\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nso what\u2019s with all the awesomely dramatic sadcore in the early\u00a0\u201890s
\n1991 losing my religion, spending my time
\n
1992 runaway train, everybody hurts, must have been love
1995 foolish games, don\u2019t speakevanescence got nothing on this
\n\n\n[flaps arms in imitation of a chicken]\n\n
\nARGUMATE survivor of the early\u00a0\u201890s, understanding of the Situation too tainted by own memories to accurately assess
\n\n\nyouzicha said: The collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of the colonial period, the final triumph of nationalism over imperialism. This created a pervasive sense that events were out of control, reinforced by a neoliberal political orthodoxy which painted these developments as a *good* thing. It all filtered down into the pop culture.
\nanaisnein said: there was a recession.
\n
anaisnein said: to be fair the mood lasted longer than the recessionI\u2019m going to say that it\u2019s partly just the pop fashion pendulum: sad songs seem dramatic and novel, then overblown and inauthentic and fall from favour, then a few years later seem interesting and new again, repeat as necessary.
\nI guess I\u2019m predicting a wave of emo howling within the next 3-5 years.
\nPart of it\u2019s that the 80s were a nadir of rock in American (and thus Anglophone) music.
\n
Prog, metal, and arena rock variants all seemed to meet their limit in glam/hair rock, men in spandex performing highly technical guitar solos while pyrotechnics went off and the singer celebrated girls! Parties! Subtextually, cocaine!
Rock lost ground to R&B, Miami Bass, rap, soul, dance. Michael Jackson was called the \u201cKing of Pop\u201d in a deliberate parallel to Elvis\u2019 \u201cKing of Rock and Roll\u201d. That this pop moment represented a rise of minorities (and relative decline of whites) in popular culture was not missed, and is part of why Jackson\u2019s racial identity was such a point of interest.
Even \u201cwhite\u201d music - Madonna (whose more sexualized crossing of race lines was also central to her brand) and Cyndi Lauper were not \u201crock\u201d at all, not even from the folk-derived singer-songwriter tradition that fellow-travelled with it. Kylie Minogue\u2019s take on \u201cLocomotion\u201d explicitly drew a line between this pop and earlier Motown, skipping the period between.
The post-punk/new wave which was probably the most promising type of mass-market rock was only barely so, rejecting the bluesy four-bar backbeat that had long been central. It\u2019s funny that Blondie was the first rap on MTV and rockers were trying reggae and world music and country, but the point was EVEN ROCKERS were over rock. Huey Lewis\u2019 Sports was significant precisely because it was standard bar rock with horns, AT THIS LATE DATE.
What would in the 90s become \u201calternative rock\u201d was coming together, at this point it was largely known as \u201ccollege rock\u201d. Nominally after the low-power radio stations and small-market scene they gestated in, but it could as well represent the background of its audiences and performers. REM, which formed in the college town where Michael Stipe stayed after graduating, was the PROTOTYPICAL college rock band.
That\u2019s a thing, as white flight shook out, popular music went from a fairly integrated 80s-early 90s \u2013 Suburban white boys listening to New Jack Swing by black boys dressed preppy \u2013 to something that was fairly class- and race-specific. Over here you had your college rock and your college singer-songwriters, your Toris, Alanises, Anis, Merediths Brooks, Paulas Cole and Lisas Loeb; over THERE you have (gangsta) rap.
(This is what struck me at the time about n\u00fc metal/rap-rock \u2013 I called it \u201c\u2018some college\u2019 rock\u201d which I think I deserve some laughs for \u2013 for how generic the broken home/disappointing your parents/general aura of stress and failure notes were, they were the \u201cwhite\u201d music that seemed to invoke them on behalf of a non-professional-class audience at all)
One thing to reflect on is how the only urban music scene to \u201cbreak out\u201d in this period was Seattle, a distinctly white, educated city whose contemporary contributions included Microsoft Windows and Starbucks. (From Sublime to skate punk to No Doubt, there was a pretty diverse \u201csuburbs of LA\u201d influence tho)
So \u201cwhy was there a lot of downer music in the early 90s\u201d, because that\u2019s when rock reestablished itself in a new, specifically white college idiom, and that\u2019s what the comfortable classes write music about, from too-bougie-to-be-commie folk revivalists to James Taylor AAC to Rilo Kiley to today\u2019s Americana, because their greatest passion is themselves and their greatest struggles are existential.
Or as the Bloodhound Gang so memorably summarized alternative rock:
"}I\u2019m not black like Barry White
no I am white like Frank Black is