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mixtapes
Mixtape: 1989
1989 was a weird year. It saw the release of three unquestionably classic albums——the Cure's Disintegration, the Pixies' Doolittle, and the Stone Roses' eponymous debut——along with several last gasps from 80s artists who would never quite break through to the mainstream (Guadalcanal Diary, Fetchin' Bones, XTC, Camper Van Beethoven, etc.) and some strong early records from artists who would go on to dominate the sound of the 90s (Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails).
I don't often find that separating music by decades is useful for anything other than an arbitrary break and an easy way to divide up musical hisory along more traditional historical lines, but it really does feel like there was a seismic shift between the 80s and the 90s that starts in 1989 and ends with Nirvana's domination of the musical landscape in 1991. As a result, all three years in the span are a bit of a hodgepodge as some trends and scenes were dying off and others were springing to life. All in all one of the better years for music, though.
- "Love Crushing"
Monster
Fetchin' Bones
read about this song
- "Club Mekon"
Rock 'n' Roll
The Mekons
read about this song
- "5 More Minutes"
Spin The World
Royal Crescent Mob
read about this song
- "Latifah's Law"
All Hail The Queen
Queen Latifah
read about this song
- "Waterfall"
The Stone Roses
The Stone Roses
read about this song
- "You're The One Lee"
Me And Mr. Ray
Miracle Legion
- "You Keep It All In"
Welcome To The Beautiful South
The Beautiful South
- "The Mayor Of Simpleton"
Oranges & Lemons
XTC
- "Always Saturday"
Flip-Flop
Guadalcanal Diary
- "End of the Day"
End of the Day
The Reivers
- "Broken Bones"
Tantilla
House Of Freaks
- "Down All The Days"
Peace And Love
The Pogues
- "Pictures of You"
Disintegration
The Cure
- "Terrible Lie"
Pretty Hate Machine
Nine Inch Nails
- "Hands All Over"
Louder Than Love
Soundgarden
- "Wave Of Mutilation"
Doolittle
The Pixies
- "See A Little Light"
Workbook
Bob Mould
- "June"
Key Lime Pie
Camper Van Beethoven
- "Sleepwalk"
Earthquake Weather
Joe Strummer
Track 1
"Love Crushing"
Monster
Fetchin' Bones
To kick of the 1989 mixtape, I was debating between two songs: Fetchin' Bones' "Love Crushing" and the Sidewinders' "Witchdoctor", and in the end I went with the local band (Fetchin' Bones are from my home state of North Carolina). 1989 would find both bands at their most relevant and with their biggest chance for success, and neither would quite make it. Fetchin' Bones would break up after failing to break into the mainstream, while the Sidewinders would go on to release a few more albums (although only one more under the Sidewinders name; legal challenges to the name caused them to rename themselves the Sand Rubies). But neither band would come as close to success as they did with these albums, and you get the sense that if they had released these albums 3-5 years later, their stories could have turned out much differently.
"Love Crushing" is the perfect power pop stomper to open a record called Monster (and in case you're wondering, Fetchin' Bones' Monster is much better than R.E.M.'s). At the time this record's guitar sounds were seen as almost metal-ish when compared to what else was popular on college radio (and even to the band's own catalog up to that point), but listening to it now, it almost has an overproduced studio pop sheen to it. That's not to say it's not a good album——it's likely the best collection of songs the band ever recorded, and while "Love Crushing" is clearly the standout, the are several other single-worthy tracks here.
I never got to see the band live, even though they played around Durham and Chapel Hill all the time in the late 80s, and that's something I regret——they had a great reputation as a live band, and it's likely I would have become a fan sooner if I had the chance to see them play a show.
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Track 2
"Club Mekon"
Rock 'n' Roll
The Mekons
At the time this album was released, I was aware of the Mekons as a group with reverent followers (some of whom were among my friends at the time) and a near-legendary reputation, but I didn't become personally acquainted with the band or this album until many years later. (At the time, I was most familiar with the band in the context of the Too Much Joy song "If I Was a Mekon", which waxed rhapsodic about how perfect the world would be if only they were members of this sprawling music/art collective. This didn't tell me much about the band's music, but it did underscore the fanatical devotion of the band's followers.)
It was a mistake not to get to know the Mekons sooner, because this is a brilliant album, and out of many good choices, this is probably the best song. Not only is it ridculously listenable, combining the best of post punk guitar work, pop melodies, and alt-country influences, but the lyrics are singable and cool and capable of holding meaning on multiple levels in the way that the best rock lyrics (and poetry) always are. The opening four lines that say more about the good and the bad of rock and roll than scores of dissertations turned in by media studies majors over the past few decades:
When I was just seventeen
Sex no longer held a mystery
I saw it as a commodity
To be bought and sold, like rock 'n' roll
Despite the love I grew to have for this album when I finally gave it a chance years after its release, it did not lead me to a larger exploration of the Mekons catalog (I own only two other of their records, Honky Tonkin' and Journey to the End of Night) even though I love every album of theirs that I've heard. I'm not sure why this is, but I have a nagging feeling that something is missing in my life, and when I listen to their records, it's easy for me to believe that this hole in the world would be filled if only I would plunge deep into the poool of Mekons fandom.
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Track 3
"5 More Minutes"
Spin The World
Royal Crescent Mob
The stories of many of the bands that are on this 1989 mixtape are stories of barely missed connections, of possible superstardom derailed by bad timing. In two years, the popular music world would be turned on its head by Nirvana's Nevermind, which not only led to mainstream success for grunge and other heavy guitar sounds, but for a myriad of bands and sounds that would have been footnotes had the peak of their careers happened just a few years earlier.
The previous two bands definitely fit into this larger narrative——it's easy to see how Fetchin' Bones charismatic singer Hope Nicholls could have led the band to the same heights of success enjoyed by No Doubt, and while the Mekons might not have ever made it as top 40 superstars, it's not hard to believe that, with slightly different timing, they could have ended up like, say, Wilco, who sell lots of records without needing radio/single support and whose large and devoted fanbase allows them to play sold out shows pretty much whenever and wherever they want. And it's even easier to envision success for Royal Crescent Mob, who mine the same sort of rock/pop/funk/punk territory that the Red Hot Chili Peppers built a massive career on——a different single at a different time, and it could be Royal Crescent Mob who turned out to be the big success story and the Red Hot Chili Peppers who turned out to be the interesting footnote.
(I put together this mixtape an embarrassingly long time ago and I'm just now getting around to writing about it, but I don't think it's a coincidence that I'm featuring a song by Royal Crescent Mob on here but not one from the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Mother's Milk, which was also released in 1989 and was their first album that got widespread airplay, setting the stage for the massive hit that would follow it, Blood Sugar Sex Magik. I'll get a chance to write about the Chili Peppers again in this mixtape series, but this is pretty much the end of the line for the RC Mob, and they deserve to be written about.)
I saw Royal Crescent Mob play live several times (mostly at the Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill), and I've rarely seen a group command an audience like they did; it was hard to conceive of a universe in which they wouldn't eventually be huge, simply because it was impossible to go to one of their shows and not emerge a fan. "5 More Minutes" is one of their best studio tracks, and of all their studio albums, Spin the World is the most consistent. There would be a few more records before the band petered out in 1994, but it was pretty much all downhill from here. Release this record in 1994 instead of 1989, and we could be living in a world where the greatly inferior Spin Doctors never needed to exist and these guys would have enjoyed a much longer and more fruitful career.
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Track 4
"Latifah's Law"
All Hail The Queen
Queen Latifah
25 years after the release of her debut album, All Hail the Queen, Queen Latifah is well established in contemporary pop culture, mostly as an actress and talk show host. But I would bet that most of her current fans have either forgotten or never knew that she got her start as one of the first significant female rappers who could go toe to toe with the best male hip hop artists of the day.
This record is part feminist manifesto delivered via a rap album, part dance album, and all in all one of the strongest hip hop releases to that point by any rapper, male or female. It's the kind of record that could be the subject of a cultural studies seminar in the classroom and a featured record at a house party later than night, with no tension between those ways of experiencing it. The biggest issue with it from a critical perspective is that Latifah works too much in the established rap tropes of narcissistic self-aggrandizement and constant dissing of her fellow MCs——her talents are so great and so obvious that you find yourself immediately wishing that she had, on her debut album, found a way to transcend the genre in which she'd chosen to work.
Queen Latifah would go on to release several more records (her most recent was released in 2009), but none would be as impactful or just plain good as All Hail the Queen——she had already started to explore how to be a star in other media, and it's clear that rapping was not the only thing she intended to be known for. Yes, today we all know who she is, but in the list of words most people would use to describe her, rapper would come after things like actress, talk show host, and media personality——if it would be used at all (it's telling that when you type her name into iTunes, her movies are displayed above her albums).
In terms of the emerging theme of this mixtape——artists who had huge careers after tastes shifted in 1991 contrasted with those whose timing just wasn't quite right——it's hard to categorize her as anything other than a success story given the overall arc of her various careers, even though most music critics would agree that All Hail the Queen and 1993's Black Reign are her only records of any importance. She would never again reach the heights of Queen as her artistic energies became increasingly diversified (she started her two decades-plus career of appearing in movies and television series in 1991, the same year that she would release her sophomore album).
But based on the quality of All Hail the Queen, which came when all of Queen Latifah's energy as a performer was focused solely on making music, you can't help but wonder what kind of albums she might have made if her only passion was being a rapper. We'll obviously never know, but this record stands the test of time, and if you're a fan of 80s hip hop but don't have this one in your collection, it's time to rectify that omission.
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Track 5
"Waterfall"
The Stone Roses
The Stone Roses
Let's get this out of the way first: the Stone Roses' self-titled debut album is one of the best records ever released. If you don't agree with me on that, there's probably not a lot we have in common musically. And for you real music nerds out there, the album I'm specifically referring to is the expanded US release (the third version of the album) that included both the earlier UK single "Elephant Stone" and "Fool's Gold", which was released as a single subsequent to the album's original release in England.
In many ways the Stone Roses were both the culmination and the resolution of the tension in Manchester between guitar bands (led by the Smiths and Johnny Marr) and synthesizer-based dance club bands (led by New Order)——with the incredible John Squire on guitar, the band was rooted in a guitar aethestic, but they were also pop enough to be danceable, and every now and then, they released something like "Fool's Gold", which was explicitly designed for the emerging rave culture.
(Sidenote: fellow Manchurians the Charlatans, who were also huge during this period, may have actually straddled the line between guitar band and dance band better, because keyboards were featured much more prominently in their first few albums, but the Stone Roses were the flagbearers for the Madchester scene——they were the first of this breed to make it big, and many of those that would come later were just imitating what they had done. I wouldn't argue that the Charlatans belong in this category even though they were clearly part of the Madchester wave——their career was too long and varied for them to be accused of being mere posers——but they nonetheless were following a path that had already been cleared by the Stone Roses.)
Like their godfathers the Smiths, the Stone Roses never really broke through in a big way in America, but they were huge in their native UK. And that turned out to be their real problem in terms of establishing a legacy: they were so successful that they ended up spending several years after the release of their debut partying in a rented mansion and occasionally recording music. Many dates for the release of their sophomore album came and went with no actual new material, to the point where it became the Chinese Democracy of its time: fans of the band began to treat the second album (eventually released in 1994 and cheekily titled Second Coming) as a mythical object that would never actually come into being. You waited for it, you hoped for it, you imagined what it might sound like, but as time went on, you slowly began to accept that it would never exist.
This album is so full of amazing tracks that I probably could have picked one at random and felt good about putting it on this mixtape, but "Waterfall" was the first song I absolutely fell in love with, and the band itself must have been pretty pleased with it t0o: not content to simply have it as the fourth track, they played the backing track BACKWARDS, had singer Ian Brown add new vocals, called it "Don't Stop", and made it fifth track——immediately after "Waterfall".
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