Is there a name for that genre of turn-of-the-90s pop-rock with the positive vibes, huge guitar leads, and gated drums?

I just realized I saw School of Fish live. They opened for the Charlatans in early 1991.

Just thought of another one - The Proclaimers, "500 Miles." It's a little weird, but the snare and the chunky guitar both make an appearance to my ears.

Seems like some movie soundtrack hits from 89 and 90 might fit this bill. Interesting ideas from Nabisco here -- kind of like sounds from the 60s-channeling baby boomer demographic finally grappling with these technologies.

Oh man: the guy at the next desk is listening to "Life is a Highway."

So the more I think about it, the more I can't tell if the development I'm talking about was a good one or not. Doctor Casino is totally right: most anyone making an old-school rock'n'roll record after 92 or so would shoot for production that sounded natural, "vintage." And while this was WAY less embarrassing, it feels weird to applaud a development that put stuff in a glass case to be properly preserved and recreated.

Movie soundtracks are a great example of this, Mark! I'd trace it back toward the early 80s, where you have two things going: (a) the shine and ambition of prog and "yacht rock" have kinda died, and (b) you have one of rock's early generations first hitting the question of how to be an older rocker. (E.g., Rod Stewart is all over MTV).

And if you look at big movie-sountrack type hits in particular, a ridiculous number of them are pastiches of rock's early days -- a lot of them lyrically about the roots of rock:

- Huey Lewis is all "The Heart of Rock and Roll is the Beat"
- George Thoroughgood is doing "Bad to the Bone" blues pastiche
- Billy Joel is going further back and doing doo-wop pastiche like "Uptown Girl"
- "Old Time Rock and Roll" by Bob Seger!
- I would kinda class "Footloose" here too
- and stuff like Aretha singing "Freeway of Love!"

Plus stuff like Mellencamp and Tom Petty -- it was like everyone soldifying a mythology of what rock'n'roll was, only nobody yet felt like there was some great incompatibility between classic rock/soul and 80s production techniques. (It surely helped that the people working in big studios, the session players, the label heads and producers, and plenty of the stars had genuinely been working since the glory days.)

Point being that seems to fall apart right around "Life is a Highway," or something. (I would go on and on about the details of this, but I don't think they're hard to imagine; there was a kind of changing of the guard here, I think.)

Spin Doctors didn't have gated drums at all! Aaron Comess was a sick drummer, dudes

B-52's "Roam" may fit into this.

And those early 90's Def Leppard singles

like "Let's Get Rocked"

There really should be a name for this kind of thing. It's like the hair-metal aesthetic, only with "party rock" instead of hair metal.

Get rocked here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B05EDye9QII

There is so much wrong with that video, I don't even know where to start.

Soup Dragons, "Divine Thing"

I have been rocked by that video.

I didn't remember that I owe the expression "let's get the rock out of here" to that song! I probably say that ten times a week!

- Huey Lewis is all "The Heart of Rock and Roll is the Beat"

I'll be pedantic: "The Heart of Rock and Roll is still Beating" was the lyric.

Another name for that genre: "hot new country" (e.g. Alan Jackson "Chattahoochee").

Big Audio Dynamite II, "Rush"
The Farm, "Groovy Train"

This is the continuing application of mid 80s pop production to rock music, right? Sound of Bob Clearmountain on Bryan Adams Reckless and Hall & Oates Big Bam Boom, and of Mutt Lange on tons of stuff (AC/DC, Def Lep, Huey Lewis, the Cars' Heartbeat City, etc.). Kind of based in dance music in the first place - Clearmountain worked with Chic. Vic Maile did some similar stuff in England, though he's more associated with hard rock bands.

By the time you get to the 90s, the drums aren't quite so prominent & boomy, the once-trendy new wave dance elements starting to shrivel, more naturalistic production coming back into favor.

That's not pedantry, that's important: I've spent decades thinking Huey's pointing out that, like, rhythm is the foundation of rock'n'roll music!

Plus, exactly, add to the "explicit nostalgia" pile -- "Summer of 69" by Bryan Adams

Nabisco is giving this thread a B-story.

And while this was WAY less embarrassing, it feels weird to applaud a development that put stuff in a glass case to be properly preserved and recreated.

Yeah, in general I'm much more drawn to pastiches of "classic sounds" that seem to be made unhesitatingly with whatever "today"'s sounds are, no matter how dated they may rapidly turn out to be. Over at Popular, Tom Ewing is starting to hit that stretch of the 70s where every third number one is a really blatant attempt to recapitulate specific sounds of the 50s or 60s, except they sound totally weird and idiosyncratically of their times as well. And thank god, because it turns out that if you sound exactly like the classic records, but aren't actually as good of a musician/performer/songwriter, you have no legs left to stand on and will inevitably suffer from the direct comparison....

In a slightly different vein and a good decade before the stuff I started the thread about, you have "It's Still Rock and Roll To Me" by Billy Joel, where he insists repeatedly on a continuity between rock n' roll and the present-day musics, while performing in the style of Joe Jackson...

So anyway, yeah, I like this version of the history that focuses on the talent pool working in the biz - it's much more interesting to conceive of these people as being rock veterans getting on board with what looks like the next big thing than cynical cash-ins milking a perverted form of rock for no good reason at all. See also: the Traveling Wilburys, basically an interpretation of "roots rock" by 60s musicians, produced by a 70s master in his 80s style. Actually, all of Jeff Lynne's 80s records fit really snugly into this history...

Spin Doctors didn't have gated drums at all! Aaron Comess was a sick drummer, dudes

So was Phil Collins! I'm no recording engineer or anything, but I definitely hear that famous "80s drum sound" on Two Princes. It's not quite "Myth of Fingerprints" but it's there.

I was going to mention Traveling Wilburys right after Nabisco's first post today, but I haven't actually heard them.

I suspect the legacy of hair metal is more of a factor of all this than I thought at first too. If you asked me to make a record that sounded like "Cherry Pie" or "Pour Some Sugar On Me" for a band without a lead guitarist it might end up sounding a lot like "Joyride," I dunno.

xpost Traveling Wilburys are GREAT! The whole first album is really wonderful and shockingly unforced-feeling for a supergroup-type thing. The Lynne-y-ness varies from track to track, though, and I don't think anything on it sounds quite as keen on the 80s as "Got My Mind Set On You."

I would also like to add that listening to Morrissey in the early 90s was a useful balancer to listening to the type of music described on this thread---put it together and you get something like a pop speedball, up and down together.

Possibly worth reviewing: That Eighties Drum Sound

Which, not to spam my own thread, quickly raises the possibility that the explicit goal of sounding like this was to AVOID being hidebound by the spectre of rock history. Hrm....

Re: the backstory. Maybe it isn't the application of modern production to tradition rock 'n' roll sounds and themes, but the other way around - lyrical window-dressing that attempts to connect this ostensibly un-rock sound with "respectable" no-homo rock history. A bunch of artists saying, "No, this really is rock, just like you grew up with. Don't get all uncomfortable like you did with disco."

Thus the relentless, protesteth-too-much insistence on AMERICAN ROCK N ROLL. All these super ordinary, gritty blue collar dudes in denim jackets singing about how it used to be, working-class kicks, the heart of rock n roll, and the fact that it was only ever about dancing in the first place.

I.e., taking a lyrical step back in order to make the musical step forward more palatable.

So was Phil Collins! I'm no recording engineer or anything, but I definitely hear that famous "80s drum sound" on Two Princes.

What "Two Princes" are you listening to? There's like sputtery funk fills and ghost notes and a break. How could you hear ghost notes if it was gated? There's like a world of difference between "In The Air Tonight" and the Spin Doctors. Spin Doctors are produced to sound like a BAND. The drums sound like drums.

I guess I just mean how the snare counts its way through the song on the 3 (nothing really unusual about that) and sounds like a ringing shiny TONGKK!!! Someone else back me up here?

I'll totally back you up on the pushed snare, but in general, the drums do sound more natural than most of what's being discussed here.

I think he just tuned his snare funny.

But I'll take the drums alone in "Two Princes" over any beats I've ever heard Dave Grohl or Janet Weiss come up with.

-- chuck, Monday, March 17, 2003 11:49 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Link

OTFM

Yeah, the drums do sound really naturalistic on Two Princes. The snare is cranked pretty high (tuning-wise and in the mix) and there's a lot of reverb on there, but it's really live-sounding.

It still totally fits the vaguely funky, party-rock vibe though!

Actually listening to the break in that tune I wouldn't be surprised if there was some gating going on? Not Phil Collins extremes or anything, just a little.

OTFMy ass. Grohl slays on Scentless Apprentice and No One Knows. Different kind of thing, but just as tight. More uptight? Yeah, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Given those two examples, I'm inclined to change my OTFM.

It still totally fits the vaguely funky, party-rock vibe though!

When threads collide!

Sang "Two Princes" at karaoke tonight to a fairly receptive crowd. What a great song. Half the running time is taken up with "just go ahead now"s, but they pack in enough variations on that, plus the fantastic scatting thing after the first verse and the hidden gem at the end: "Oh, your majesty / Come on forget the king and marry me." So great.

Post-Cold-War sounds right.

the result of "alt" bands showing up in the studio with producers who only knew how to make certain kinds of records.

Proposed genre name: Industry Music

the opposite of the sludgy/blurry blanket the other end of alt-rock would bring in.

A lot of British "alternative" music would not at all have a sludgy or blurry guitar sound. Britpop, for instance, often had a very pure and clean guitar sound.

I think Genesis' "I Can't Dance" fits into this category as well.

In the original post, Doctor Casino says "One can imagine an entire alternate, Nirvanaless 90s rock history-that-might-have-been". When I was living in Atlanta during the summers of 1993 and 1994, listening to the local "alternative" station at work (99X), this stuff was all they played. It was like Nirvana never happened. Later, after I'd stopped coming back to Atlanta for the summer, I heard they started playing more Creed-type stuff (and I guess with Seven Mary Three, who had a big hit in 1995, that was on the way earlier). But in 1993 and 1994, you'd hear Whale once an hour, Porno for Pyros, that "New Age Girl" song with the "she don't eat meat but she sure loves the bone" line, and on and on with this stuff. So I don't think you have to imagine an entirely different rock history---it happened, and I'm sure Atlanta wasn't the only place it did---but I spent the rest of my time in San Antonio, and there Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins laid out a much grungier history.

Euler - faboo post, especially because I'm from Atlanta and was weaned on 99X myself - but from, let's say, '96 through '99, when the format was dead-set on post-grunge alt-rock: Foo Fighters, Everclear, and Pumpkins reined supreme. If the guitars were distorted or the band wore tattoos, it was probably in. Funny how these things evolve! Just around 2000 the nu-metal quotient was really getting too much to take, and anyway I moved away for college at that point. I think they later pulled the standard 2000's "return to rock" makeover where they start playing Nirvana and Pearl Jam along with the White Stripes...dunno where they're at now.

I just checked the "Hit List" on "Detroit's New Rock Alternative" 89X and the top three songs are Foo Fighters, Papa Roach and Limp Bizkit. Two out of three bands I didn't even know still existed.

James Murphy still has a lot of work to do.

99x's playlist is almost exactly what you'd expect it to be if you stopped listening in 1997, with the integration of numetal and emo (and still plenty of Dave Matthews Band ads all over the place)...

Oh, and a few "huh, didn't realize they were that above the radar now" moments - Peter, Bjorn, & John, mainly. WTF? Also, Cake apparently has a cover of "War Pigs" out there, so I guess I better not turn on the radio for a while. Collective Soul is my pick for "didn't even know still existed."

THEY ALSO CANCELLED THE RETROPLEX WHICH WAS THE ONLY GOOD THING ABOUT THE STATION

In the "same as it ever was" category, there's also a Silverchair song on the 99X playlist. It's like 1994 never ended. I thought their whole "appeal" was that they were a "grunge" (and Australian) version of Hanson?

Woah, that Mock Turtles song is pretty cool! Definitely towards the indie end of things but the impulse towards a clear, ringing, booming sound is there, and certainly the Positive Vibes. Get one really assertive commercial producer in the room and it could have been the theme song to a Friends-wannabe show. Apparently Fatboy Slim remixed it in 2003, but to the extent that he changed anything it seems to have been to muddy things up further with busy percussion, spacey whooshy noises, and turning the organ way up in the mix.

Another single from the same album, "Strings and Flowers," similarly straddles the thread's core and what I think of as Britpop:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMZeohb-kpI

How influential was REM on British bands of this era? I would have assumed Johnny Marr as a more important source than Pete Buck, but I have no idea.

How influential was REM on British bands of this era?

That's an interesting question. There are tantalizing bits of evidence scattered around the web. It seems that they weren't very well known in the UK until their breakthrough hit 'The One I Love', which went top 20 in the UK, though not for lack of trying. They actually recorded Fables of the Reconstruction in England, and toured on it in the UK, but apparently without much traction.

The band's third album, Fables of the Reconstruction (1985), demonstrated a change in direction. Instead of Dixon and Easter, R.E.M. chose producer Joe Boyd, who had worked with Fairport Convention and Nick Drake, to record the album in England. The band members found the sessions unexpectedly difficult, and were miserable due to the cold winter weather and what they considered to be poor food; the situation brought the band to the verge of break-up.

https://classicrock.fandom.com/wiki/R.E.M.

Also found this amusing early interview where they disavow any direct Byrds influence:

As for frequent comparisons to the Byrds, (Buck) declares, "I probably listen to people that stole from the Byrds more often than the Byrds. I've got one Byrds album, and it's the one that doesn't sound anything like them -- Sweetheart of the Rodeo -- because I love Gram Parsons. The Byrds are OK, but none of us ever paid much attention to them."

Instead they point to the Velvet Underground and country music as major influences.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/nov/20/rem-rocks-backpages-classic-interview

I like the careful wording of "what they considered to be poor food".

It is interesting that the left not just the South, but the U.S., to record their big Southern Mythos album.

(I actually don't think I knew, or at least remembered, that – I think I assumed Joe Boyd came to the U.S. for the sessions.)

How influential was REM on British bands of this era?
That's an interesting question. There are tantalizing bits of evidence scattered around the web. It seems that they weren't very well known in the UK until their breakthrough hit 'The One I Love', which went top 20 in the UK, though not for lack of trying.

It only became a hit *after* they'd broken through with Out of Time. It was re-released in either 1991 or 1992. Their first hit was Orange Crush - not massive, but definitely top 40 because they got on Top of the Pops.

Yes, I remember that one: "Nice and cool on a hot summer day, that was REM with ORANGE CRUSH!!"

1) That's not what the song was about
2) Even if it was, did it need that level of explanation?

I forget the presenter, but I don't think he was on much after that.

The One I Love was taken from the non-US Best Of which IRS released on the back of Out of Time - top 20 in the autumn of '91

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLCobKFPxQk

Never heard the Fatboy Slim remix of that Mock Turtles song but the Steve Proctor piano / breakbeat / house mix is pure sweet MDMA. Nothing to do with the genre in question except the ridiculously positive vibes.

It only became a hit *after* they'd broken through with Out of Time.

Interesting. So I guess that's another point in favor of them having little influence on UK bands in the 80s.

R.E.M. were big UK sellers the faster their American popularity waned.

Even though it’s more on the enigma/proto-trip hop side of thing, for some reason I keep thinking of moodfood by moodswings (feat the cover of “state of independence” with Chrissy Hynde). there’s some big sampled drums on there though. and I get major “paisley shirt of synthetic fabric” vibes from it. Feel like “worldbeat” (ugh) stuff runs parallel to this thread’s remit… the vague we are all one people, love the planet vibes, idk

So I guess that's another point in favor of them having little influence on UK bands in the 80s.

I mean, they were definitely known in Britain in the 80s by the kind of people that would have been in indie guitar groups. But they wouldn't have been known by, say, your aunt until 1991/92.

Direct from tonight's TwitchStream:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9TsXzOkoMc

Ian McCulloch: "Honey Drip"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o20_aSVM9Rk

Baby Animals: "Painless" (1992, singer is/was married to Nuno Bettencourt)

never heard that before! what an amazing '1992' combination of elements.

I remember them - when I was doing more music business work, I somehow ended up on the promo list of their US agent when their first album was released. IIRC the singer was on the short list to take over vocals in INXS.