I love the stuff Creation and 4AD were releasing back then and I should ad that I have albums by artists including MBV and Primal Scream and I have seen both and Massive Attack live. But because this is rock and metal section that is what my post mainly deals with.
In my first paragraph I mentioned GnR, Metallica and Red Hot Chilli Peppers releasing albums that defined their careers, for some reason I overlooked U2, but when I say these albums defined their careers, I do not mean that they were their best albums, merely that they were their best known albums, due to album sales.
I actually don't own albums by any of these artists but I am so familiar with all of them for the fact that they were releasing up to 4,5, and 6 singles per an album. I loath the self indulgence of the GnR Use Your Illusion albums and to a lesser Degree Metallica's Black
album but obviously their fans did not.
While opinion is strongly divided on what was each artist's best album, the consensus is that after 1991 they failed to deliver better albums than these ones.
The Chilli Peppers in particular took "Breaking the girl" and "Under the bridge" and made them the template for every thing that followed "Blood Sugar Sex Magic" a successful formula but a formula never the less. Their out put post 91 is at best mediocre and at worst
truly awful and no better than the like of Celine Dion or N Sync.
When I said the late nineties became a mediocre time for music, I was again referring to popular music. There has always been good alternative music if i can still use that word and the late nineties were no exception, but the impact the first big wave of indie and grunge bands had had earlier that decade was long gone.
By the late nineties my taste in music had changed completely, I was still going to see bands but not very often. The Big Day Out, a larger version of Lollapalooza with many international bands had finally finished up so I was bummed.
And to top it all of The Verve, a band i really admired had gone from releasing gems like "Storm in Heaven" to "Urban Hymns" an ode to all things Oasis. The strangest thing was hearing "Now that drugs don't work" well that was apparent when you compared Urban Hymns with "Storm in heaven".
Yes there was lots of exiting music being made by this stage but it was definitely more electronic based than rock based.
The kind of new music that I am hearing in 2014 excites me far more than what i was hearing in the late nineties and across far more genres than I could ever have imagined back then. I will admit I was pretty jaded back then and pretty narrow minded too.
Middle age has made me far more accepting of new sounds thanks in part to the internet I am more excited about music than at any other time in my life.
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