S.T.R.T. #1

STRT....yeah I totally saw them last year before they sold out or changed their sound or something. They're way lame now, but whatever. Either way, #1 is their first new...WRONG!!!! It stands for Sports Talk Radio Tactics. For if you do not know, Sports talk radio (STR from here on) in the mid- to late- nineties (how appropriate, as you'll see), in the midst of its obnoxious rise as a viable media form, one to be reckoned with in some circles, gained a certain reputation. It was said that many prominent hosts resorted, basically, to asking callers to do their jobs for them, and look up obvious information for them. Additionally-- and this still goes on-- they had a tendency, when there was nothing better to talk about (pretty much always?) to go to the callers (now emailers too) and poll them on things that are obviously controversial or question them on things the answers to which would obviously be so subjective that people would have to be riled up, and suddenly they had themselves a good half hour of prickly, contentious radio, for about thirty seconds of the hosts' effort.
So why here and now? It is a nice way to segue into my way of introducing a hopefully regular thing here at the old Blog Factory, a poll or subjective thing, where you do all the work for me, the presenter. And hopefully others will pick up on this and bring up their own topics. On with the show!
So lately, I've been thinking so much about the culture of the 90s, especially the second half of the decade. And these thoughts have not been positive. It just seems that the whole period had an air of shimmer and gloss and artificiality --and that's just the fashions of the time!!! ZING!!!-- that rings mighty hollowly these days, and really since about '01 or '02. It was like we were trying our damnedest to live up to the year 2000 envisioned by our ancestors, a slick perfect future that was our present. And lo, I say unto you, it sucked. Rap rock? Teen pop (though you'll find few bigger fans of N*Sync's No Strings Attached than your humble narrator)? Freddie Prinze, Jr. movies? Super dumbed down teen sex romps? Duncan Sheik? Nine Stories? Woodstock '99? Ben Affleck as sex symbol? Jennifer Love Hewitt movies? the occasional Fatboy Slim single--followed by said single's appearance in a Freddie Prinze, Jr. movie, in a dance sequence at the prom, where the "ugly" girl (take off those glasses let down that hair) has her beautiful coming out party? I mean, what the fuck people 4-6 years older than me, what the fuck? You've got a lot to answer for. Since current events dictate cultural and artistic trends, and I and people my age were too young to set them, just old enough to follow them, I'll cut you a break. Maybe you just had a lot of trouble with the burgeoning new technology, maybe you thought you could keep up with it, maybe it was the peace and prosperity of the Clinton years--if only you could have anticipated the Patriot Act and This Current War and Hurricane Katrina and the War on Terror and the W. Bush Era in general. Icky. Yeah, it's ok people in your early thirties, it's ok. I forgive you for your perfectly synchronized dancing to "The Rockefeller Skank," I'll praise you for thinking, "Who cares! The world might end when the Millennium comes let's just wear lots of pleather and shiny shirts. It'll be ok, man, you gotta have faith!" Cry on my shoulder. Maybe I'm just an old grumpus with a selective memory. My children will laugh at me and rage at me someday too.
But hold on. Here is what I am asking of you-- the readers here. I want a discussion on good albums, good underground stuff preferably, from the period in discussion, the mid-to late nineties. I am probably already thinking of some, but not many, not as many, say, as I can think of from one year this decade, a year like 2005. So let's do the damn thing. And by "let's," of course I mean, "you."