Down and Out in 1998

1998 is not a year that gets much love for its music. A lot of nasty things happened that year. The proper births of Nu Metal and Millennial Teen pop are not wrongs easily forgiven. The first Creed album, Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Limp Bizkit. It was almost terminally bad.

What '98 was good for though was being a depressed teenager. Even the bands that had until recently provided defiant angry Alt Rock turned up with down and out sad sack albums and I for one remember riding that trough to mope town pretty enthusiastically. It may not have been a great year to be listening to the radio, but it was the exact right time to feel morose and out of place, as demonstrated by these releases.

After losing their drummer Bill Berry REM turned up in late 1998 with what was broadly considered an uninteresting and tedious album full of navel gazing neurosis and tediously monotone musical ideas. I was not reading reviews at the time so all I knew was that REM had released an album that hit me right where I was. I still contend that it is a beautiful and subtly faceted album, emotionally vulnerable and completely hypnotic. It also boasts a bushel of delicate melodies that form like crystals and shimmer gorgeously.

I can perhaps sympathize with those who say that The Smashing Pumpkins Adore represents a major mainstream rock act co-opting and homogenizing underground music currents. It was obtusely out of character for them to suddenly try and be a techno act. The label bandwagon jumpers might well fit in this case. But what I cannot do is relinquish the memories of listening to this album into the wee hours of the night with friends on nights when the world felt enormous yet stagnant. A place where anything could happen but nothing ever did. It's pure high school and purely gorgeous to me, even now.

If this were ten years ago I might feel like I needed to defend this inclusion. Back when everyone was kind of getting tired of the Elliott Smith sadness wave that rose up in the wake of his suicide. Now I think he's just about due for another round of re-discovery. I got in on Smith in the wake of his contribution to the Good Will Hunting soundtrack and XO was his first release in the wake of that success. More than any other album here this represents to me a lost way of relating to and experiencing music. I heard Smith on a film soundtrack and had to hunt from store to store, town to town over the space of months and months to collect his releases. I acquired this album at a record shop that no longer exists, buying their only copy. I felt like a victorious hunter. And then listening to it I was alone and unique in a uniquely beautiful world I could feel confident no one for miles and miles had yet experienced. It was a feeling of personal connection and privacy within a physically represented pop culture that one would be hard pressed to find now.