Tags
Bad Religion, beastie boys, beck, green day, Hole, live, nofx, REM, timeline
I’ve seen it many times before but I just saw it again the other day. “It” was a Facebook post about the punk/alternative cornucopia that hit the Tower Records and Newbury Comics racks in 1994. I think the particular Facebook pic in question showed half-a-dozen-plus album covers, although I’ve seen it on social media in different variations and formats.
We’ve now hit the 30th anniversary of that annus mirabilis, which prompts (I suppose) another round of reflection.
Since posting any kind of picture on et tu, Bluto? might get the copyright trolls after me, I decided to link to the Rolling Stone article on the subject. They published their review 20 years ago, during the ten-year anniversary. Ten years probably seemed like a really long time back then. How the time flies.
Echoing some of my thoughts about the music of 1984, these albums from 1994 consisted, to some extent, of the “next release” from the important acts of prior years. The Cranberries, Tori Amos, Bad Religion, Oasis, Blur, R.E.M., The Beastie Boys, had their seminal works out before 1994. Rather, these latest albums (in many cases good ones, to be sure) were notable as “the next big thing” from artists that I was (we were) already excited about.
In other cases – such as Live, Bush, Rancid, Stone Temple Pilots, Liz Phair, Offspring, Hole, Beck, and (of course) Green Day – 1994 marked either the debut album, the first big album to get attention, or a defining album for the band. I’d also mention NOFX’s Punk in Drublic album. The graphic which launched this post had (and I’m going from memory here), Rancid, Bad Religion, Offspring, and NOFX – along with a few others. NOFX’s fifth album was that band’s most popular recording ever (i.e. before and after). For me, it is not only their best but could perhaps1 my pick for best album of 1994.
To each his own, of course, but it’s a big part of why this social media “meme”- when it comes around – grabs me. If we were all on Facebook, I probably would have just shared it. Here, I’ve got to fill in for that picture with a thousand words.
- Familiarity does breed contempt. Sometime in the mid-90s, its massive success left me a bit Longview‘d out. Today, I’d be much more apt to put Punk in Drublic on for a listen than Dookie. In the spring of 1994? Dookie was paradise. ↩︎