romancing the 90's

It's amazing how things look when you see them through the window of the past. When I look back on how I felt overall during the '90's, I don't think I knew I was having "the time of my life"

Yet the music of that time makes me feel like...well, nostalgic...I guess it's kind of like antiques, 'cause I wasn't really "aware" during the '90's. Until about 1993, I had very little experience with the radio, and even then it was mostly soft rock. My Mom didn't listen to the radio, and didn't try to get me hooked on the grunge stuff that was happening. And i had no reason to want to be hooked on that, since I was only about eight years old at the time.
"Teen spirit" wasn't something I could identify with at that age. And even now I can say it's a fairly safe bet to say I never really liked Nirvana OR Pearl Jam. I probably like Pearl Jam more than Nirvana though, since they at least have some songs that could be considered "timeless" in the pop sense of the word. Nirvana would be nothing but noise mixed in with small hints of melody if Butch Vigg and Scott Litt weren't there for them. Call me stupid, but I don't think learning how to smash a guitar against a chalk board is anything to be admiring of. But anyway...
What's interesting about the '90's though is how many "one hit wonders" were there. MTV did a half hour documentary thingy about that around 1999, but I think it's worth mentioning. Of course, anyone who ever bought a CD and LISTENED to it, instead of just "having" the hits, can probably attest to the fact that a lot of those one hit wonders had other great songs that just didn't fit in with the rest of the radio roster of the time. I mean, just like an album, the radio has to have a flow to it, it can't just play a bunch of 3-5 minute songs as if the song before and after it/them doesn't exist...an album that comes to mind is Deep Blue Something's HOME (1995). In 1998 Semisonic, known for their now-classic song "Closing Time", made a fairly admirable album titled FEELING STRANGELY FINE (containing that now-classic song).
The stuff that brings me back to the 90's (figuratively speaking) is usually the folk-pop/rock stuff. Del Amitri (sp?) "Roll To Me", which I don't think I heard until I moved to Missouri after 1997, even though it had been around for at least a couple years since...and of course Hootie&The Blowfish CRACKED REAR VIEW is full of goodens, a few of which are/were smash hits...I didn't care for their two upbeat songs from that album, and I still don't think they're the highlights, but I remember hearing H&BF on the radio not knowing a dang thing about who they were...I knew the name and I heard the music, but never put them together...the radio station(s) in California, or at least that part of it, always played like 3-5 songs in a row and then after they did, they'd list 3-5 song titles/artists in a row and expect us to know which song has that artist name & song title...dang morons... but anyway; of course, the main station I'd listen to on the school bus (to & fro) played the same song at least 10 times a day, at least 2 of which could be heard on the bus (to & fro), and after 5 days and then another 5 days, and so on and so forth, pretty much everything they played got to be an annoying pop song. Except, of course, the songs that "weren't good enough" to become "hits"...I listened to classic rock radio when I wasn't at school, and when classic rock become too repetitive, I'd have CDs to back me up.
So! I guess it wasn't the time of my life, for the most part, but I'm 26 now, nothing going on in my life except discovering websites and shopping etc.; and being young back then I guess that was the decade where I was learning and growing...life itself was new, and disappointing more or less, and those songs, so many of them, became a part of my history. To quote a once-semi-famous song by The Ataris, "being grown up isn't half as fun as growing up".