#3 Modern Rock Hits: The mid-90's heyday

sort of a lol vote, sort of not; hey, it's the 90s

I like Weird Al's Nirvana song, but I love "Flagpole Sitta."

i got id over everlong and trippin' on a hole

"Santeria" wasn't #1?! I wish someone had told Southern California that.

i've dropped this factoid here before i'm sure, but i've seen airplay stats for the entire alt-rock format for a couple different 21st century years where "Santeria" is the #1 most played recurrent track from the '90s (and "What I Got" is #2, and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is #3 iirc). that Sublime album has a frighteningly dominant legacy on alternative radio.

clearly, nobody ever told them it's the wrong way

Yes, if there's two albums from this era I see most often at bro-bar jukeboxes it's Sublime and So Much For the Afterglow.

voting for i got id almost seems unfair. they brought in a ringer!

So Much For The Afterglow has some good songs, but "I Will Buy You A New Life" has to be the most annoying, and the one that most clearly proclaimed "hey, this guy really can only write one song," Uh-YEAH (yeah)! Aw (aw)! Whereas, I've always felt like "Father of Mine" had a genuine emotional punch, and "One Hit Wonder" had a cool positive-life-coach singalong ending. "I Will Buy You A New Life" and "Everything To Everyone" both felt like automatic "this is a hit because it's an Everclear song that's on the radio."

"Everything To Everyone" was dope, though

everclear was a horrible band imo

I only got SMFTA last year after ignoring it all this time and was impressed by its hooks.

I didn't know "Wonderful" peaked at #11!

please don't tell me anything about "Wonderful" now

it's not Adam Ant's.

ok this is 'everlong' obv but alot of love for 'malibu' and 'tripping on a hole blah blah blah'

really loathe art alexakis for no particular reason

everclear were a weirdly severely overrated band at the time in some circles (spin, the more popist rolling stone ppl). 'santa monica' is a classic obv and i was 'ok' w/ there other lesser santa monican hits but some of the crit talk at the time is pretty hilarious, lotta ppl thought they'd found some cobain-springsteen hybrid or something. i think alot of rock critics were ecstatic about the alt revolution but by the late 90s reaching for any liferaft they could that the dream wasn't over.

really loathe art alexakis for no particular reason

― mookieproof, Monday, January 6, 2014 11:08 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i have reasons! his songs were cynical, calculated, and bloodless.

also smfta is a horrible-sounding record

aw fuck just saw 'fade into you'; woulda voted 'everlong' anyway but it would've been more of a race. crazy that 'given to fly' peaked at 3 - altrock radio had sooooo much staked on that pearl jam album, so many hopes. they're finally giving us what we want! etc. the big altrock station in atlanta (that had just a few years earlier advertised themselves w/ billboards that just said 'PEARL JAM' and then '99x' in smaller letters in the corner) devoted the weekend before yield came out to a strictly pearl jam playlist (the last time i can remember a radio station doing this for a contemporary act). a couple of years prior their listeners would've eaten it up but by 98 alot of those ppl had cut bait and yield wasn't anyone's savior.

yeah from what i recall modern rock radio wasn't quite sure what to do with yield. given to fly is a great song but it faded fast.

man that tonic may have only gotten to #3 but that thing must've lingered on the chart for forever, easily the track that provokes the most dread for me here.

i've heard that song about a billion times and it never gets better.

xp - yeah i remember the first time i heard 'wishlist' thinking 'wait - i thought this was back to the formula hits hits hits, the fuck is this? how is this the second single???', it got airplay on the altrock stations but it was that kinda obligatory airplay, you could tell they weren't enthused about it, similar to the airplay springsteen's 'one step up' or madonna's 'bad girl' got, sheer momentum.

It was kind of funny watching radio jump on each successive single like "oh, THIS one will..." Like, I remember "In Hiding" getting a real buildup. Balls is on the money about that countdown though. The all-Pearl-Jam playlist included such highlights as a live teamup with Young on "Rockin' in the Free World" where the CD started skipping in the guitar solo, playing the same 40-second chunk for about eight or nine minutes before someone noticed. They also played "Pilate" off Yield, spawning an ongoing feud between myself and DJ Axel, who refused to ever play it again.

balls is OTM about Everclear's press hype at the time - the very first line of this article brings up Springsteen!

Tonic song got crossover pop-rock/AC play, that's why it's so ubiquitous. #11 on the Hot 100! We've gone over this relatively recently, but I do think they had better modern-rock songs: "Open Up Your Eyes," "Mean To Me"...

from what i remember pearl jam bailed out the radio by releasing the last kiss cover in '99 and that thing totally got played to death

http://usedwigs.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/everclear.jpg

^^^ the "heyday," ladies and gentlemen

and then following up yield's failure you had smashing pumpkins underwhelming later that year. not judging the actual musical merit of the albums here - i could care less about yield tbh and everytime i'm tempted by ilm to finally check out adore i remember that billy corgan sings on it iirc. just that the followup rot that had hit acts like live or counting crows or hootie before this was now kinda hitting the blue chip acts. green day's the only one who ever really shook it - pj and corgan retreated, offspring and kinda counting crows went goofy for cash, live became just another faceless band stuck in the altradio ghetto instead of 'the american u2' or 'the pennsylvanian rem' or whatever that dude was dreaming of.

'98 was def the beginning of the sea change--i think follow the leader coming out that year and getting radio play told me everything i needed to know

btw it's not going to get votes or anything but i feel obligated to point out that turn my head is a nice lil song that i always enjoyed

oh fine twist my arm i'll link my favorite thread again: commercially disappointing major label rock/alternative albums of 1996

lol at the everclear headline - 'we're a good rock band, nothing more nothing less' - WHAT MORE DID PPL POSSIBLY BELIEVE EVERCLEAR COULD BE???

96 being the year ALL those bands' sales were cut in half from previous records and the year of Sublime and DMB and Beck's best-selling albums = your sea change right there

What's amazing is that (to the extent that I can recall) none of them self-consciously reinvented themselves to try and stay on the radio in the nu-metal/Creed/pop-punk epochs, which I would not have put past people like Live guy. I guess Creed wasn't a big reach for him anyway, and "The Dolphin's Cry" did okay.

I guess we'll get a better sense of this in the next polls - I feel like third-tier bands actually weathered the changes better. Or look at Citizen King in this poll - no-name act, moderate hit, faceless slacker song with a few contemporary production touches but not a Godsmack song by any stretch of the imagination. Modern rock radio in the late 90s was full of these flash in the pan alt-rock groups and it might have been easy to think that nothing had changed. The Flys! Pushmonkey! Memory Dean!

The great unwritten story of this era is actually that of the 311/Sublime/late RHCP vaguely funky alterna-metal axis.

i will admit i've watched an everclear video in the past five years cuz a young christina hendricks was in it. but only once cuz the sidebar had clips from the late great undressed w/ a young christina hendricks.

in retrospect rhcp kinda almost sitting out a chunk of the 90s was fortuitous, by the time they came back they got to be 'survivors' and the were actually one of the more melodic acts on altrock radio

96 being the year ALL those bands' sales were cut in half from previous records and the year of Sublime and DMB and Beck's best-selling albums = your sea change right there

― some dude, Monday, January 6, 2014 11:35 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha maybe it's too personal but for me '98 was when alt rock radio started becoming unlistenable so i count it from then

i don't remember Everclear being particularly respected, certainly not by any of the alt kids i ran with, but i can see Art A getting credit from some people for being so much more aggressively topical than any other rock star of the era -- here's the song about having a black girlfriend, here's the song about having a junkie girlfriend, here's the song about being abandoned by my father, lord he was a wizened dad rocker with a dye job

i have friends who were super psyched abt art a solo shows well into the 2000s. i found his topicality to be grunge via jerry springer--so gross.

1998 was when clear channel bought live 105 in San Francisco (I think) and I remember an instant change for the worse -- fewer songs but played more often, no indie/popish bands, Korn-type music nonstop.

o yeah nobody i actually knew irl respected everclear one bit, just some of the crits. i think xhuxk was one of them, maybe they had some puns he ate up.

Everclear seemed tailor-made to headline radio station music festivals in an era when the real heavy hitters were nowhere to be found. balls, have you read this long blog by Sean Demery detailing the rise and fall of 99X from his perspective? He's a little vague in key places but it's got some telling moments.

As stated earlier in this rant, in the mid 90’s, upwards of 50% of the music 99X played was new based. This meant that every other song was new or no older than 3 months old. Recently 99X has been operating with a max of 19% new music. That means that you get 3 new songs an hour, and many of those were ill focused for the 99X music community. In the end, it seems that Cumulus was in fact programming 99X like an AC station with alternative rock hits, in the hopes of securing a 25 – 54 year old add buys. (...)

Looking from a music stand point it seems like Cumulus couldn’t understand the fact that Bush, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and their ilk were the bands of yester year, and were not the building blocks for the current music generation. It felt like that they were trying to recreate the 90’s. The 90’s are gone. They couldn’t understand what bands like the Shins, Silversun Pickups, Band of Horses, Arcade Fire, The Bravery, Interpol, Spoon, Against Me, Rise Against, etc had to do with 99X. These are bands that sell out medium sized venues in Atlanta with little or no airplay; they have massive internet and magazine prominence. These are the same types of building blocks we used in 1992; these are today’s building blocks for this music generation.

As we get close to the end it didn’t really matter. Bert from the Bert show (on Q100) needed to be on a better city grade signal, which 99X had.

sometime maybe three years ago i ran across the most amazing review of an everclear show, author totally genuflecting before his bleached late-40s rock god, but i can't find it now

"look at your bleached rock god now"

http://image.motortrend.com/f/features/consumer/112_1002_everclear_art_alexakis_celebrity_drive/32418657+w799+h499+cr1+ar0/art-alexakis-in-car.jpg

mookieproof, that sounds really familiar, must be on ILX somewhere I think! I'm hearing it in my head like "He has the crowd. The crowd loves him. ART ALEXAKIS IS IN THE HOUSE!"

hmm, did find xhuxk linking to his SPIN review though, which may address balls's speculations above

98 is probably where it's really starting to be evident (i think more 99 though) but seeds are sown w/ that 96 lollapalooza and the huge success of 311 and sublime. really as these charts have kinda shown the pre-nirvana was kinda primary succession species but post-nevermind the more plausibly headbangers ball acts are driving them out and by the late 90s they've established near total dominance, and gotten more suburban metal. the early hard acts had some hard rock in there (generally more so than they had new wave or college rock) but there was still some adherence to some idea of angst and cool - they were actually alternative maaan. this gets kinda worn out or passed over due to certain anti-market tendencies in those acts aesthetics ("cool") and by 2000 you have fred durst as the predominant altrock star, someone no more alt than sebastian bach in persona (not the case even w/ adam duritz, nevermind vedder/corgan/reznor/cobain/stipe).

For better or worse Billboard scrapped the term "modern rock" a few years ago in favor of calling the chart "alternative songs"

― some dude, Sunday, January 12, 2014 11:33 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

These songs are even less "alternative" than they're "modern"....

Voted for "I Got Id"

Pretty sure it charted higher than #3 on hot 100

it got to #7 on the Hot 100, mainly because the Merkin Ball EP was essentially a surprise non-album single by the biggest band in the world and went gold.

Pearl Jam's biggest Hot 100 hit: "Last Kiss" at #2 in 1999.

and those are their only two top 10 hits. the only Ten single that scraped the Hot 100 was "Jeremy" at #79, which gives you an idea of how little the chart reflected the popularity of rock bands in the '90s.

That's insane.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

iirc "jeremy" charted a few years after Ten when a bunch of the maxisingle imports were reissued stateside... prolly around the same time as Merkin Ball.

I recall getting a little frustrated because I spent $9.99 on the import Jeremy single to hear "Footsteps" ... I didn't know "Yellow Ledbetter" before buying it. And then a year or 2 later it wasn't very difficult to find for $4.99 at Circuit City.

yeah the '90s was a painful time to be obsessed with bands and look for rarities on absurdly overpriced import singles and bootlegs. one of the things i'm most happy that file-sharing killed off.

yeah but it built character

Mazzy Star by a country mile.

"Worst 90s import/rare/ripoff maxi-single buying experience" might be a good thread.

not a one

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/35/Voodoo_People_02.jpg

not worth it fyi

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

1995 - Sponge, "Molly" 6

six voters down the.........draaaaaaaaaaaaaaaain

So someone aside from me also voted for Citizen King.

Yay, I voted for the winner! Much as I love reminiscing about Everclear, it really is the song here with the most staying power. Just lovely. Kind of surprised that "Perfect" and "Wrong Way" could get votes but not "Angels of the Silences" - not that there's anything that special about the latter either.

my Recovering The Satellites fandom is powerful, but not as powerful as my The Colour And The Shape fandom

The most sought after import of my childhood was the Smashing Pumpkins' Rocket -- it had their cover of Depeche Mode's Never Let Me Down.

Wow, lots of love for Flagpole Sitta. That one was just too played out both at the time and then throughout college.

When I first got Limewire I had a ball getting all the stray B-sides and compilation appearances that would have cost a fortune to collect on CD or vinyl - that Smashing Pumpkins cover being one of them.