Now that the CD revival is in full swing, I highly recommend picking up a cheap copy of "Something to Remember," which collects many of Madonna's ballads and presents a different side of her, not so hung up on shock and awe. This song sounds better in that context, and the Mantovani strings sound a little less grating surrounded by "Oh Father," "Rain," "Take A Bow," "Crazy for You," and the Marvin Gaye cover she did with Massive Attack.
My wife grew up in Latin America, and absolutely loves this song, along with Extreme's "More Than Words" and a lot of other similar ballads by rock bands. She calls them "rock rosa," which literally translates as "pink rock" but basically just means romantic rock. In the US, it feels like a lot of these songs were very unfashionable in the wake of grunge, gangsta rap and other trends but in places like South America where the subcultural undercurrents were not so important the songs were free to just be enjoyed by people because they sounded catchy and emotional. Guilty pleasures don't have to make you feel guilty!
A lot of bands saw how popular the sappy ballads were compared to the hard rock and just excised the riffs and distortion from their sound to just focus on making a whole discography of "To Be With You"s and I think that's a shame. Ed Sheeran feels like one of those songwriters, all power ballads, no rockers to really contrast them with, and the result feels like it is missing some oomph. Maybe I would enjoy "Thinking Out Loud" a bit more if it were sandwiched between two metal songs that made it seem like a breath of fresh air.
It's not the same thing but often non-profit Adult Album Alternative stations will go deep on classic rock artists sometimes - the one near me will play stuff like Barrett-era Pink Floyd, Dylan album tracks that no classic rock station would have touched even when they played him, and lots of great classic soul music, which for some reason classic rock stations never count as classic rock even though I think the audience likes a lot of 60s and 70s R&B too. They don't go heavy though. One great college station still flying the metal flag is Seton Hall's WSOU - they continue to play a lot of new heavy rock alongside all the metal greats, and seems like the college kids still get a lot of latitude to play what they want.
U2 I still feel like their Achtung Baby hits at least still get some love, though their time in the wilderness after that was pretty alienating for fans even at the time. I agree about Madonna and Mellencamp though - maybe some 90s Madonna ballads come on at the drugstore sometimes but considering how big she still was in the 90s those songs don't seem to get much play these days. Her legacy seems to mostly be about the Immaculate Collection. I remember VH1 playing all those 90s Mellencamp songs when they came out constantly - the Wild Night cover, Key West Intermezzo, Human Wheels...boy did those drop off the face of the Earth.
Seems like Prince has been everywhere since he died, his icon status has been confirmed over and over again and yet...the tributes always seem to focus on his 80s work. Prince's last big hits were definitely on the radio a bunch when I was first getting into music in the early to mid 90s - one big one I didn't see mentioned here was "The Morning Papers" - but when people talk about Prince now the music they are usually referring to is from up to about 87 or 88 - and I almost never hear any of his big 90s songs in the wild at this point. And then of course once the hits stopped coming Prince seemed to make more and more music that I have trouble even scratching the surface of...triple albums???
One more recent Prince song I have always loved is from 2004 Musicology, "Cinnamon Girl." No relation to the Neil Young song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGjTc7iIJbg
Please tell me there are Supoer Tecmo Bowl samples on here, I played the heck out of this game when I was a kid! It was the first game I remember that let you save your stats for the whole length of a season, assuming that some dust didn't get in there and cause the game to lose all its saved information when you blew it out so that the cartridge would work.
I definitely remember this one getting a lot of Lite FM play - I think it's still on the drugstore canon playlist in the states. That goopy synth bass really feels like nails on a chalkboard though, feels especially harsh in a song calling back to the glory days of Motown.
Multiple people on this thread are remembering early crushes thanks to this song, and I have to add myself to that list. I asked one of my first crushes to slow dance to this song at summer camp, and boy was that awkward. Something about this song just screamed out to me at the time "this is what love must feel like." Thirty years later, I am only slightly less cheesy.
It felt like EMF and Unbelievable got dated about 5 minutes after they slid off the charts, maybe because grunge started dominating alt rock and gangsta rap started dominating hip-hop right afterwards. Now that rock music is not so popular - and when it is, it usually has beats a la 21 Pilots or Imagine Dragons - something like Unbelievable sounds more like it predicted the future again. For better or worse.
This is reductive but Stereogum feels like it remembers what 90s-raised alternative and indie fan who still wants to listen to new music might dig, and Pitchfork feels like it is ok millennialing me with too much zeitgeisty pop music I am just not that into.
Aside from "Lonely Boy" I didn't listen to any of this at the time, was probably too cool for school. Listening to this now, I can't get over how much "Little Black Submarines" sounds like "Stairway to Heaven," was that intentional on their part?
Type O Negative is overdue for a "Ten Best Songs" or "Albums Worst to Best" feature on Stereogum. Being sarcastic was always a part of their deal, and I think that made people take them less seriously, but they are one of the best hard rock bands of the 90s and had a totally unique sound - Goth and metal mixed in with the Beatles, lite FM, psychedelia, thrash, punk, just a whole carnival of sounds along with Peter Steele's almost emo declarations of love and betrayal. What a band!
This One Direction song is for you Bloc, I swear it sounds like a lost Big Star power pop jam and should have been on this list: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q61hpKNK5Y
Comments