When is a 20th anniversary something not to celebrate? Twenty years since I started freebasing? Twenty years since my wife took her vow of celibacy? Twenty years since that guy on the subway took a leak on me?
Regular readers (all three of them) know how seriously I take music. In the late 1980s both mainstream Rock and Country music were in a creative funk. You know, the same thing over and over again. If you were a record executive, the formulaic types of there genres were still selling but that's mainly because you forced us to repurchase our favorite music on a different format and then you made that format more expensive to own. And you were laughing all the way to your cocaine dealer. It's no surprise that long standing artists like The Moody Blues, The Rolling Stones, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash dropped off their respective Top 40 singles charts after 1990.
In Country's case, Garth Brooks showed up around 1989 with his high octane arena-ready brand of music and pretty much destroyed any type of artist still using pedal steel guitar and singing tear-in-my-beer lyrics. This genre of music hasn't changed much then mainly because Mr. Brooks' music was pretty darn profitable (over 100 million albums sold) even though industry insiders have been warning us of a traditional country comeback for over 20 years now.
Rock music got a one-two punch in Nirvana and Pearl Jam in 1991; pushing alternative rock right into the mainstream. However, with the exception of Pearl Jam, most of these modern rock stars either burned out or faded away by the end of the decade. This meant change once again on Top 40 radio and pretty much anything but modern rock replaced it.
One genre was teenybopper pop, a category thought driven into the ground in the 1970s by just about every Osmond who ever made a record. But much like the graveyard below the Freeling house in 'Poltergeist', it wasn't. Boy bands like Backstreet Boys and N'Sync popped up, seemingly out of nowhere, and took radio by storm. Where were the girls? Yes, Christina Aguilera was there but the first to the charts was Britney Spears whose debut song "Baby One More Time" is celebrating its 20th anniversary this week with many music critics lauding this debut as the beginning of more mature sounding teen-pop. Does anyone else see this as a contradiction in terms? Certainly not the Spears family who rushed their oldest daughter into showbiz at an early age and obviously didn't see anything wrong with the title song's creepy video and lyrics sang by someone not even eighteen yet at the same time espousing her strong Christian beliefs. I understand Christians are not all prudes but the song and the video were and still are borderline child porn.
I'm willing to overlook the fact that the image and music were completely manufactured from the ground up. Spears, Aguilera and Justin Timberlake were all being groomed for stardom as members of the late 80s version of the Mickey Mouse Club. Ms. Spears sang the songs pretty much like anyone on karaoke night would as she did not write a single note or word of the song (or anything on the album which would appear in early 1999). I'm willing to overlook the fact that her voice was nothing special compared to the vocal stylings of Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey. But the way she 'delivered' the songs would have been more understandable coming from them than from someone who most likely had to be taught how to properly 'shake her groove thing.' Just plain embarrassing. I remember seeing pre-teens everywhere dressing up (or, more precisely, down) like her as these young girls were obviously voicing their support of female empowerment, not realizing their fearless leader was slowly headed for a self imposed mental breakdown. I honestly don't remember Gloria Steinem doing this. Of course, I don't remember Gloria's parents shoving her into showbiz as a toddler either. As the late, great Tom Petty once said 'as we celebrate mediocrity all the boys upstairs want to see how much you'll pay for what you used to get for free.' 'Nuff said.
