in my veins hot music ran

Some pointless reminiscing today, brought on by a late night viewing of Deep Rising on Encore Action. The 1998 film is no great shakes, just one of a multitude of movies employing James Cameron’s “Lifeboat with monsters and machine guns” formula from Aliens, with nothing save a higher gore quotient and Famke Janssen in a wet t-shirt to differentiate it from the pack.

It’s a Big Dumb Movie from a Big Dumb Era, but watching it gave me a twinge of nostalgia for that bygone time. Not that the current era is any smaller or less stupid than the mid-to-late 1990’s, but as the cliché goes, “9/11 changed everything.” Well, 9/11 and the collapse of the Web 1.0 economic bubble, which introduced a mean-spirited, eat or be eaten mentality to the festive atmosphere.

Those years, roughly encompassed by Clinton’s second term, were a good time for me, despite some personal setbacks that turned out to be blessings in disguise. In the fall of 1997, I quit/was thrown out of graduate school for calling the interim American Studies program director’s bluff after I made a complaint about how the program was being run. (It ended with me calling the professor a “pencil-neck” and telling him that I thought the program was shit, which it was.) I hit the ground running, though, and switched to full time status at work, thus doubling my disposable income while freeing up other, more important parts of my schedule.

There were ample opportunities to squander those dollars, too. I amassed a fairly large collection of import and domestic Playstation and Saturn games and related ephemera such as game soundtracks and art books. This was also when my massive comic book back issue buying spree began. Armed with a list culled from a dog-eared copy of the previous year’s Overstreet Price Guide, I made an aggressive effort to reclaim and repurchase the various individual comics and series that I had either enjoyed and lost track of or missed on during my youth. The fact that I found complete runs of a lot of those comics still in pristine condition in various quarter bins speaks volumes about my childhood tastes.

That era was the last time I was actually enthusiastic about the current pop music scene, and by “enthusiastic,” I mean reading Spin and the like without the reflexive, jaded sighs and shaking on the head that the Andrew of 2007 displays on such occasions. (It doesn’t help that so many features and reviews of today’s bands read like they were generated by a computer program designed to simply swap in and out names and influences from a stock template. REMOVE: Smashing Pumpkins, ADD: Mars Volta, REMOVE: Velvet Underground, ADD: Emerson, Lake & Palmer, INSERT: Banal popcult reference, END TASK.)

As I wrote back in May 2006 in my post on the music used in the WipeOut series of games:

…the late 1990's, when the swing revival, electronica, and third-wave ska battled it out in the pop music arena for the title of "The Next Big Thing." Of course, the eventual winner of that dubious honor turned out to be teen dance pop, but it was interesting while it lasted.

…and it was interesting to hear something other than the bland, marketable tones of AOA (Adult-Oriented Alternative, aka “Yacht Rock for the coffeehouse generation”) acts on the airwaves, even if only for a short while.

Save Ferris – Come on Eileen (from It Means Everything, 1997) – Brandon Flowers of The Killers publicly dismissed The Bravery because some of that band’s members had once been in a ska band (the painfully named Skabba the Hutt). Too bad that it lead to a defamation or libel suit. It would have been the stuff of comedic legend:

“I would like to produce as evidence this high school notebook filled with poems plagiarized from the lyrics of The Cure’s ‘Love Song’ and New Order’s ‘True Faith.’ DNA testing proves that the tear stains on the pages are authentic.”

“Your honor, the suburban teenage girls and wimpster English majors deserve only the most self-righteously authentic pre-packaged and mass marketed angst! That cannot come from a soul tainted by frat boy bluebeat!”

Honestly, that whole cluster of bands (Fall Out Boy, The Killers, Interpol, etc.) can’t get tossed into the dustbin of history soon enough for my satisfaction.

The Crystal Method – Busy Child (from Vegas, 1997) – Does not contain psuedoephedrine.

Cherry Poppin’ Daddies – Zoot Suit Riot (from Zoot Suit Riot, 1997) – Horn sections, complicated dance moves, touches of Latin rhythm… If you think about it, swing is like disco, but with pegged wool trousers instead of polyester flares and a much whiter, middle-class audience.