In an effort to prepare for the coming wave of ’90s nostalgia while simultaneously making everyone who remembers the ’90s feel old, Listen, Dammit, will be exploring the best music of 20 years ago in chronological order, month by month.

We begin at the beginning: January 1990. By the end of the ’80s R.E.M. had signed to a major label, U2 was playing stadiums, Hüsker Dü and The Smiths had broken up and The Replacements were working on what would become their final album.

A new guard of indie/college/alternative rock bands and scenes had risen to prominence: Nirvana, Mudhoney and Soundgarden in Seattle; The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets in Manchester; Pixies and Throwing Muses in Boston; Fugazi, Nation of Ulysses and Shudder to Think in Washington D.C.; Jane’s Addiction and Concrete Blonde in L.A.; Ministry and My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult in Chicago. The big breakthrough for Nirvana was still two years away.

Another band making waves on college radio in the late ’80s was They Might Be Giants. Their eponymous debut and its follow-up, “Lincoln,” gained them a cult audience, but the album that defined the band — and quite possibly remains their finest work — was “Flood.”

Released Jan. 5, 1990, on Elektra, “Flood” featured 19 quirky and short (9 of the songs were less than a minute long, and the longest was 3 1/2 minutes) pop songs with topic ranging from the renaming of a Mediterranean city (“Istanbul Not Constantinople”) to the virtues of authenticity (“Whistling in the Dark”). Listen, Dammit, dares you to listen, dammit, to “Birdhouse in Your Soul” without nodding along and singing the infectiously catchy chorus: “not to put too fine a point on it/say I’m the only bee in your bonnet/build a little birdhouse in your soul.”

— Text by Nicholas Coleman, photo by Susan Anderson

January 18, 2010 at 8:30 am | Share |