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

- 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?

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.

-- yussel, Wednesday, 5 September 2007 04:52 (7 hours ago) Link

haha, I did a doubletake and actually had to go to that site and make sure that Limp Bizkit doesn't still exist. they don't -- you meant Linkin Park.

"James Murphy still has a lot of work to do" is the new "no Sufjan, no credibility".

what does it mean?

without pushing it too hard, i think this stuff had an r&b analog in new jack swing. both had that real crisp, bright beat production, mostly uptempo, big hooks. and design-wise, lots of color -- if you watch videos either for a lot of songs in this thread or for new jack songs, you get all those bright primary colors, and lush purples and greens. in both cases it was sort of the tail end of an 80s sonic and visual aesthetic, and they had some commonality in their hybridization of pop, electrofunk and hip-hop. (not that the songs being talked about here actually reflected much hip-hop, but they were at least aware of it. look at the half-rapped verses in like, inxs songs or even "life is a highway." and then supplanted in the recessionary early 90s by grunge on the one hand and g-funk on the other, which took turns in murkier directions and basically had nothing to say to each other.

i've always thought that 88-91 era had some things in common with the '60-'63 era, when rock 'n' roll and r&b and tin pan alley were all kind of talking to each other, these windows of pop hybridization between periods when forms emerge and solidify again (often by referencing or paying homage to past forms). the hybrid periods tend to be marked by a lot of moaning about various forms being "dead" and a lot of sneering at the stuff on the charts. it's possible we're in one now.

(should have been a closed parens somewhere in that first paragraph. insert at will.)

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?

They're not grunge anymore. They sound like Coldplay now.

So does this mean that there were no heirs to this lineage? That alt-rock's influence, even on people that were ultimately not consuming alt-rock albums, was to restate a certain standard of "authenticity" when one was to undertake doing genre work?

Yes. I think this genre played the same role in alt myth that prog rock played in the punk myth: something to exist in opposition to, and render unfashionable.

This genre is called Corporate Rock. It still sucks.

Oh, and a few "huh, didn't realize they were that above the radar now" moments - Peter, Bjorn, & John, mainly. WTF?

-- Doctor Casino, Wednesday, September 5, 2007 5:05 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Link

i didnt know what this was until it came on lite rock radio at the goodwill in greenville SC and my gf had basically the same response

they were playing it in between like careless whisper and maroon 5

Which is exactly where it belongs, right? That's not a criticism.

Do you guys remember people around that time saying "I listen to progressive music"? (which meant they listened to the "Modern Rock" format radio station circa '90/'91)

these people were O.G. L0u1s J@gg3r

I think this genre played the same role in alt myth that prog rock played in the punk myth: something to exist in opposition to, and render unfashionable.

This genre is called Corporate Rock. It still sucks.

wrong and wrong

The Spin Doctors were on the leading edge of the piccolo snare revival, which was the signature element of 1990s spring break/frat rock. That's why it stands out. Totally different frequency response, it's almost an instrument there's so much tone. There's definitely a pinch of gated reverb on the kit in "Two Princes," but it barely registers - most of the effects are the "Ready for FM radio" stamps, compression and punch. The effects on that guy's vocals, on the other hand. Wow.

One of the other common threads in the songs mentioned: fuckloads of rhythm guitar overdubs ("Life is a Highway," all Matthew Sweet, Spin Doctors, etc.). This is why the Sex Pistols sounded good on record.

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.