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Tag: 60-songs-that-explain-the-90s

  • Lenny Kravitz and the Fear of a Black Rock Star

    Lenny Kravitz and the Fear of a Black Rock Star

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    60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for its final stretch run (and a brand-new book!). Join The Ringer’s Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 112 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering Lenny Kravitz’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way?” Read an excerpt below.

    Lenny was in the news recently. Esquire magazine did a giant feature on him in late November 2023, big fashion spread. Lenny is 59 years old. He looks fantastic. Lenny is still so hot it’s hurting my feelings. But Lenny’s also got some thoughts, some slightly and justifiably grouchy thoughts on the way he has historically been perceived and the different ways he’s been perceived by different audiences. He talks about the press he typically got in the ’90s. He says, “There was this one article that, at that time, said, ‘If Lenny Kravitz were white, he would be the next savior of rock ’n’ roll.’” He says, “I got a lot of negativity thrown at me by all these older white men who weren’t going to let me have that position.”

    He talks about Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone cofounder and longtime dictator. He’s long gone from there, but in September Jann put out a book called The Masters for which he interviewed only white male rock stars, and then he did a disastrous New York Times interview with the great David Marchese where Jann said, “Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level.” And also, “Of Black artists—you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? I suppose when you use a word as broad as ‘masters,’ the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.” I was afraid to paraphrase any of that. Disaster. Huge news cycle. Everyone was disgusted. Jann tried to apologize, but he still got kicked off the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame board or whatever. And so now Lenny, who’d spent a little leisure time with Jann back in the day, says, “The statement alone, even if you just heard about the man yesterday, was appalling and embarrassing. And just wrong.”

    You know one of my favorite songs of all time, any genre, any era? Curtis Mayfield. 1970. “(Don’t Worry) If There Is a Hell Below, We’re All Gonna Go.” Fantastic use of parentheses; legitimately one of my absolute favorite songs of all time. Dig the bass groove, dude! Dig the dare-I-say articulation!

    And if there’s hell below
    We’re all gonna go

    But Lenny Kravitz got the most attention, in this Esquire interview, for talking about other magazines. Other media. The article says, “Kravitz is more mystified, though, by how he’s been treated by Black entertainment and culture outlets. Take Vibe magazine, which featured a who’s who of Black artists in its pages when it began publishing in 1993, but waited almost a decade to put Kravitz on the cover. And it wasn’t just Vibe.” And then Lenny says, “To this day, I have not been invited to a BET thing or a Source Awards thing. And it’s like, here is a Black artist who has reintroduced many Black art forms, who has broken down barriers—just like those that came before me broke down. That is positive. And they don’t have anything to say about it?”

    Finally, Lenny says that he doesn’t understand why he “is not celebrated by the folks who run those publications or organizations. I have been that dream and example of what a Black artist can do.” Do you mind, terribly, if, just for a minute, let’s all do the Bump. Bump bump bump. Yeah. Ugh. I’m sorry. It sounds better when he says it.

    MC Hammer was in the news recently. That was “U Can’t Touch This,” from 1990, and I don’t have to tell you that. The whole point here is I don’t have to tell you that. So in November, Oakland renamed a street after Tupac, who’d of course started his rap career in Oakland as part of the Digital Underground. Oakland took part of MacArthur Boulevard and renamed it “Tupac Shakur Way,” and they have this ceremony, and a bunch of beloved Bay Area rappers speak at this ceremony, including E-40, Too Short, and Richey Rich Double R. But MC Hammer speaks too, and Hammer calls Tupac “hands down, the greatest rapper ever, there’s not even a question of that.” But Hammer actually goes kinda viral for saying other stuff:

    But you ain’t never heard me talk about no stories on nobody’s platform. You ain’t heard me, uh, go to none of these hip-hop 50, and just for the record, I got invited to every one.

    You may be aware that hip-hop turned 50 years old in 2023. It dates back to a party DJ Kool Herc and his sister threw in the Bronx in 1973, and thus we had 50 years of hip-hop celebrations all year, including a giant eras-spanning medley at the Grammys in February featuring Grandmaster Flash, Run-DMC, Salt-N-Pepa, LL Cool J, De La Soul, Missy Elliott, and on and on and on. Questlove from the Roots organized it and curated it. And Questlove said later, on Twitter, that MC Hammer turned him down, and Questlove was heartbroken. And here now we got Hammer explaining why he turned all this 50 years of hip-hop stuff down.

    I can’t get with the fakeness of it all. Y’know what I’m sayin’? Like, I can do it with a young cat, but I can’t come around old cats, and still be pretendin’, “What you want me to call you?” “Six-Shooter.” Eh, Six-Shooter! Man, come on, man. Ain’t none of your bodies turned up yet!

    And I’m disinclined to put too many additional words in Hammer’s mouth, but the reaction to his speech here, the comments, the Twitter chatter, whatever, is mostly people saying, “Good for him. Good for Hammer. Hip-hop is trying to honor him now, but it’s too late.” MC Hammer never got the respect he deserved from hip-hop because he was too pop, too wholesome, too successful, too real but the wrong kind of real. He refused to indulge the Call me Six-Shooter–type fakeness. And he took a lot of shit for it. The old A Tribe Called Quest line, Q-Tip’s famous line, “What you say, Hammer? Proper / Rap is not pop / If you call it that then stop.” I’m sorry. It sounds better when he says it. But it’s still rude. And OK, look, speaking for myself, as someone who owned, in 1990, as a 12-year-old, the MC Hammer album Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ’Em on cassette, that’s not a great album and MC Hammer is not one of the greatest rappers of all time. But nonetheless, Hammer is another dream, another example of what a Black artist can do, despite the stifling categorization of being a Black artist or a hip-hop artist.

    Finally, you know who else politely declined all invitations to 50 years of hip-hop events? André 3000, of Outkast. André 3000 is in the news. He did a great giant feature in GQ magazine, written by friend of the program Zach Baron. They did laundry, that’s true, because André 3000—who is legitimately in the conversation as one of the greatest rappers of all time—finally put out a solo album in November. Twenty years or so we’ve been dying to hear an André 3000 solo album, or another one, depending on how you classify The Love Below, never mind that now. And finally, now we get a whole new album from André 3000, and it’s called New Blue Sun, and it sounds like this.

    It’s a great melody, actually, but I can’t play you the whole thing and I feel bad about that. That’s superstar rapper André 3000 on flute, and that song is 12 minutes and 20 seconds long. And the title of this—and get comfortable for this—the title is “I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me …” That’s the title of that song. Swear is the only word that’s not capitalized, and it bothers me. New Blue Sun is a whole album of superstar rapper André 3000 playing the flute, various flutes, and there is no rapping whatsoever because André will not submit to the stifling categorization of being a yeah, OK, all right, you get it. Here’s the way the wind was blowing Lenny Kravitz in 1989.

    Lenny Kravitz was born in New York City in 1964 and raised primarily on the Upper East Side. It’s fine if you don’t care, personally, what neighborhood in New York City he grew up in specifically, but if you live there, it matters. His mother, Roxie Roker, was an actress who played Helen Willis on The Jeffersons. If you’re too young to know what The Jeffersons is, good for you. Lenny’s father, Sy Kravitz, was a TV producer and army veteran. A Green Beret, in fact. Young Lenny started banging on pots and pans when he was 3, decided he wanted to be a musician when he was 5, and went to see the Jackson 5 in concert when he was 7, and that’ll do it. When he was 10, the family moved to L.A. so his mom could be on The Jeffersons; he soon discovered rock ’n’ roll and marijuana. That’ll do it, also. Early attempts at becoming a rock star himself were discouraging. He wore blue eye contacts for a while and called himself Romeo Blue; per that Esquire interview, he was also apparently going to be the frontman for an all-Black version of Duran Duran. I’m relieved, of course, that he didn’t do that, but I would like to have heard that, honestly, if only for 30 seconds.

    To hear the full episode, click here. Subscribe here and check back every Wednesday for new episodes. And to order Rob’s new book, Songs That Explain the ’90s, visit the Hachette Book Group website.

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    Rob Harvilla

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  • ‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: The Sun-Soaked Magic of Sublime’s “Santeria”

    ‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: The Sun-Soaked Magic of Sublime’s “Santeria”

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    60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for its final stretch run (and a brand-new book!). Join The Ringer’s Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 110 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering Sublime’s “Santeria.” Read an excerpt below.

    All the way up to the mega-huge self-titled Sublime record in ’96, the album that comes out two months after Bradley Nowell dies, Sublime are never famous in real time. When you listen to Sublime, the dudes singing and playing for you, those dudes aren’t famous yet. They don’t know that they’re gonna be famous. They don’t know that the ’96 Sublime record is gonna sell 6 million copies in America. It’s a little heartbreaking, listening to Sublime, what you know that they don’t. Sublime’s first official-official album comes out in 1992. It’s called 40oz. to Freedom. We got a super-important Sublime collaborator, Marshall Goodman, a.k.a. Ras M.G., playing drums on a lot of it because Bud Gaugh’s got his own problems. This record’s famous—it sells 2 million copies in America—but it doesn’t blow up right away. Or, really, it doesn’t blow up fast enough to do Bradley Nowell any good.

    This song is called “Badfish.” This is a top-tier Sublime hit, actually. This is maybe, probably, presumably a song about Bradley battling heroin addiction. “Badfish” is also the song that makes me think, if only for a split second, of Jimmy Buffett. Bradley and Jimmy. The clown princes of Margaritaville. Two barefoot bards of good-time partying, all libido and id and conspicuous overconsumption, but with a not-so-hidden soulfulness, a grace to them even at their bawdiest. Shrewd songwriters with hidden depths. Bradley and Jimmy—and Jimmy’s still present tense too—they don’t specialize in super-sad songs that deceive you by sounding all happy; they write happy and anthemic songs where the shrewd undercurrent of sadness somehow only amplifies the happiness, the anthemicness. The pain, the struggle driving “Badfish” doesn’t make it sound painful. The struggle just makes it sound better.

    Yasi really likes that line: Ain’t got no quarrels with god. The use, the deployment of the word quarrels there. Yes. Great word. But don’t skip over Ain’t got no time to grow old. That’s—OK, that one’s a little painful.

    Despite the fact that, again, Sublime are very much not huge or even “successful” yet—they’re not even on a major label yet—even so, 40oz. to Freedom has Greatest Hits energy. It feels monumental if only in retrospect. “Badfish” and “Ball and Chain” (love that one) and “Let’s Go Get Stoned” and “Don’t Push” are all back. Sublime’s covers of “Hope” by the Descendents and the Grateful Dead’s “Scarlet Begonias” are here, and this is the only record I’m aware of that covers both the Descendents and the Grateful Dead. “Smoke Two Joints” is here. “Smoke Two Joints” is a cover, also. “Smoke Two Joints” was written and recorded by the Toyes, a reggae band that started in Hawaii but later moved to Oregon. Tough break. Great song, great cover. When Bradley Nowell sings, “I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints / And then I smoke two more,” you believe him. But then again, you believe him when he sings anything.

    This might be my favorite song on 40oz. to Freedom, if you want the truth. Ask him how he knows about hamburgers and Elijah Muhammad and the welfare state. Go ahead, ask him: He wants you to know why he knows. The song is called “KRS-One.” It is probably the best quote, unquote rock song about a rapper, ever. Just the delicacy of this song. The sweetness. The earnestness. Bradley just loves listening to KRS-One and wants to shout out everything he’s learned about by listening to KRS-One. And I love listening to him talk about why he loves listening to KRS-One; I even love when Bradley slips back into reggae patois while he does it.

    He knows. He knows you know he just sang the words, We don’t want to pay no money fi hear the same old sound. He sells the fi there, somehow, maybe. Or maybe not. Or maybe you could also ask, Who’s “we,” Bradley? in the line Watch and we’ll take hip-hop to a higher ground. But even here, there’s a difference between wrapping yourself in the flag of KRS-One, so to speak, and simply waving KRS-One’s flag on KRS-One’s behalf. Not that this is the song on this record that unnerves everyone. At first, 40oz. to Freedom isn’t a disaster, exactly, but it doesn’t sell a ton. It doesn’t push Sublime to the next level. It doesn’t work, really, and it especially does not help Bradley Nowell in his very public battle with drugs. The next Sublime record is called Robbin’ the Hood. It’s from 1994, it’s four-track recordings, it’s lo-fi in the extreme, it’s experimental, it has a theoretically visionary sample-heavy beat-tape vibe, it’s got Gwen Stefani for less than two minutes, and it features several interludes from a schizophrenic gentleman named Raleigh that unfortunately last way longer than two minutes. There’s a lot going on, and pretty much all of it is baffling, but it’s all more intriguing than maybe you remember. Here’s a little throwaway tune called “Lincoln Highway Dub.”

    Huh. That sounds familiar. I may actually not get around to “Santeria” here today. Is that OK? Are people gonna get pissed at me? They might. Sublime’s biggest songs are so huge, are so ubiquitous, that I never need to hear them again, externally, because they’ve been stuck in my head for 30 years. In a broader sense, I’m never not listening to Sublime. I don’t know if there’s any point to elaborating on that, but—OK. So, look: Robbin’ the Hood is not designed to push Sublime to the next level, to put it mildly. What pushes Sublime to the next level, in August of 1994, is that a famous DJ named Tazy Phyllipz plays “Date Rape” on the famous L.A. rock station KROQ, and the phone lines blow up, and soon “Date Rape” is the biggest song on KROQ, which means that rock radio stations nationwide pick up on it, which is how I hear it in fuckin’ Ohio, and that’s what pushes Sublime to the next level. Yeah, this is a story of a single DJ at a single radio station plucking a random song from obscurity, and that song blows up in a manner so absolute that we even remember the DJ’s name now.

    Sublime get signed to a major label, to the MCA subsidiary Gasoline Alley, but also Bradley goes to rehab. Sublime start recording in Redondo Beach with David Kahne, who’s worked with Fishbone and Tony Bennett (separately), but that flames out, so they also record with Paul Leary, he of the Butthole Surfers, at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Studios in Austin. Sublime nail down their biggest, most enduring hits—“Santeria,” “Wrong Way,” “Doin’ Time,” “What I Got”—but they also leave a trail of destruction and consternation. Sublime’s self-titled album comes out in July 1996, and those songs slowly but surely make Sublime super-famous, finally, but Bradley is already gone, and we’ll spend the rest of our lives listening to Bradley singing about himself in the present tense.

    To hear the full episode, click here. Subscribe here and check back every Wednesday for new episodes. And to order Rob’s new book, Songs That Explain the ’90s, visit the Hachette Book Group website.

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    Rob Harvilla

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  • ‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: Portishead, “Glory Box”

    ‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: Portishead, “Glory Box”

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    60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for its final stretch run. (And a brand-new book!) Join The Ringer’s Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 108 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering Portishead’s “Glory Box.” Read an excerpt below. And if you’re in Los Angeles on November 16, check out the 60 Songs and Bandsplain crossover event celebrating Rob’s new book.

    What is this voice? What is the deal with Beth Gibbons? How would you describe Beth’s diction here? Playful? Caustic? Bright? Malicious? Theatrical? All of ’em? None of ’em? Who do you hear? You hear Billie Holiday? You hear Dusty Springfield? You hear a Disney villain? You hear a Bond girl? You hear a Bond villain? No, Mr. Cupid, I expect you to die!

    What does Beth Gibbons think about Beth Gibbons? “I’m not technically a very good singer. If anyone says I am, I know they don’t know what they’re talking about. If I wanted to be, I’d have to give up smoking and have lessons.” That’s Beth in a 1998 book called Seven Years of Plenty: A Handbook of Irrefutable Pop Greatness 1991-1998, by Ben Thompson. 1991 to 1998 is eight years, but OK. Portishead consists primarily of three people. You got Beth. You got Geoff Barrow, on lots of stuff but primarily on turntables. And you got Adrian Utley, primarily on guitar. Beth and Geoff meet while participating in an Enterprise Allowance Scheme. I’m going to be honest with you and say that I got really excited by the word Scheme. I pictured Beth and Geoff meeting while devising, y’know, an Ocean’s Eleven–style audacious crime spree. Right? I pictured a stylish caper. I pictured Beth and Geoff hanging upside down and stealing the Pink Panther diamond or whatever. Right? How appropriate, given this band’s flagrant old spy movie vibe, the Mission: Impossible of it all.

    But, no. No. The Enterprise Allowance Scheme was an ’80s Margaret Thatcher–era British political thing that gave young people extra government money if they set up a small business. That’s boring. That’s so boring. But Beth and Geoff meet, and they do set up, in a manner of speaking, a small business called Portishead, a band named after the town near Bristol where Geoff grew up. A town that Geoff once described to SPIN magazine by saying, “I really don’t like the place. It’s a place you can go to and die.” And then Beth says, “That’s why we named ourselves after it.” That’s funny. C’mon. She’s a little playful. The first song they work on together is called “It Could Be Sweet.” Dig the feature-length, majestic, tragic arc of the word nothing here.

    Perhaps you’re like me, and you can close your eyes and clearly picture the cover of Portishead’s 1994 debut album, Dummy: It’s a quite striking, almost nauseating blue, with a blurry photo of Beth sitting in a chair in a fancy dress with blood on her face and hooked up to an IV, looking disconcertingly dazed. Perhaps you’re like me and you were not previously aware that this cover photo of Beth is a still from a short film Portishead devised and, perhaps to their chagrin, starred in called To Kill a Dead Man. Adrian plays an oily businessman type, Geoff plays a dirtbag assassin type, Beth plays a femme fatale type. They’re all not great actors, necessarily—Beth, maybe, though, if she took lessons and smoked more—but they’re all extremely well cast. Let’s leave it at that, actually.

    The drums on “It Could Be Sweet,” though. The precise and bone-dry psh psh psh psh of the cymbals, the dollhouse-tea-set delicacy of it all. It’s a minor technical marvel; it’s a marvelous major triumph of vibe. Looking back on this song while talking to BBC 6 in 2010, Geoff says, “It wasn’t soul, but then, it kind of was. And it wasn’t overtly jazzy. And it wasn’t folk. But she brought this adultness to the track. And all of a sudden it was—this is actually real. And she’s singing about things that she obviously cares about.” You can find that quote in a cool Trash Theory video about “Glory Box” as well.

    So this is real. Geoff is somewhat of a studio veteran by the time Portishead kicks off; in fact he was a tape operator at Coach House Studio in Bristol when Massive Attack was making Blue Lines. Geoff has said that he was a lousy tape op, but he made great tea. That’s gonna about do it for Geoff and self-deprecation. Geoff once told Melody Maker, “Ambient music has never particularly appealed to me. Push ‘Go’ on a synthesizer. Make some noise. Put some delay on it, and put a couple sheep noises on it. I’m not into it.” Rude! I believe Geoff’s got some specific targets in mind, there. The KLF would like a word, Geoff. But let’s leave that at that, as well, actually. Sheep noises will not suffice, then, in terms of a hook.

    And this is how Dummy, this is how Portishead first reaches me in 1994, an alt-rockin’ midwestern teenager with no ambient sheep music experience, only a little Massive Attack experience, and for that matter very little cool old spy movie experience. Portishead first reaches me via the single “Sour Times,” which has a recognizable retro-futuristic cool old junk drawer feel that makes a lot of sense if you’ve spent 1994 getting heavy into Beck, or Stereolab, or, like, “A Girl Like You” by Edwyn Collins. You remember that shit? Is that a sacrilegious comparison from Portishead’s perspective? Too bad.

    [Rob hums guitar solo.] That’s right. That’s exactly how that guitar solo sounds. Too many poor-ass singers! Not enough poor-ass songs! That’s what he says there, right? Listen. There was a subset of 1994 alternative rock popular enough to sneak on the radio and MTV and yet ultra-cool and wily enough that I’d hear it and go, I don’t know how old this is. This is not the most sophisticated initial framework through which to receive Portishead, but, well, the statute of limitations expired on that, too. What elevates Dummy, what enshrines Dummy, is that you get all these warped old samples, you get that disorienting sense of timelessness, you get all these wonderful dusty old machines, but you get all the ghosts in those machines, too. All the ghosts are played by Beth Gibbons.

    I dig the beat here, right? The alarm clock boom bap of it all. Adrian Utley’s less-is-more fuzzed-out guitar: bwwwwooowwww. But you also get Beth singing, wailing, moaning, declaiming whatever it is she’s saying there, on the song “Strangers.” I can’t think of another album that delivers quite the same sort of delightful whiplash pivot between cool detached post-human sounds and bone-chillingly extreme human frailty. This song is called “Numb.” You ever heard a cooler snare drum sound in your life? No, you have not.

    However. Does the coolest snare drum sound she’s ever heard in her life make Beth Gibbons feel less lonely? No, it does not.

    In my California years, my Bay Area years, one time I went to this super-cool San Francisco apartment open-mic night sorta living room concert deal, and this dude had just a microphone and a loop pedal—he was a beatboxer, right—and he did a full looped beatboxed version of Portishead’s “Wandering Star.” It is difficult, perhaps, to convey the exquisite desolation of Beth Gibbons’s vocal approach while beatboxing; I don’t know if I would recommend getting romantically involved with a Portishead-covering beatboxer. You’re living on the edge there, emotionally. You’re gonna end up living a Portishead song. I’m generalizing, but come on. But on the other hand, this dude did a great job this time, and thereafter, every time I go back to Dummy, “Wandering Star” sounds ever so slightly more human to me.

    “Wandering Star” sounds more human to me now, but it also remains, like, wildly depressing, right? “The blackness / The darkness / Forever.” I have always heard Portishead primarily as primo moping music. Moping, whining, sulking, pouting. Being a grumpus. Not calling ladies on the phone. Feeling extravagantly sorry for oneself. Over-romanticizing one’s solitude, et cetera. This does not appear to be the way most people heard Dummy. The moping approach does not appear to be either of the top two approaches most people took to Dummy. Generally, you hear two things about this record. One: It is apparently stupendous background music. You’d hear it in restaurants, you’d hear it in both high- and not-as-high-end clothing boutiques, you’d hear it at the parties where all the girls were so they wouldn’t have been home even if I had tried to call them, which I didn’t. Dummy became not ambient music, exactly—not Lo-Fi Beats to Study To—but this record did prove compatible with a wide variety of activities and social situations. Put it that way.

    Or! Or, put it the other way. People thought it was makeout music. Music for … smooching. Amorousness. Et cetera. On YouTube you can find footage of Geoff and Beth, on camera, in a church, being asked by a cheerful Canadian interviewer how they feel about Dummy being described as “the greatest shagging record of 1994.” That’s another way to put the other way to put it. That’s apparently the Canadian way to put it. They don’t shag in Canada. Do they? Don’t answer that. Do you find this music appropriate for, uh, smooching? Don’t answer that, either. I just have a very hard time imagining some suave Canadian dude being like, Hold on, baby, we need some music, yeah, let me put on some, yeah, all right, check this out, baby.

    That song’s called “Biscuit.” I just googled “Do they shag in Canada,” and I got what I deserved. That’s all I have to say about that. “Biscuit” is the second-to-last song on Dummy. The last song is “Glory Box.”

    Dig that slow-motion gnarly guitar, man. Phenomenal. Adrian Utley on guitar. The chopped-and-screwed Jimi Hendrix, they call him. Nobody calls him that. That is also dumb. That is Cheeto chamber–caliber dumb. Now, that line’s got makeout music overtones for some of you, perhaps, not unreasonably, but Beth’s focus, not surprisingly, is elsewhere.

    Talking to The Independent on Sunday in 1994, Beth says, “The key line in the song really is Move over and give us some room, because I do think women are very much taken for granted. I’m more an easygoing than a rabid feminist, but women in general are very supportive to me. History has made them like that. And this is not something that is always reciprocated.” She elaborates on this theme after Adrian’s extra-rad guitar solo.

    In 1995 Dummy won the prestigious Mercury Prize, awarded to the best album of the year from the United Kingdom or Ireland, beating out Oasis’s Definitely Maybe, Tricky’s Maxinquaye, PJ Harvey’s To Bring You My Love, and many other fine records, including a Van Morrison album I was unfamiliar with. I wouldn’t say Portishead recoiled from the spotlight, precisely, but Portishead put out a second album, self-titled, in 1997, in a vein similar to Dummy’s but just a little harsher, sharper, less … what’s the word? Warm. It’s not as warm. It’s still pretty great, though. What it doesn’t have is a “Glory Box.”

    To hear the full episode, click here. Subscribe here and check back every Wednesday for new episodes. And to preorder Rob’s new book, Songs That Explain the ’90s, visit the Hachette Book Group website.

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    Rob Harvilla

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  • ‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: Perfecting Pop With the Swedes, “Lovefool” Edition

    ‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: Perfecting Pop With the Swedes, “Lovefool” Edition

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    60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for its final stretch run. (And a brand-new book!) Join The Ringer’s Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 107 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering the Cardigans’ “Lovefool.” Read an excerpt below. And if you’re in Los Angeles on November 16, check out the 60 Songs and Bandsplain crossover event celebrating Rob’s new book.

    The Cardigans form in Jönköping, Sweden, in 1992. The Cardigans consist of guitarist Peter Svensson, bassist Magnus Sveningsson, drummer Bengt Lagerberg, keyboardist Lars-Olof Johansson, and lead singer Nina Persson. Nina had never sung before, but Peter and Magnus were like, Trust us on this. Peter and Magnus both started out as metal dudes. They played in heavy metal bands—as did Max Martin, come to think of it—but they got sick of metal, and now they’d like to play in the poppiest pop band ever born. And the Cardigans will devote their lives to proving that pop and metal are quite tonally similar, at least the way they do it. They do that in a song called “Rise and Shine,” and this one’s called “Black Letter Day.”

    And here’s the whole ball game, really, with Nina Persson, lead singer of the Cardigans: She sings beautifully and exquisitely and elegantly and delicately even when she’s singing what could totally be Metallica lyrics. James Hetfield totally would’ve written and barked out a song called “Black Letter Day” if he’d thought of that title first. James Hetfield got so mad when he heard this song. The first Cardigans album, called Emmerdale, comes out in 1994; the album cover is a blurry photo of a dog. It’s an extremely 1994 album cover, I have to say. A blurry photo of a dog perfectly sums up the dominant vibe of alternative rock in 1994. Time for a piano ballad.

    This song is called “After All,” and it sounds like Nina is singing directly into your ear, which means that the t in the word insanity is really going to pop when she sings the word insanity. Is she singing, “I’m scaring close to insanity”? Because if she is, James Hetfield is so pissed he didn’t think of that first. James Hetfield is pissed regardless, obviously. You want the chorus? Do you think you can handle the chorus? Well, let’s find out!

    And this, too, is an extremely 1994-type vibe, yes? Tremendous darkness in a tremendously bright package. This bait-and-switch approach is not exclusive to the Cardigans, or exclusive to Sweden for that matter, but it feels exclusive, it feels fresh and freshly unsettling when the Cardigans do it. Talking in early 2023 with a newspaper called The New European, Nina says, “Isn’t it a universal thing, really? If you made stats, there are few pop or rock songs that are only bright—that’s very rare. The rest of them are dark! I’ve always had a hard time talking about the Scandinavian mentality, but I think it’s art in general. I think what we are drawn to—which might be a Scandinavian thing—is to sort of ‘Trojan Horse’ your product; put it in a costume of something that’s light and upbeat.” All right, so time for something light and upbeat. Name that tune!

    And then the Trojan horse opens up and oh, shit, it’s the Cardigans’ cover of “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” by Black Sabbath. Told ya pop and metal were quite tonally similar! Take it, Ozzy!

    I feel as though Ozzy and Nina would really get along. I don’t think Nina Persson would bite the head off a bat or snort a line of ants or befoul the Alamo, but she sings as though she’s considering doing all of those things. All right, we got ourselves an intriguing and sweetly confrontational Swedish alt-rock band with sophisticated pop overtones; time for the second Cardigans album. You know the greatest feeling in the world? You wanna know my favorite thing? I’ve said this before, but I’m saying it again: It’s when you love a song, but you totally forget about that song, and then you hear that song again years and years later, and you fall in love with it for the first time but also simultaneously realize that you’d already fallen in love with it.

    The second Cardigans album is called Life, it comes out in 1995, and we have leveled up in terms of brightness, cheeriness, catchiness, and also, possibly, subversion. There’s an exclamation point in this song title.

    That song’s called “Hey! Get Out of My Way.” There’s Nina, on the cover of the Life album, smiling extra brightly, lying on her stomach in a powder-blue dress with furry sleeves, propped up on her elbows with a little sunflower pinkie ring, her feet crossed and dangling in the air, and she’s wearing ice skates, and it occurs to you, pretty immediately, that ice skates are just blades for your feet. Hey! Hey! Get out of her way. This song’s called “Tomorrow,” and it’s as close as Jönköping, Sweden, has ever gotten to Motown.

    Is morning a sugar kiss, though, really? The Cardigans are not setting the world or the pop charts on fire at this point. But they are building toward something, and this precise three-year span, 1994 to 1996—post-grunge, pre–nü metal, post–alternative explosion, pre-Napster—this is a great time to be building toward something, pop subversion–wise. The third Cardigans record, released in 1996, is called First Band on the Moon. Nina, in a 2014 interview, says, “Every record we have made with the Cardigans has been a counter-reaction to the previous one. And by then we were really tired of everybody calling us cute, after having done sort of cute and ethereal—we felt like we weren’t easy listening. We weren’t taken serious. So we wanted to be taken seriously. We wanted to be sort of more gritty and rocking.”

    As an added bonus, this song has the most Black Sabbath–esque guitar riff on this whole record. Get a load of how rad this guitar riff is:

    Y’know how Black Sabbath–esque that guitar riff is? It’s the most Black Sabbath–esque guitar riff on an album where, just for emphasis, the Cardigans cover Black Sabbath again.

    Yes, the Cardigans do “Iron Man,” and I used to play the Cardigans cover of “Iron Man” all the time on college radio, and I’d be just tremendously pleased with myself. As an added bonus, this record, First Band on the Moon, has another track that went semi-arbitrarily viral on TikTok in the spring of 2023, and I love it when semi-arbitrary ’90s songs go viral on TikTok; that doesn’t make me feel weird or old at all. It’s called “Step on Me,” and Nina means it literally.

    That’s the sped-up TikTok version of “Step on Me.” I feel great. This phenomenon of speeding up songs for TikTok, I understand that perfectly. I don’t feel like my bones are grinding themselves to dust and blowing away in the wind at all. That quote of Nina’s, about wanting to be taken seriously and be more respected and gritty and rocking on this record, there’s one last part to that quote, actually. She says, “So we wanted to be taken seriously. We wanted to be sort of more gritty and rocking. But then we made ‘Lovefool’ on that record, so we like totally dug our grave.”

    And maybe there is nothing that I could do. The mass appeal of “Lovefool” was immediately, painfully obvious to everyone, and that includes the band—this song’s mass appeal was painfully obvious while they were still writing it, before they sped it up. Talking to Billboard in 2016, Nina says, “We definitely were aware that it was a single and a catchy song when we wrote it, but the direction it took is not something we could have predicted. It wasn’t necessarily our character; it felt like a bit of a freak on the record—which, objectively, it still is. Before we recorded it, it was slower and more of a bossa nova. It’s quite a sad love song; the meaning of it is quite pathetic, really. But then when we were recording, by chance, our drummer started to play that kind of disco beat, and there was no way to get away from it after that.”

    To hear the full episode, click here. Subscribe here and check back every Wednesday for new episodes. And to preorder Rob’s new book, Songs That Explain the ’90s, visit the Hachette Book Group website.

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    Rob Harvilla

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