In 1998, Now That's What I Call Music! was the White-Hot Epicenter of the Pop Music World
My Dumb Quarter Century is a 25 part project where veteran pop culture writer Nathan Rabin (that’sa me!) looks back at his quarter century as a writer for The A.V Club, The Dissolve and now Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place through a series of essays about twenty five important pieces of art and entertainment from that period.
The catalyst for my That’s What They Called Music THEN column at The A.V. Club was a car ride following a signing and Q&A for The A.V. Club’s book Inventory with colleagues who would eventually leave The A.V. Club with me to launch The Dissolve.
One of the two CDs in the car that fateful night was the first edition of the zeitgeist-capturing smash compilation series Now That's What I Call Music!
We put it on more or less as a joke, an ironic goof because we didn’t really have anything else to listen to but there was nothing ironic or tongue-in-cheek about the pleasure we experienced listening to all of those ridiculous songs again.
We were instantly transported to a magical time and place when everything seemed possible and the universe radiated infinite promise.
That magical time, friend, was 1998. I was employed by The Onion, my all-time favorite publication. I was matriculating at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the only college I ever wanted to attend and all of my expenses were paid for by the government or the agency that ran the group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents where I grew up.
And the music! The music was so beautiful it could make you weep.
Weep!
I was so moved by this disc of random hits that I decided to create a column where I went through every edition of Now That's What I Call Music! in chronological order in order to simultaneously celebrate and mock the glorious idiocy of pop music.
I was feeling burnt out and exhausted creatively at the time and delving deep into the shallow waters of top 40 detritus got the creative juices flowing again.
In retrospect it was good preparation for writing The Weird Accordion to Al in that I was writing about music on a micro, song-by-song and, as with Al’s parodies, it dealt exclusively with hits. Your song peaked at 46? Get that bullshit out of here.
It’s not coincidental that Al named one of his polka medleys after the series, since they share a nothing-but-the-random-ass-hits aesthetic.
Al’s polka medleys and the hits found on Now That's What I Call Music! are ubiquitous for a very good reason: they’re fucking great, or at least irritatingly catchy.
“Together Again”, the Janet Jackson smash that opens the album qualifies as both legitimately great and insanely catchy.
It’s a song that sounds not just happy and upbeat but joyful. If you let “Together Again” wash over you like a warm bath it’s easy to completely miss its fundamental sadness.
If you really pay attention to “Together Again” it’s nothing short of heartbreaking, a song that is hopeful because the strong, kind survivor singing it lives for that transcendent moment when she will cast off her mortal coil and be reunited with all of her dancer and musician friends who died of AIDS.
“Together Again” is consequently a happy and hopeful song about death, grief, loss and AIDS, some of the grimmest possible subjects. “Together Again” is another powerful illustration that if a jam is infectious enough you can pair it with the saddest sentiments in the world and people will still dance to it.
That’s true of other songs on Now That's What I Call Music! as well. Fastball’s “The Way” is a sadistically catchy alt-rock anthem inspired by an article its frontman read about an elderly couple, one with Alzheimer’s and the other having recently undergone brain surgery, who inadvisedly set out to attend a festival and ended up dead hundreds of miles from their intended destination.
It’s a nifty pop music trick, Trojan horsing all manner of darkness, madness and death inside a shiny pop package the masses are unable to resist.
The title of Cherry Poppin’ Daddies’ surprise smash “Zoot Suit Riot” was inspired by a real-life race riot involving flashily clad Hispanics clashing with racist sailors but the song itself is relatively apolitical.
Singer-songwriter Steve Perry (no, not that Steve Perry) explained that the song “seemed like a Pachuco rallying cry that could double as a dance anthem for those of us interested in swing music and culture at a time when nobody else was. It was an expression of a proud marginalism. That's not that deep, but there you go.”
That’s a little like writing a song called Stonewall Riots that is only tangentially related to the actual historical event and insisting that Stonewall Riots is just a cool phrase for a chorus and doesn’t have to actually mean anything.
Today a white swing revivalist naming his band’s hit single after a genuine tragedy involving a race he does not belong to constitutes cultural appropriation, but that unfortunately did not exist in 1997.
It gets worse. Under the “cover versions” section of the song’s Wikipedia entry we learn that Perry was flattered that his song was being parodied by our preeminent pop parodist even if he didn't quite understand "why Weird Al is such an icon.”
I think we can all agree that Perry is maybe the most evil, ungrateful “musician” this side of Charles Manson.
Incidentally, I’m sure Manson would have loved to be a part of the 1990s Swing revival. The “scene” almost exclusively attracted deviants like that.
Who the fuck is Steve Perry to throw shade at “Weird Al” Yankovic like that? Where does he get off? What the fuck is wrong with him? Motherfucker had one hit. Al has a CAREER.
It’s bad enough that the coarse vulgarian essentially named his retro outfit Virgin Defiling Poppas. I know the Swing scene of the 1990s was heavily influenced by GG Allin and Toilet Rock but that’s just straight up distasteful.
Now That’s What I Call Music captures the gloriously scattered nature of pop music in the mid to late 1990s, when fads like swing and ska revivals competed with the burning embers of the grunge revolution and teen pop created by top European scientists of sound like Max Martin to be as infectious as possible.
Martin wrote and produced the Backstreet Boys smash “As Long As You Love Me”, which follows “Together Again” on Now That’s What I Call Music and is every bit as shiny and polished but without the ache and sadness.
Teen pop does not get better than Hanson’s breakout smash “MMMBop.” Actually, pop music does not get much better than “MMMBop.” Hell, MUSIC does not get much better than “MMMBop" and that includes all of that wig-wearing fop Beethoven’s so-called “symphonies.”
When “MMMBop” took over top 40 radio and MTV it sounded like a perfect, timeless pop song that had always existed, and just needed to be realized by youngsters tuned to the exact right frequency.
The monster chorus of “MMMBop” was powerful precisely because it was defiantly nonsensical in a way that could be traced back to the early days of rock and roll, Doo-wop and Little Richard.
“MMMBop” simultaneously channels the freakishly talented golden child incarnation of Michael Jackson and Little Richard in his piano-pounding early prime without being particularly cognizant of either.
It’s as if these Stepford Pop Stars, these Pop Stars of the Corn magically materialized on Total Request Live one blessed day fully formed. That’s not true of course. These blindingly caucasian, intensely Christian children paid their dues for decades, pounding it out on the road playing tiny clubs and recording demo after demo before they achieved super-stardom in their teens.
The lyrics to “MMMBop” are about the lonely uncertainty of life. They’re about everything that we lose as we get older and move further and further away from childhood and youth and how important it is to hold onto the few people and things in life that endure.
The words to “MMMBop” are melancholy and bittersweet where the music is relentlessly upbeat but the most important aspect of the song vocally is sub-verbal. It’s that unavoidable chorus that says everything and nothing at the same time, and doesn’t need words to do so.
The lyrics are a sheltered teenager’s conception of profound and philosophical. This is adorable, and at least a little bit true. There is wisdom as well as bollocks coming from the mouths of these flaxen-haired babes, these younglings, these talented tots, these marvelous moppets.
That is perhaps not true of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl”, a ubiquitous international smash that offers a Eurotrash take on an American icon. Mattel was less flattered than litigious.
It sued Aqua but the Danish subversives were all, “First amendment, bee-yatch! Parody is protected speech! Suck it, toy pimps!”
The courts ruled that the song was protected under the trademark doctrine of nominative use. That’s the same sick law that allows “Weird Al” Yankovic to transform profound, deeply personal songs about life and the human condition into silly ditties about eating cheeseburgers.
Mattel clutched its pearls tightly and complained that Aqua had done the unthinkable and unforgivable and suggested that lurking under Barbie’s sunny, All-American exterior, there might be something a little naughty, a little racy, a little PG-13, if not higher.
“Barbie Girl” delights in racy double entendres and a subtext-laden interplay between its breathy Euro-Barbie and Eurotrash Ken, whose razor-cigarette rasp couldn’t sound less appropriate for Barbie’s clean-cut beau.
“Come on Barbie, let’s go party” Ken implores impatiently. When you’re a kid, parties mean cake and birthdays and, if you’re lucky and/or wealthy, pony rides. Once you’re an adult, however, “partying” means booger sugar or Mary Jane.
That helps explain Mattel’s anger. These Danish scoundrels were literally the first people ever to soil the innocence of Barbie and Ken by injecting their “innocent” world with a frisson of adult naughtiness. That couldn’t be a rite of passage for generations of Americans, boys and girls alike, or anything.
Aqua won. Free speech won. Art won. Tyranny lost. Censorship lost. Mattel even ended up using “Barbie Girl” in a commercial. Today the only reason we have freedom of speech is because Aqua won its lawsuit with Mattel. So the next time you engage in one of your damn “Let’s go Brandon” memes and make a joke out of our saint of a Commander-in-Chief maybe thank a certain Danish dance pop outfit for your right to say whatever you want, including screaming “Fire!” in a crowded building, without any consequences whatsoever.
“Barbie Girl” is, in the grand tradition of bubblegum, music for dumb children. That is not true of Everclear’s “I Will Buy You a New Life.” I had to become a sad middle-aged man with a whole lot of failure behind me before I could appreciate the whiny majesty of Art Alexakis.
“I Will Buy You a New Life” does not reduce me to tears like Everclear’s “Father of Mine” but its depiction of middle aged struggling and failing nevertheless connects with me on some weird emotional level that’s confusing because I’m pretty sure that I dislike Alexakis and Everclear, yet I nevertheless find something about them weirdly affecting, possibly its sincerity coupled with its effortlessly authentic angry-abandoned-kid-who-never-got-over-it energy.
What can you say about Radiohead? Not a lot but “Karma Police” is catchy enough to belong on an album with jams like Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll Be There” and Imajin’s “Shorty (You Keep Playing With My Mind.”
That is auspicious company but Radiohead, a solid guitar-based rock and roll band from the UK, merits it.
The promise of Now That's What I Call Music! Is that it takes all the guess work and hassle out of record buying by delivering nothing but hits, with no filler, only the songs you buy the whole damn CD for, with none of that album filler crap.
The first version of Now That's What I Call Music! delivers on that promise. They’re not all winners but they are a glorious allotment of ear-worms that will transport you instantly to a magical time and place called the late 1990s.
That was a halcyon time when a band called Marcy Playground briefly mesmerized the record-buying public with “Sex and Candy”, a molasses-slow slab of post-Nirvana grunge with mumbly, nonsensical lyrics delivered in a lazy haze. By this point, grunge had become a sort of novelty music. The geniuses were dead or disillusioned and the pretenders were everywhere.
Harvey Danger’s “Flagpole Sitta” merits the highest possible praise: it’s a “Blister in the Sun” for the 1990s, a jittery New Wave geek anthem that’s cockeyed and sideways and overflowing the ecstasy and the irony of being young and nerdy and overflowing with incoherent lust and rage.
Frontman Sean Nelson channels the erudite angst of Elvis Costello as well as Gordon Gano. He’s dirty as well as nerdy, an onanistic imp who embodies a fascinating New Wave archetype: the angry nerd, the Poindexter shaking with rage towards the world for no good reason.
Nelson would go on to edit The Stranger but for a single song he was a goddamn rock star with a preeminent platter of pop perfection that still sounds urgent and inspired a quarter century later.
In 1997 music was better than ever because Nathan Rabin was 21 years old and everything seemed great. If only I’d known what the future held! I’d still be incongruously happy but I’d be bracing myself for a whole bunch of shit.
Listening to this magical, tacky, cheap, majestic compilation instilled a double nostalgia. I felt nostalgic for the late 1990s but I also felt nostalgic for the time I spent writing my column about Now That's What I Call Music!
Traveling back into my past, as well as our collective past reminded me how much I love pop music, even when it’s incredibly stupid and tacky, or rather especially when it’s stupid and tacky.
Up Next: Our Dumb Century
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