Back to 1995
This is the end of the line my friends,” says the farewell message on torrent site BTJunkie. “The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!”
So there. I imagine there might be some kind of panic-downloading going on in some quarters. What with Megaupload being shut down, FileSonic’s self-castration, and now this, previous notions of most music being free everywhere forever in a kind of pirate’s paradise have probably faded a bit. Online piracy is a complicated subject, with very few things one can be sure of (although, hint: SOPA is not the answer, people), but for better or worse, it did enable access to vast amounts of music that one might never have listened to otherwise.
(And of course, at this point, I feel duty-bound to remind readers that, piracy and torrents aside, there is a ton of music available for free download with the consent of the artists. Check out Fingertips Music and RCRD LBL for a start.)
Yes, legitimate means of obtaining media will always ultimately be best for all concerned, but whatever the method, it’s fun to discover (or rediscover) good stuff from the past, particularly pre-internet.
1995, unless my memory fails me, was the year just before our household got our very first internet connection. I was still learning about foreign acts through publications like Melody Maker and Rolling Stone, then (I was two years away from buying my first copy of Q). I was still bugging record bar salesladies about bands they had never heard of. I was still buying cassettes, for God’s sake. (I had just gotten a CD player, but my acquisitions in that department were limited to Greenhills bargains and balikbayan pasalubongs.)
Good stuff from that year: the self-titled debut album by Garbage, which sing-snarled and guitar-squealed and beat-blasted its way to a mass audience, mixing faux-gritty production, pop songcraft, and the glory of Shirley Manson into a sound that helped define the ‘90s. Songs like Queer and Vow can still give you a kick where it counts. (Incidentally, the band are slated to come out with a new album this 2012. Fingers crossed.)
By the time of “The Great Escape,” Blur had established themselves as the British pop band to beat. Well, them and Oasis, whose “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory” came out in 1995 as well. This was the height of the two bands’ rivalry, a clash that seems largely silly in retrospect, but which at the time was quite exciting for fans like myself. (Blur was seen as winning the battle -- their first single off “Escape” beat Oasis’ first single off “Morning Glory” -- but losing the war, as the Oasis album went on to bigger international sales.) As albums, both are well worth revisiting (or listening to for the first time): Blur offers infectious British silliness (Country House), ragged grandeur (The Universal), and touching quirkiness (Yuko and Hiro), while Oasis offers anthemic rock singalongs with sincere if occasionally dumb lyrics (Wonderwall, Champagne Supernova, etc.).
“Post” by Bjork delivered another wonderfully strange yet eminently listenable set of songs by the Icelandic pixie (personal favorites: Hyperballad, It’s Oh So Quiet). Black Grape made their party-starting, incoherently howling, decidely funky debut with the rather ironically titled “It’s Great When You’re Straight... Yeah!” (frontman Shaun Ryder has probably not been sober since the ‘70s, if then). And The Cardigans came out with the lovely “Life,” which combined a sweetly retro sound with impeccable pop tunes and soundtracked many a Saturday afternoon drive and Sunday morning daydream.
