Tag: Nirvana

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Playlists

Playlist: 75 tunes from 1991

Here’s a good long Apple Music playlist that could get you through an afternoon of chores, painting, or cooking. Perhaps a road trip from Toronto to Montreal. Or keep you company on a flight from North America to Europe.

I’ve done a few playlists over the years on this blog but never any that focused on the music of a particular year in the past. I’ve chosen to start with 1991 because it was particularly pivotal year for me in terms of musical discovery. It was the year that I started to dip my toes into alternative rock, a brave new world for me, a wave of music that included a huge variety of styles, very little of which sounded like the music of my parents. So even though I wasn’t listening to all of these songs at the time, I’d say that the majority are old friends, intimate acquaintances.

There’s seventy-five great tracks, representative of how I saw 1991. It’s not a ‘best of’. I’ve already done the list of my top thirty favourite tracks on this blog here. Some of the songs in that list appear on this playlist but there’s plenty others here and some that are much deeper cuts. I know that there are those of you out there who might catch some obvious omissions. Some of these might have been because they were not to my tastes but there are others, like My Bloody Valentine’s “Soon” or The Real People’s “Open up your mind (let me in)”, that were not available to be added due to music rights and Apple Music or whatever. Still, there’s so many other gems that show the wide range of music that was coming out in those years just before Grunge exploded and changed everything for alternative rock.

For those who don’t use Apple Music, here is the entire playlist, with links to YouTube videos for each song:

  1. Primal Scream “Loaded”
  2. Vic Reeves & The Wonder Stuff “Dizzy”
  3. Blur “Sing”
  4. Teenage Fanclub “Star Sign”
  5. Lowest of the Low “Subversives”
  6. Electronic “Getting Away With It”
  7. Throwing Muses “Not Too Soon”
  8. Red Hot Chili Peppers “Under the Bridge”
  9. James “Sit Down”
  10. Chapterhouse “Mesmerise”
  11. R.E.M. “Belong”
  12. Spacemen 3 “I Love You”
  13. Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians “So You Think You’re In Love”
  14. EMF “Unbelievable”
  15. Crash Test Dummies “Androgynous”
  16. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones “Where’d You Go”
  17. Pixies “Alec Eiffel”
  18. Levellers “Liberty Song”
  19. Big Audio Dynamite II “The Globe”
  20. Spin Doctors “Two Princes”
  21. Depeche Mode “Death’s Door”
  22. Slowdive “Catch The Breeze”
  23. Rheostatics “Record Body Count”
  24. Siouxsie & The Banshees “Kiss Them For Me”
  25. Jesus Jones “Right Here, Right Now”
  26. Northside “My Rising Star”
  27. Primus “Tommy the Cat”
  28. Morrissey “Sing Your Life”
  29. Pearl Jam “Jeremy”
  30. Ned’s Atomic Dustbin “Grey Cell Green”
  31. Big Audio Dynamite II “Rush”
  32. Ministry “Jesus Built My Hotrod”
  33. Paris Angels “Perfume (Loved Up)”
  34. Barenaked Ladies “Lovers In A Dangerous Time”
  35. Saint Etienne “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”
  36. Primal Scream “Come Together”
  37. Teenage Fanclub “The Concept”
  38. Billy Bragg “Everywhere”
  39. The Farm “All Together Now”
  40. Crash Test Dummies “The Ghosts That Haunt Me”
  41. Inspiral Carpets “Caravan”
  42. Morrissey “Mute Witness”
  43. The Tragically Hip “Little Bones”
  44. R.E.M. “Me In Honey”
  45. Meat Puppets “Sam”
  46. The Wonder Stuff “Welcome To The Cheap Seats”
  47. U2 “One”
  48. The Charlatans “Over Rising”
  49. Erasure “Chorus”
  50. Lowest of the Low “Henry Needs a New Pair of Shoes”
  51. Violent Femmes “American Music”
  52. Spirit of the West “D For Democracy”
  53. Blur “She’s So High”
  54. Spirea X “Chlorine Dream”
  55. Chapterhouse “Pearl”
  56. The Grapes Of Wrath “You May Be Right”
  57. The Dylans “Godlike”
  58. Lenny Kravitz “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over”
  59. Levellers “One Way”
  60. Revolver “Heaven Sent an Angel”
  61. Barenaked Ladies “If I Had $1,000,000”
  62. Swervedriver “Rave Down”
  63. Rheostatics “Aliens (Christmas 1988)”
  64. Billy Bragg “Accident Waiting To Happen”
  65. The Farm “Hearts & Minds”
  66. Spirit Of The West “Far Too Canadian”
  67. Ned’s Atomic Dustbin “Kill Your Television”
  68. Odds “Love Is The Subject”
  69. R.E.M. “Losing My Religion”
  70. Pixies “Head On”
  71. Northside “Take Five”
  72. U2 “Until the End of the World”
  73. Blur “There’s No Other Way”
  74. Lowest of the Low “Rosy and Grey”
  75. Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

And here is the promised link to the Apple Music playlist. I hope you enjoy.

If you’re interested in checking out any of the other playlists I’ve created and shared on these pages, you can peruse them here.

Categories
Tunes

100 best covers: #77 The Polyphonic Spree “Lithium”

<< #78    |    #76 >>

Some of you might remember that I started off the countdown of my favourite songs of 1991 with a post on Nirvana’s “Smells like teen spirit”. I bestowed upon it an honourable mention rather than ranking it in the list and explained how Nirvana excited me at first, much like it did everyone else, but how I quickly became oversaturated with the mere mention of them. It took many years before I could appreciate the band and I think swearing off of commercial radio went a long way towards getting me to this place. All that being said, there were a handful of songs from their catalogue that didn’t have me running screaming, even back then, and “Lithium” was one of them.

Ten or fifteen years after the release of “Nevermind”, my wife and I and another couple of friends went to see David Bowie on his “Reality” tour. We walked into Scotiabank Place (or whatever it was called at that time) to find our seats during the opening band and they were quite the sight, all active and dancing and gesturing in white flowing robes and so many of them, they filled the stage. It was one of the few concerts that I didn’t try to get a grasp on the opening act in advance but they made such an impact on all of us that I hit the internet the next day to investigate. I learned that The Polyphonic Spree were a symphonic rock collective orchestrated by Tim DeLaughter after the dissolution of his 90s alt-rock band Tripping Daisy (“I got a girl”). I checked out their debut and loved it but still distrusted them a bit, given their garb, almost impervious sunshine, and cult-like feel. My friend Tim’s assessment, after playing them for him, was that they sounded good but that they were ‘too damned happy’.

Between the releases of their second and third albums, The Polyphonic Spree released an EP called “The wait” that included three covers amongst its five songs. It’s likely obvious by now that one of these was the subject of this post, a cover of Nirvana’s “Lithium”, and well, I love it.

The muscular guitar intro from the original is turned into the plinkety-plink of piano keys. Kurt’s hurting angst becomes Tim’s unending hopefulness and he’s joined by a choir of angels. Of course, both versions turn it up at the chorus, the original, a raging mosh pit and the cover is a symphony gone psycho. Fellow blogger, Steve for the deaf, in his post on this very same cover, described it as “like wearing [Guernica] as a T-Shirt because you like horses”, which I found hilarious and more than a little apt. Indeed, Steve’s comparison reminded me of the gen-x parents I saw out one night who had dressed their toddler in a onesie that featured the iconic image of Che Guevara and the words: “I don’t even know who this is”.

I find it’s usually best not to take ourselves too seriously. What are your thoughts? Good fun? Or is it too soon?

The cover:

The original:

For the rest of the 100 best covers list, click here.

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 1991: [Special honourable mention] Nirvana “Smells like teen spirit”

Ok. So I before I get started into my Best tunes of 1991 list, I wanted to clear something up right away: Nirvana’s “Smells like teen spirit” is NOT the number one song. Nay, it didn’t even make my top 30.

I’ll explain.

In the fall of 1991, I was entering into my fifth year of high school. Back then, it was called O.A.C. (don’t ask me what it stood for) but it was also known as grade 13. I had been getting into ‘alternative’ music over the previous few years and was in pretty deep by then. I remember first hearing “Smells like teen spirit” and watching the video for the first time and being pretty invigorated by it all. And I remember shortly afterwards, a bunch of us driving around in my friend Tim’s car, late on the night of the year’s first snowfall, and going to the local mall parking lot to do donuts, while this song played on the car’s tape deck. I also remember ‘moshing’* about to the song at a high school dance shortly after that.

But then, I started to get turned off by it – the constant airplay, how commercial it got, and how all these young kids were talking about Nirvana, ‘alternative’ music, and how the first had invented the second. It got so that each successive single from “Nevermind” (and “In utero” afterwards) turned me off a little bit more.

I got (and I still get) the song’s importance and its influence on alternative rock. The problem was that with “Smells like teen spirit” and Nirvana’s emergence, suddenly every ‘alternative’ band was supposed to sound like that and the other bands from Seattle’s ‘grunge’ scene, effectively narrowing the scope of American (and with it, Canadian) music for a number of years. It’s no wonder then that I turned my ears to England’s music through most of the 90s.

Many years have since passed, however, and my angst towards the band has faded. I can now listen to their songs without the animosity I had garnered towards it in my youth and actually enjoy some of them. I even have their self-titled, ‘best of’ compilation in my iTunes library. And though I still don’t think “Smells like teen spirit” was as original as everyone saw it (Kurt Cobain, himself, admitted he was trying to emulate the Pixies when he wrote it), I look at it as a good song that was at the right place, at the right time. I can really appreciate the raw energy that Krist Novoselic, a pre-Foo Dave Grohl, and of course, Cobain poured into the song. The now famous intro guitar line that carries its way through the chorus and the juxtaposition of its rage against the relative calm of the verses. It is loud and raucous and now iconic. And though I’m sure it’s still getting overplayed on alternative radio stations everywhere, I no longer listen to them with any regularity so that when I do chance upon “Teen Spirit”, it reminds me of the first time all over again. I tap my foot and nod my head ever so slightly, re-enacting an adult version of my teenaged ‘moshing’.

All that being said, don’t look for this song (or any by Nirvana) when I start posting my favourite songs from 1991 in the next week or two. It won’t be there. But that doesn’t mean I won’t understand those of you who will disagree with it not being included. To those, I salute you and recommend you press play below and bang your head along with Kurt. Happy Friday!

* I put the word ‘moshing’ in quotes throughout this post because I wasn’t really… just flailing about in a similar approximation thereof.