“Music for the People” turns 20 this week and to celebrate, Dave Steed tracked down Funky Bunch member Hector the Booty Inspector and asked him to reminisce.
Popdose Flashback
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This album, for all intents and purposes, saved my life.
Here’s the back story: I had just graduated from college in the summer of 1991, I was in Connecticut. Girlfriend was in Ohio. I packed up everything I had and boarded a train to move to Ohio to be with her. But she was under tremendous pressure from her parents to break it off, and by the time I arrived, their smear campaign was clearly working. I rarely saw her, even though we worked in the same mall. I got a job at a record store, and one of the promo CDs that had just arrived was Squeeze’s new album Play. I had always liked the band but never bought any of their records. However, the local modern rock station (97X, holler) was giving it some support, so after hearing a couple songs I liked, I took it home with me and played it in the car of my friend Ed, who’s the only person I know who likes Squeeze more than I do. I vented all of my frustrations to him about the ridiculous predicament I put myself in as we blasted “House of Love,” because damn it, I was living that song. She was full of lies and boredom, a very acidic tongue waggled in her head, we seemed the best of friends, life had just begun…but on the roof a tile began to slip. The house of love caved in, and that was it. Fuck.
No one could top the Clash, so Mick Jones didn’t try…instead, he forged his own path with the brainy dance music of Big Audio Dynamite. Robin Monica Alexander looks back at “The Globe.”
How did a clownish, mostly-acoustic French ensemble make a record that exemplifies the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll? For the merry misfits of Les NÁ©gresses Vertes, music was a gang fight — and defeat was not an option.
De La Soul dead? Hardly? Their masterful sophomore effort, one of the best hip-hop albums of all time, gets the Flashback ’91 treatment on Popdose.
Or, to borrow an album title from the Judybats, Pain Makes You Beautiful. In 1990, Joe Jackson had just signed a spiffy new deal with Virgin Records after spending 10…
Nathan, Michael, Shawn and Wanya: four names that were on everyone’s mind 20 years ago. Dave Steed takes a look back at his awkward teen years and nights spent alone with Boyz II Men’s Cooleyhighharmony.
There’s a curious waiting game that you play, as a fan, following a band you have loved in the knowledge that their best work is already behind them. They may…
I spent most of the 1990s training myself to be a self-conscious aesthete. Which makes me sound, I suppose, like some horrible, sneering, holier-than-thou funwrecker. Really, though, it was just…
Popdose analyzes a seminal rock album, Slint’s Spiderland, that 80% of the public doesn’t even knows exist.
Popdose goes back to 1991 with the debut album from Australia’s Baby Animals.
It’s not often that a band releases two solid albums in the same week — twenty years apart. But such a gesture is just all in a day’s work for…
In between more timely projects and content, the Popdose staff are dissecting albums from 1991, which happens to be one of my favorite years of music. It was also…
John Wesley Harding’s sophomore studio album hits the big 2-0 this week, and Wes himself steps into the wayback machine to reflect on his efforts.
When Material Issue front man Jim Ellison committed suicide in June of 1996, the act was sharp and sudden. The 32-year-old wasn’t a stereotypical grunge sad-sack. He was an anachronistic…
Rob Smith travels back in time to Graham Parker’s 1991 album Struck by Lightning, in today’s Popdose Flashback.
Kelly Stitzel takes a look at Susanna Hoffs’s solo debut, which just celebrated its 20th birthday.
In 1991’s The Soul Cages, rock legend Sting simply became Gordon Sumner again, a boy grieving over his father’s death.
There was an odd cultural moment about twenty years ago when veterans of the 1970s rock avant-garde started showing up in an unexpected place — the pop charts. That old…
Louie Louie’s “Sittin’ in the Lap of Luxury” was one of the best singles of 1990, but what about the rest of his debut album?
My seven-years-older brother went through a heavy Jethro Tull phase during his teens. (I know, I know — this is supposed to be a piece about An Emotional Fish. Stick…
The second (and seemingly final) Traveling Wilburys album turns 20 this week — and for Dw. Dunphy, the disappointment still stings a little.
I like third albums. They’ve got a certain revelatory character about them. They’re not always the best records of an artist’s career (although they often are), but from them you…
Jason Hare reflects on the 20th anniversary of Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 — the beginning of the end for George Michael’s US career.
Robin Monica Alexander and Kelly Stitzel revisit I’m Breathless, Madonna’s 1990 soundtrack tie-in to Warren Beatty’s comic-strip blockbuster Dick Tracy.
On the 20th anniversary of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s death, Michael Fortes revisits the Texas guitar master’s swan song: a collaboration with brother Jimmie Vaughan.
Duran Duran’s “Liberty” turns 20 this year; David Medsker takes a look back at the group’s decline.
Kelly Stitzel brings us back to Christmas 1990 to celebrate the release of Deee-Lite’s debut, “World Clique.”
Though Sonic Youth are the quintessential indie rock group, they actually spent 18 years on a major label. Michael Fortes looks back at the start of it all.
Punk? Metal? No matter what you call Suicidal Tendencies, there’s no argument that 1990’s “Lights…Camera…Revolution” was a peak for the band.