Rock Blogs from antiMUSIC's staff. Do You Remember 1997 Or 1998? By Dan Grote

Welcomg to Blog n' Roll a place where antiMUSIC's staff brings the blog craze together with their rock n' roll adventures. Have a rock n roll story of your own? We're always on the look out for Fan Blogs too, click here to submit your story...  Now here is the featured Blog... Enjoy! 
 

DO YOU REMEMBER 1997 OR 1998?
By Dan Grote

I was rocking out to some Weird Al the other day when I came across his 1999 polka medley "Polka Power." For those of you who aren't gigantic nerds, Weird Al Yankovic puts out a polka medley on each of his albums that features snippets of about thirteen or fourteen pop songs resung unparodically by Yankovic and set to polka music. Yes, it's every bit as ingenious as it sounds. No, I'm not being sarcastic.

Anyway, Yankovic's '99 medley featured the pop gems of 1997 through 1998. Herewith, the track listing of said medley:
Spice Girls, "Wannabe"
Harvey Danger, "Flagpole Sitta"
Pras featuring Mya and Ol' Dirty Bastard, "Ghetto Superstar"
Backstreet Boys, "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)"
Smash Mouth, "Walking on the Sun"
Beastie Boys, "Intergalactic"
Chumbawumba, "Tubthumping"
Madonna, "Ray of Light"
Matchbox 20, "Push"
Third Eye Blind, "Semi-Charmed Life"
Marilyn Manson, "Dope Show"
Hanson, "Mmm-Bop"
Marcy Playground, "Sex and Candy"
Semisonic, "Closing Time"

The thing that makes this medley stick out is the fact that about 90% of the original artists vanished into obscurity almost instantly, taking their quirky yet banal middle-of-the-road nerd rock with them. As a matter of fact, not a single popular genre that spawned from those two years is with us today.
Let's break down what filled the void between grunge/gangsta and nu-metal/teen pop.

TOP 40. Top 40 radio was taken over by a bunch of nerdy-looking regular guys who all looked like they could pull down $65,000 a year doing tech work. They came to us with names like Harvey Danger, Marcy Playground, Fastball, Semisonic, etc. Remember, this was during the heyday of VH-1, so AOR lovers wanting to be hip ate this s*** up. Leading the pack were the reigning champions of sensitive-guy rock Matchbox 20, not to mention Third Eye Blind and the New Radicals. Then there was the pure cheese of bands like Smash Mouth, Sugar Ray, the Barenaked Ladies, and Chumbawumba, Britain's favorite anarchists-cum-street buskers (I can only assume).

Pop music was just starting to test the waters of the teen movement, as the Backstreet Boys made their way to American ears after conquering Europe. However, the true pop champions of the years that time forgot were the Spice Girls. The Spice Girls courted overexposure long before overexposure was en vogue. They even made their own movie, Spice World, which I'm pretty sure one of them had the audacity to call their own "Hard Day's Night." And then they imploded, each one thinking they were talented enough to record a solo album.

America responded to Britain's pop volley with their own girl-group, Hanson (ba-dum-ching!), three androgynous-looking toe-headed songwriters who ended up competing for young girls' hearts and minds alongside Home Improvement star Jonathon Taylor Thomas (That kid was actually famous?!), another relic of the forgotten era.

RAP: Rap was never more awful, more unimaginative, than it was in '97-'98. Three words: Sean "Puffy" Combs. Two more words: Master P. The deaths of 2Pac and Biggie allowed Puffy to capitalize by creating a slew of "tribute" songs using unpublished Biggie tracks and sampling post-disco R&B. He also unleashed Ma$e upon the world, the late �90s answer to Mush Mouth, which is an unforgivable sin in and of itself.

Even more unintelligible was the Southern bounce of Master P and his No Limit Soldiers, of which Snoop Dogg (who dropped the Doggy from his name in 1998) was, for a time, a member. The Soldiers' biggest hit? "Make �em Say �Uhh'." Why would I want to make anybody say "Uhh?" Master P had a later single called "Ooh-wee." And y'all think Missy Elliot is a hack.

ROCK. '97 was the year rock was pronounced dead. I have fewer albums from 1997 than I do from any other year from the past decade. Grunge was over (unless you count Days of the New and Creed), and instead, we got ska. "Punk" music with horns. Then Disney got ska, and so the genre every high school kid worth his salt would defend like it were real punk would then go out and purchase the soundtrack to "Meet the Deedles" to hear new cuts by the Mighty Mighty BossTones and Save Ferris (Sorry to have to lump those two together; I actually still like the BossTones).

And I bought into it. I thought Reel Big Fish were this incredible anti-industry band (Again, I think they had a song on a Disney movie soundtrack). But in truth, it was every bit as cheesy as the AOR pop that was flooding the radio at the same time (Although I'm sure you guys can name a bunch of Epitaph bands that were ten times harder than the pap that actually got radio play).

But then there was swing, the logical progression that took hold in '98. Brian Setzer was considered a hot musical commodity, and everyone rented Swing Kids when they really meant to rent Swingers. And of course there was that damn Gap commercial with all those kids in khakis swing dancing Matrix-style to "Jump Jive an' Wail." I took swing dancing lessons too. I was bad at it.

TECHNO. Oh, and remember when "electronica" was going to be the next big thing? MTV started showing AMP at 2 in the morning, and everybody wanted to see the "Smack My Bitch Up" video? Prodigy were huge and then disappeared. The Chemical Brothers were cool for a while, as was Fatboy Slim. Then that whole thing kid of fizzled when everybody realized they didn't want to listen to ten-minute songs of the same repetitive beats and that cliché thing where the beat fades out and then fades in again louder and more extreme.

Yes, strange times were they, but let's end this non-nostalgia piece Letterman-style.

�And the number one reason nobody had any taste in 1997 and 1998 is� JAMIROQUAI, JAMIROQUAI, JAMIROQUAI. �Chumbawumba.