15 Years Ago Today #5 - 1/22/98

Just five years later and it's clear that tastes had changed and how. None of these artists were on the 1993 chart and with the exception of Pearl Jam, none of these artists even existed in 1993. I realize that's not exactly accurate, as Green Day had already released 2 albums by 1993 and Everclear were doing...something and Matchbox 20 was still an Orlando band called Tabitha's Secret, singing "3am" in clubs all up and down Orange Avenue, and I say that like anyone who didn't grow up there has any clue what that means. The point is, we're like 6 months out from Barenaked Ladies' "One Week" at this point in the decade. Which is pretty much when the 90s stopped being the 90s, in my opinion.

But this is a celebration of the greatness of the decade and not its decline, and this collection of songs  defines a very specific time in my life that I loved. As I've gotten older, I've realized that finding a group of songs that can so clearly represent a period in your life is a lot harder. Partly because you end up listening to the music of your formative years more often, so the memories those songs are tied to have already been made, and partly because the radio is really, really fucking terrible right now so it's harder for songs to be tied to time, since you end up playing music you want to hear when you want to hear it as opposed to whatever is popular at the time being the soundtrack to your life.

Does that make sense? What I mean is, there's not a set of 10 current songs that will, for me, ever be tied to January of 2013. Mostly because, I'm choosing what I listen to as opposed to the radio doing it for me, which was pretty much how it was during the entire rock'n'roll era until the invention of the MP3.

Maybe I'm waxing nostalgic, but this is a blog about the 90s so I don't know what you thought you were going to get.

Anyway, here's Marcy Playground, a band that got way more attention than it ever deserved for what I always thought was a mediocre and monotonous dirge that people really only liked because of the way he said "candy here" and because the word "sex" was in the title. This was before porn saturation; we lived for any mention of sex. Oh, and the video was cool.

Side complaint: there was a 10 second commercial for a Kidz Bop American Idol-esque contest before the video, about 12 kids who are competing to be music superstars. THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS!!! I would take a thousand Marcy Playgrounds before I took one 8-year-old singing about whatever puerile garbage that spews from the food hole that is the mouth of an 8-year-old child. Go play in the yard, you gross little tax deductions!

And here's the chart:

1. Marcy Playground - "Sex and Candy"
2. Green Day - "Time of Your Life (Good Riddance)"
3. Pearl Jam - "Given to Fly"
4. Everclear - "Everything to Everyone"
5. Matchbox 20 - "3am"
6. The Verve - "Bittersweet Symphony"
7. Third Eye Blind -"How's It Going to Be"
8. Days of the New - "Touch, Peel and Stand"
9. Ben Folds Five - "Brick"
10. Our Lady Peace - "Clumsy"

Whatever.