August 13, 2006 by A.S. Van Dorston

I was trying to respond to an I Love Music thread, but it’s down, as usual. It was interesting reading the parts from 2001, talking about seven years ago as if it was a long time ago. Now, 1999 was seven years ago. Does it feel that long ago? I reckon only if you’re under 23. 1994 was an interesting year. Personally, I was emerging from a three year lost weekend. After graduating from college, I moved from the Twin Cities, where I had a radio show, friends, lots of cheap rock shows, and outlets for my writing, to Chicago, where I knew almost no one other than my girlfriend’s old and bitter grad school cronies. I stopped writing, had no Internet access, and didn’t have a lot of money. I was managing a small desktop publishing business and wondering if I should still go to graduate school, teach and write articles for academic journals that would be read by about three undergrads looking for something to plagiarize for their papers.

The new World Wide Web presented more intruiging possibilities. I saw early on the potential of publishing online and having immediate access to a worldwide community. Within a year my site would be up and running. That spring my relationship ended, I moved into my own apartment, and immediately started meeting friends and doing interesting things, like modeling in a whacky fashion/hair show that was set up as hilariously pretentious performance art where I was the devil (in flaming red hair and yellow hair extension horns), leather pants and punk rock industrial boots. The women were in gaudy, flowing goth dresses. The cultural scene in Wicker Park was still stuck in an Industrial rut, worshipping Al Jourgeson and Trent Reznor. Yuck. I preferred going to see bands like Polvo and the newly formed Shellac. But there were signs of indie rock getting out of its stylistic straight jacket.

Just as the Internet was on the verge of making global cultural exchange happen more quickly and easier, a few bands were already getting drunk on the riches of reissued treasures from the seventies, like Krautrock and Jamaican dub. It helped that a lot of this was just starting to be reissued on CD for the first time. Tortoise, for example, was talking up that stuff along with Tito Puente and obscure electronica and musique concrete. You could hear Can, Popol Vuh and Neu! in new bands like Laika, Sabalon Glitz, Labradford, Main, Flying Saucer Attack, Stereolab, Bark Psychosis and Jessamine. Godflesh, Scorn, and soon Techno Animal were mixing metal with dub and electronica/dance. Hip hop, funk, dub, soul, Arabic music, Latin rhythms, Indian classical, Afrobeat and more were being incorporated into the music of Cornershop, Massive Attack, Cafe Tacuba, Mano Negra and Transglobal Underground. Not all of it would be timeless, but it was fun, giddy times. Orbital, Autechre and Oval were starting to do interesting things with armchair electronic dance music.Disco Inferno, Portishead and `O’rang sounded like no one else.

Compared to the above bands, Jeff Buckley’s music was pedestrian, but at the two shows I saw that year he sang like a supernatural chartreuse-banshee. Significantly, after the first show I took my date home and discovered what truly mindblowing sexual chemistry was for the first time. I got to see Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (Pakistan), Femi Kuti (Nigeria), and Baaba Maal (Senegal) at the Hot House. I also remember blazing performances by Dog Faced Hermans, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Rodan and Unwound. Shellac curated a big show including the likes of MX-80 that anticipated Intonation. Not a bad little year, 1994.

Posted in: Rants