andy across millennia

About two years ago a very good friend of mine shared a playlist called ‘99 approximately, made up of songs he’d been listening to around the turn of the millennium. It was a wonderful gift and delightful insight into a side of this person I’d know for some fifteen years.

Of course, not long afterwards I started to compile a similar playlist of my own, completing it right around the time everything shut down. And of course there were a couple small ideas I had for it in my head that I wanted to do before it felt Finished that kept me from sharing it with anyone for the next two years.

One was to find and scan a specific photo to use for the cover art, which I quickly located and then quickly lost before I could make the image I had in my head. I’m happy with where I ended up, but getting there took some time. The other was to write up contextual capsules for each song (I’m not sure why - my friend didn’t with his). I started that but it never felt quite right - I was taking way too much time and the writing just felt overwrought. Cut to two years later and I had a fresh idea; listen to the playlist and only take as long to write about each song as it does to listen to it. There were a couple times I bent the rule, but happily, I got there in one sitting.

A quick review to add some links and do very minor edits and here we are, with a list songs that Andy (c. 1999) was listening to, seeing on MTV last at night or every morning before school, or hearing on movie soundtracks, scores or the radio.

Radiohead, “Planet Telex”

This song has been my go-to airplane music for about as long as I’ve had The Bends. I probably discovered it in the summer of 1998 or 1999, when I traveled to Nantucket with my dad, his sister and her husband for a week or so and then went on a cruise in Alaska with my mom and one of her friends. The cover photo for this playlist is from one of those trips, either the ferry to/from Nantucket or the Alaskan cruise ship.

But yeah, pretty much every airplane trip for the last 25 years has started with this song. 

Rage Against the Machine, “Guerilla Radio”

The greatest rock band of their era? The memory that always surfaces for me of Rage around this time is being in a mall music store in New Jersey when I was visiting my dad around the time this came out and overhearing someone in a group of younger kids tell his friends that the guys in this band “were communists,” as though it were some kind of scarlet mark. 

Personally, I think this is their most consistent album, although a cute girl at a record store on that Alaska trip had some strong thoughts about their first album when I bought Evil Empire and told her I didn’t have Rage’s debut.

Primus, “Jerry Was A Race Car Driver”

Thanks for introducing me to Primus, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater! Definitely my favorite track from that game, and the reason I still have Sailing the Seas of Cheese in my 320-disc Caselogic doorstop. Never really got deeper into Primus, or this album, honestly, but it has some great singles.

Aphex Twin, “Come to Daddy (Pappy Mix)”

A song and artist I got into from the infamy of its music video, which was banned from daytime play on MTV and still remains a high point for the medium. I picked up the EP this was on (and the VHS music video single!) and found a surprising amount to enjoy here. To the point where I definitely played at least one or two songs from it to my dad as a kind of misguided, “I like this and you might, too?” teenage olive branch; he was kind, but not super game. 

But this was part of a wave of Warp artists that started to train my brain on weird electronic sounds that I still enjoy and crave to this day. 

Air, “Sexy Boy”

It’s weird to think about it now, but there was kind of a discomfort around listening to this, or from other people finding out that I listened to a song called, “Sexy Boy,” in the late-90’s/early-00’s. Between that and starting to paint my nails black in Junior year of high school, though, I was Pushing Boundaries in my own little way in rural white central New York state. 

But how could you not, with music as beautiful and cosmic as this? I was a huge space nerd, reading popular astronomy books and going to Astronomy Picture of the Day in my free time while running SETI@home as my screensaver. To a kid living in Oswego, NY these French electronic artists and their sounds may as well have been from another galaxy.

The Velvet Underground & Nico, “All Tomorrow’s Parties”

At some point around this time, I had my mom buy me the Peel Slowly and See box set. I found the pink banana Very Funny in a wildly naïve way (it was also my mom who pointed out that it was a phallic symbol and burst that bubble - it didn’t stop me from also getting a shirt with the album cover on it). 

Their first album and Loaded were probably my favorites from the set, and this one in particular has stuck with for its expansive, end of the century vibe, the piano chugging along endlessly from the start of the song through the ages, from the then impossibly distant sixties into my 17 or 18-year old brain. 

The Chemical Brothers, “Let Forever Be”

A song that’s inextricably linked to the summer it came out in, which I’m pretty sure was the bicoastal trip one. I remember seeing this video on 120 minutes, and it being introduced by Matt Pinfield who said a little preamble about its director, Michel Gondry who I would become a huge fan of. But mostly, I remember hearing this song everywhere on alt rock radio, particularly when riding in the passenger seat next to my dad somewhere around Briarcliff Manor in upstate New York, and then eventually on CD, my first Chemical Bros. album. 

Squarepusher, “Chunk-S”

Another early bold step into electronic music that felt a lot stranger at the time than it does to me now. After years of Getting Kinda Into Jazz, I really appreciate this as, basically, jazz with a little electro spin on it. Seems simple enough now, but it blew my little mind back then and I remember this album feeling extremely imposing. I didn’t get super into it then, but I’m glad I tried and have it as a reference point now. 

Blur, “Battle”

The best track on their best album? The song that, maybe more than any, expanded my mind into the possibilities that exist when music stretches its arms out past the normal limits of traditional pop tune lengths? The most apt sounding song for a band with this name?  Yes, yes, and yes. 

I got into Blur because of Song 2, like most Americans, but it was ultimately this album that would make them favorites for such a long stretch of my life. I think it spoke a lot to the lonely, Zoloft-prescribed years of yearning to talk to girls, or even to talk to my friends on a deeper level, and not feeling able to. Living out in the countryside of Oswego could be a cold, lonely place sometimes, but good art helped fortify and expand my brain and also let me know I was not alone. 

Buckcherry, “For The Movies”

I feel like music history often forgets about middle bands. Ones that maybe never filled up stadiums on their own, or that forged new paths and sounds. Ones that existed, had hits, toured for while and maybe still put out albums that have fans who still await them. I know very little about Buckcherry, but this song connected with me when I would hear it on the radio, and it painted a vividly nonspecific picture of shinier places and more vibrant lives which seemed to exist in locales I didn’t live in as a teenager and mostly saw on TV or, well, The Movies. Places I would eventually live and love, but at the time were just fonts of imagination and possibility. 

Less Than Jake, “History of a Boring Town”

Titans of third-wave ska-punk and my favorite song off their best album, about living in a dumpy town and wanting to get out. It was catchy as fuck and it spoke to my exact situation in the way that art just does sometimes. Hearing it now makes me think of the gravity that places where you’re from have, and the weird pull they can effect on your brain and memories. 

R.E.M., “Lotus”

Still my favorite R.E.M. song, even after finally, fully discovering them a few years ago and having that “Oh shit, Automatic for the People is, like, a flawless album!” moment like 10 or 20 years after someone my age might’ve. This one clicked and still does for me because it’s just so luxurious. It’s sexy without necessarily being about sex. It also just kind of sounds weird. 

Having a better and broader understanding of R.E.M., this was definitely a vampy outlier on the album it’s from, almost a holdover from the fuzzier, fucked-up Monster. It also had a grougeous video by Stephane Sednaoui, and Michael Stipe’s look in that is still something I think about and see when I hear the song today. Deep blacks, blown out whites and all the colors in between deeply saturated, like a humid world that just got rained on.

Ash, “A Life Less Ordinary”

The Danny Boyle movie of the same name was one of the first that alerted me to the possibilities of what movies could be when they weren’t, like, Charlie’s Angels or Mission: Impossible 2 or the latest Star Trek sequel. It’s a quiet fourth companion to the trinity of Trainspotting, the original Dawn of the Dead and Touch of Evil that fully opened my eyes, but was the first one I bought the soundtrack to (I didn’t get Trainspotting (arguably the best soundtrack) until college). 

I never got super into Ash, but this song kicks ass and had that special kind of longing nectar that teenage Andy lived off of in the art he liked. 

Green Day, “Nice Guys Finish Last’

Fuckin’ Green Day, man! They would eventually be my second live concert, and Dookie still has the more personal, memory-based connections, but this album was the one that was newest around the turn of the millennium (at least, that I listened to - I never really bought/heard Warning). I remember it soundtracking trailers to the movie Varsity Blues, but more importantly it was a CD that my brother owned so I had to borrow it from him if I wanted to listen to it. 

Atari Teenage Riot, “Revolution Action”

Another 120 Minutes discovery. There’s a mythical VHS tape somewhere that I recorded late one night, possibly during Spring Break of Junior year of high school which has this music video on it, among many others. I wrote out a list of all the artists and songs that were on it and came up with a rating system to denote my favorites, of which this song was one. I wish I still had that tape, or even just the list, because in my head it’s kind of foundational to the sort of music that I would end up liking/seeking for a lot of the next decade. 

Basement Jaxx, “Red Alert”

Continuing the VHS/120 Minutes theme here. I’d never heard of Basement Jaxx before, and would completely miss “Where’s Your Head At?” when it tore through colleges in the early 00’s, but this one clicked with me really quickly. I have no idea what the video is like now (and probably haven’t seen it since the 90’s) but I’m really grateful for the appreciation of wacky maximalism that the Jaxx introduced me to. It’s made my life brighter in general and really made the dubstep years from 2010-2012 a lot more fun. 

Morphine, “Early To Bed”

Ah, the sublime Morphine. Another 120 minutes hot tip, this one a sad note, as the video and intro about them was related to the news of the passing of their singer, Mark Sandman. A bittersweet introduction to a band that I would come to love, even though I only bought one of their albums (in that same record store with the record store girl, in Juneau, Alaska). Morphine are one of those bands that had a sound and never really changed it, kinda like Clinic, which seems to rub some people the wrong way, but as someone who dug it, I’ve always appreciated them. 

Autechre, “Acroyear2”

This probably came in with the same early Amazon (or maybe even CD Now) order as Squarepusher, and wow if I thought the former was intimidating this was truly something else. That said, this opening track did hook me in a way that probably got me to listen to the album a lot more than I would have otherwise. I think it also helped that in the pre/early Napster and pre-iPod years, you had the CDs you had and that was basically it. So you sat with albums and gave them more chances than you might give music when most of its entire recorded history is at your fingertips. 

I think it also helped that I was discovering William Gibson’s work around this time, and this track in particular became tied to the opening of Neuromancer in my head (or the movie version of it in my head, where it soundtracks the main character’s dissolving neurons as his ability to connect to cyberspace is chemically destroyed by gangsters he’s cheated). 

Rob Dougan, “Clubbed to Death (Kurayamino Variation)”

The coolest song in the coolest movie from this era. I can still remember seeing trailers for The Matrix on my brother’s computer and being kinda blown away, then leaving the theater with my mom after it finally came out and being even more blown away, while she said something about the trenchcoat mafia and Columbine that kinda missed the point. A highlight from a soundtrack that itself was a highlight from the golden era of movie soundtracks, this still sounds like a very specific kind of effortlessly icy, yet eye catching cool that I think we can all relate to aspiring to at one point or another in our lives. 

John Williams, London Symphony Orchestra, “Duel of the Fates”

Remember when any new Star Wars was Good Star Wars? Or when Star Wars fandom could be good? I’m not sure any classical or classical-adjacent musical work has appeared on MTV before or since the music video for this absolute JAM broke that door down, but then, it was a weird time for everyone and good gravy it fried our damn brains because the new Star Wars we got then was far from good and would only get worse before disappearing and eventually morphing into the misplaced toxic avenger it is today. 

Refused, “New Noise”

Back to those one hundred and twenty minutes, Matt Pinfield, and the long reach of late-night music videos. Similar but less tragic than my introduction to Morphine, this video was played as a memorial to a band that had broken up, badly, and no longer was by the time I found out about them. 

News truly did not travel fast in the old west. 

But that video and this song would click for me, and I’d eventually get the album of the same name that has, at various times in my life been my only theoretical musical companion on a desert island. It’s still one of my favorite rock records, if only for how varied and boldly it takes on that genre’s charge. In a lot of ways, it messed with the conventions and expectations of its genre in the same way that Radiohead would with Kid A several years later. 

Smash Mouth, “All Star”

I know I know I know, but hear me out. This is not a troll. I have a very strong memory tied to this song and every time I hear it it brings me back to my second driving lesson with my dad, in a summer in the late-90’s when it came on the radio right at a point where I was starting to feel like I was a little more capable at this terrifying new thing I was doing than I had been the first time, when I put the steering wheel out of alignment on my brother’s car before I even got out of the parking lot. I can still remember the intersection where this better memory happened.

Busta Rhymes, “Gimmie Some More”

I used to wake up really early before school to watch TV, usually SportsCenter, but before that came on there were two things that I would turn to to tide me over; Sailor Moon and the tail end of late-night “nothing but music videos” MTV. That’s where I discovered and came to love Busta Rhymes, in all his Hype Williams-directed fisheye lens glory. It could honestly be argued that Sailor Moon was the more realistic of the two when compared to the incredibly stylized worlds that Hype conjured up for him to bounce around in and while it would take at least a decade more for me to start to really get into hip hop, Busta was there at the start. That he was also game to show up on Space Ghost Coast to Coast only spoke even more highly of him. 

The Magnetic Fields, “Absolutely Cuckoo”

It must have been Spin that introduced me to 69 Love Songs; I can’t think of my stumbling on them any other way, but it was almost certainly Napster or Bearshare that allowed me to listen to them without sinking the money required for their three album masterwork (something I would later do as a classic bit of college freshman, “I have no idea how money works” overspending). However it all happened, I am endlessly glad for how long this incredible collection of songs had been a part of my life. 

Moby, “Porcelain”

Remember when Moby was everywhere with this album? All of the videos that were released for it? When we collectively turned the other way while he was being a creep to Natalie Portman? Salad days, I suppose, but that mix of techno and American folk recordings really went hand in hand with my Zoloft prescription (though, again, this was an album that my brother had (this time because I bought it for him!!!)).

Iggy Pop, “Lust For Life”

And here we are, at both the start of the Trainspotting soundtrack and its movie. Would I have gotten as into movies as I have if it weren’t for this one? Maybe, but I don’t know if it would have been as soon or quite the same as the love that this gave me, with its allegedly indecipherable Scottish accents (that I don’t remember having any trouble with), the ever charismatic Ewen McGreogor and the stylized, slightly surreal visuals Danny Boyle conjured up, I can still see a lot of what would and does interest me in it.

And if nothing else, it introduced me to Iggy Pop. 

The Dillinger Escape Plan, “Calculating Infinity”

I still remember being very drawn to the title of this song (which I think is also the album’s title) when browsing around sites like CD Now, and the disappointment that I felt when the rest of the album really wasn’t like the one song. There were probably other times like that before, and there’ve definitely been ones since, but this song, to me, is really where that phenomenon had its foundation. 

Nine Inch Nails, “Into The Void”

I remember being so excited about this album and it being sold out at all of the places that sold music in Oswego, so I had to ask my mom to drive me to a mall that was, like, 30 minutes away so I could buy this IMMEDIATELY. There were other, flashier singles from it and moodier experiments, but this song is the one that stood out and remains a favorite. I love that it’s the kind of song that just builds and builds and builds, from those initial miniscule notes to a kind of funky goth glory. 

Beck, “Sexx Laws”

I’m not sure I knew what to make of Midnight Vultures when it first came out - it wasn’t what I’d expected from Beck after Odelay and Mutations, but this song helped. It’s another one of those, “I really liked the first track, and let the rest of an album I wasn’t sure about play out” situations, though I definitely had a better affinity for whatever it was Beck was doing than I did with Autechre. With the greater knowledge of music that time and streaming have afforded me, I can see this as Beck’s Prince-tribute album; sexy, funky and kinda weird. 

Sonic Youth, “Little Trouble Girl”

There were other songs and albums from Sonic Youth’s 90’s heyday that I liked more than this one, but I stand by it because it’s a good mix of their more popular songs from the time (“Andorgynous Mind,” “Teenage Riot,” etc.) and their weirder, experimental side. I would have put, “The Diamond Sea,” on here because it may actually be my favorite song of theirs and it’s from the same album, but I know not everyone wants/likes/can tolerate a 20-minute guitar freakout.

Cake, “Sheep Go To Heaven”

What a run Cake had! From Fashion Nugget through to Comfort Eagle, they had four albums that I listened to a lot over this stretch of time. They hold up well, too, if only because Joel McCrea really seems to have not been a fan of Capitalism before that stance was fashionable. An abiding memory I have of this song was a rich high school classmate of mine telling me how surprised he was when this album took up so much of his MP3 player’s space, because he’d accidentally downloaded a 192kbps(!) file. Tough life. 

Foo Fighters, “Learn to Fly”

This song was the reason I bought my first (and to date, only) Foo Fighters album. It’s so pretty and swoony, and had a goofy music video (which… maybe the album was also an enhanced CD, and included the video?). I remember liking the rest of the album, but that joy being somewhat cut short when some shitbird stole my CD player and wallet of discs from my backpack during gym class in Junior year of high school. I guess it’s partially my fault for leaving it unattended in the locker room, but I never expected some lowlife to take my stuff:\

Tricky, “For Real”

I’d seen Tricky in The Fifth Element, but didn’t know that he also made music until, you guessed it, an episode of 120 minutes. In my head, it’s all the same episode, and the looseleaf list of bands and songs would prove that out, but it seems suspicious to be putting that much weight on a single one, and I’ll probably never find out for sure.

I still find this song extremely catchy in a very chill way, effortlessly cool but warmer than the Rob D track. At the time, I tried to get into his first record, Maxinquaye, and remember downloading some MP3s from Napster or Bearshare and just not having the ability to parse (much less enjoy) any of what I was hearing. I’d get there eventually (it’s an incredible album) but back then it was way more than I could handle. 

Bjork, “All Is Full of Love”

The greatest music video ever made, and one of the best songs Bjork’s ever made. Probably not on the 120 Minutes tape, but I think I did manage to record it at some point. I remember being really disappointed that Homogenic didn’t have the same version of the song that was used in the music video (which was actually from the soundtrack to the movie Stigmata, iirc), but thanks to the magic of MP3s, I was able to listen to it on Winamp on my black IBM Aptiva. I’m not sure I remember what teenage Andy thought or felt when he listened to this, but he probably yearned a lot for all of the emotions that Bjork had so beautifully put to record.

Henry Mancini, “Tana’s Theme”

The closing music to the movie Touch of Evil, whose restoration on TCM or some other movie channel was one of those formative Cinema experiences for me. Maybe it was the long opening tracking shot, or it being my first noir-ish movie, or one of the first black and white movies I’d seen, but something about it just clicked for me in the, “oh, that’s different, I like that,” kinda way that new art can do.

Radiohead, “Everything In Its Right Place”

I associate this song and its album with school days during my senior year of high school. I’d moved from Oswego to Newburgh and while I had started to make friends by the time this came out, I didn’t have anything quite like the friends I’d made over the previous five or six years. The apartment we’d moved into was right near the Hudson, so every morning before school I’d wake up and see the mountains across the river before I started getting ready for school. This song will always be connected to that view in my head, and it still brings me back to that time in my life, with a little bit of that new kid loneliness tempered by the comfort of knowing that both the time and place are in the past, and that those feelings would not last forever.