CD Review - Whatever: The 90s Box Set

Not to steal someone else's review, but I'm doing it. As someone who essentially grew up in the 90s (i.e. went to high school and college), this CD compilation is hideous at best and manipulative at worst. Attached below is the review of the new 90's compilation that you can buy from Rhino records called "Whatever: The 90s Box Set" taken from www.pitchforkmedia.com. Good God. It's a longggg review, but it speaks perfectly to me, at least regarding music from this decade. It's dead on in panning it. This is your-parents-90s-radio, all boxed up and ready for you to enjoy. Want to listen to some C&C Music Factory, some MC Hammer and some Jump Around? Got an arena that needs songs to get peeps off their feet? Boy, have we got the CDs for you. Enjoy.



Disc 3 track 8: King Missile, "Detachable Penis"Disc 3 track 9: Silk, "Freak Me"

Good God the juvenilia! I was 14 when I first heard "Detachable Penis," and I found it catchy and hilarious enough that my friend Dave and I choreographed a whole geeky "interpretive" dance to go with it, which we performed backstage in our high school auditorium for a selection of friends. Later that week, on a late-night bus ride, I split a pair of earbuds with a girl from our audience, listening to the left channel of "Freak Me" and touching actual boobs for the first time. This box puts the two tracks together because it thinks it knows me. It can't explain how I managed to touch this girl's boobs even after she'd seen me doing geeky interpretive dances, but whatever: I shouldn't have been touching those particular boobs anyway, and now, whenever I hear Silk's overheated "wanna lick up you up and down" come-ons (most recently from a singing homeless guy), I get all sorts of Portnoy's Complaint issues going.

Disc 2 track 17: Spin Doctors, "Little Miss Can't Be Wrong"Disc 2 track 18: dada, "Dizz Knee Land"

You think it's totally self-indulgent of me to share my banal high-school memories at the top of this review? Then don't think about buying this box set. Whatever is seven discs and over a hundred dollars' worth of random nostalgia and unflinching faith in the disposable income of formerly middle-class suburban alt-rock kids now around their late twenties. The track selection is specifically designed to let people in this demographic spend 15 minutes going "oh shit, I remember...and holy shit, lookit, that one video, right...I am Cornholio I need TP for my bunghole...holy fuck ... no MC 900 Foot Jesus?" All for the last decade during which people relied on ganky old cassette dubs, and therefore don't have ganky old external hard drives to crack open when they want to get Proustian about 4 Non Blondes.

Disc 3 track 12: Green Jelly, "Three Little Pigs"Disc 3 track 13: Dinosaur Jr., "Start Choppin"

So what do you want to do: Bask in the warm-fuzzy vibe of shared pop-cultural history or be crushed by the thought that your suburban alt-rock song-memories, and maybe even some of the stories that go with them, are shared by just as massive a cohort as you-- being a child of the nineties and therefore wanting to be "special"-- always feared? And so long as you're examining your emotions, check this out: How many of the tracks you're excited to see here did you actively despise when they were on your teenage radio? Not yet 30 and already so wistful! Pop culture races along, and here is the ambient sound of your teenage years; I have Big Head Todd like a sepia snapshot of me growing up in Colorado and hating Big Head Todd; do we just buy this now and put it in storage for when we retire?

Disc 5 track 14: Better than Ezra, "Good"Disc 5 track 15: Blues Traveler, "Run-Around"

Well no, because Rhino couldn't possibly understand just how special you are, and they're cheating on you with everyone in your age group. The bulk of this set consists of standards and one-hit non-wonders from the mid-nineties flare-of up alternative rock radio, and maybe if you pared that segment down to a couple of discs it'd be a half-decent idea: There's nothing wrong with getting a kick out of hearing Green Jelly or Marcy Playground one last time, but there's certainly something wrong with spending a hundred bucks to do it. Same goes for the subset of perfectly fine, memorable alt-rock singles scattered around, especially in Time-Life infomercial terms: Looking for a way to avoid the expense and headache of tracking down Helmet, Sugar, Juliana Hatfield, and Ash albums? Except: If that's your angle, how much do you really need some C+C Music Factory and Right Said Fred hanging out on the other five discs? How much do you need weirdly placed tracks by Pavement, My Bloody Valentine, and Stereolab, tracks from albums fans mostly bought and still listen to? Is this a recap of alt-rock memories or a Now That's What I Called the Nineties hits compilation or what? By whose estimation, exactly, do quasi-riot-grrrls and Seattle rockers form this much of the nineties history? And why does this listing seem to swing back and forth between "remember the theme from Friends" kitsch-stalgia and seemingly trying to tell us that some of these tracks are actually good and important?

Disc 6 track 11: Jewel, "Who Will Save Your Soul"Disc 6 track 12: Primitive Radio Gods, "Can You Believe Our Label was Willing to Promote a Song with a Long Stupid Title about a Phone Booth?"

The only thread that really works, in fact, is the carefully selected line of Genuine Chart Hits that Suburban White People Liked then Forgot About. Rhino just happens to assume that somewhere around 1993 you bought a bunch of flannel shirts or striped tights and threw away whichever of your middle-school mix tapes contained "Walking in Memphis" and "Silent Lucidity," and after that you thought you were much too cool to buy anything by Des'ree or Deep Blue Something-- and then somehow, by decade's end, you were back to being cool with Shawn Mullins. See? Rhino doesn't know you at all. But you're special to me, and at least if they'd been a little more consistent about the pop streak, we could be listening to Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn" right now.

Disc 3 track 5: Wreckx-N-Effect, "Rump Shaker"Disc 3 track 6: Snow, "Informer"

Speaking of pop: A quick scan over the track listing might give you the mistaken impression that Rhino have made a half-hearted attempt to get some hip-hop, r&b, and dance music on here. Turns out there's no "half" going on. They've just managed to cull an exact, scientific selection of the particular hip-hop, r&b, and dance hits that their alt-rock demographic-- hell, their alt-rock demographic's parents-- either liked or can't help remembering. "Can't Touch This" is the first track on the first disc, followed by plenty of EMF and Jesus Jones and other things that struck me as sounding "cool" and "different" on the radio on the way to soccer practice, where-- oh memory!-- a guy named Steve would later sell me all his old Cure and Morrissey albums, because he was getting into Van Halen and trying to pick up chicks. Whatever: from there on it's all En Vogue and Sir Mix-a-Lot and "O.P.P." and other things that even people in comas would remember, plus such legends of hip-hop's Golden Age as Kriss Kross, plus stuff like Canadian toaster Snow (whose "Informer" video was so popular that MTV put the words and a bouncing ball on screen), jock favorite "Jump Around" (by the proud Irish rappers of House of Pain), and, cleverly, DAS EFX, filling the spot you'd think would be reserved for Digable Planets or Arrested Development. Whoomp, there you are, and no Onyx, either: You can get nostalgic for both the alt-rock hits you loved and a few of the pop hits you pretended not to! Plus Boyz II Men.
Disc 1 track 2: Sinead O'Connor, "Nothing Compares 2 U"Disc 1 track 3: Michael Penn, "No Myth"

Whatever. I am nothing if not a nostalgist; I have associations for miles and stories to tell; I spent this exact decade in high school and college and the mere track listing of this box makes me want to hunt down old friends. Here is a bunch of stuff I remember, and yet it's not even worth one hundred dollars. Good thing we no longer live in that Time-Life world, that pre-mp3 world where you couldn't possibly track down all these memorable hits; give yourself an afternoon and a copy of iTunes, and you can make your nineties however you like, for memory or for quality or for fun. If all else fails, didn't they just put out My So-Called Life and the first season of The Real World on DVD?
-Nitsuh Abebe, July 25, 2005