an apology

In light of the ten year reunion, i made a preunion party playlist my pals and i could enjoy. i made the list out of the Billboard charts from the year of our graduation, 1999 and a little from 1998.

i spent the next week humiliated and apologetic.

i had forgotten or had never realized how excrutiatingly awful that time was in the world of music. This is me saying "I'M REALLY SORRY, WORLD, FOR THE MUSIC MY GENERATION INFLICTED UPON YOU." We punished you with the following diseases of sound:

Ricky Martin's 'Livin' La Vida Loca'
Sugar Ray's 'Every Morning'
Cher's 'Believe'
Smash Mouth's 'All Star'
Celine Dion's 'My Heart Will Go On'
LFO's 'Summer Girls'
Will Smith's 'Miami'
and of course...'Hit Me Baby One More Time' by Britney Spears.

Here's the thing about 1999: it was pre-myspace, pre-iTunes and, in a way, pre-internet. Very few of my friends even had email addresses, much less the savvy or resources to find any sort of music that wasn't in heavy rotation on the radio or on MTV...which was beginning its downward slide into 'TV not having anything to do with M'. And i don't think i need to explain how asinine the radio stations around here were. And are. "Indie band" wasn't in our vocabulary, and since we lived in Redding and not a bigger or more cultural town like LA, Sacramento or even Chico, there were no shows to attend. So, there were a few GOOD albums released in the waning years of the 90s, albums like Beck's 'Midnite Vultures', Jeff Buckley's 'Grace', and Sigur Ros's 'Ágætis byrjun', but we didn't hear them.
At the mainstream level, the late 90s were about the end of grunge and rock and the beginning of bubblegum pop, the boy band, and of course, the country cross-over (thanks a million, Shaniah Twain, still haven't forgiven you). There were a few gems that made their way to the masses, Lauryn's Hill's 'Miseducation' album had several great singles, the Chili Peppers put out 'Californication' and Tom Petty made 'Wildflowers', but overall it was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad time. We're sorry. If i give you Dave Grohl will you forgive? Here's one of the un-bad things to come out of 1999, the Foo Fighters with 'Learn to Fly', with a little Tenacious D thrown in for giggles.

Foo Fighters - Learn To Fly

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