The Factual Opinion

The Best of 1992: #19

Nine Inch Nails
Broken/Fixed

"Say fist fuck. Win a Grammy."-Trent Reznor, 1992.

Not much for subtlety, but at least you can't call him a liar. Nine Inch Nails were never a band that concerned themselves for being mysterious--the only reason Pretty Hate Machine could be considered a slow album was because Trent hadn't started experimenting with upping the tempo, or playing his brand of industrial poems live; and yes, they are poems...bad ones.  Much like his choice of backing technology, Nine Inch Nails have always been one of those bands that like to start hitting you with a hammer from the first yell--they then continue to hit you with it until the timely conclusion.  Broken was, and to some extent, still remains, one of the best examples of what's become an incredibly successful format: make it loud, make it fast, make the lyrics so baldly honest and revealing that every 16 year old will identify with them personally, and put it in a weird package.  Then put out an unnecessary remix album that looks cool next to aforementioned album.  Sure, industrial music had been going on for years: but Throbbing Gristle had never made MTV heavy rotation, and they'd certainly never cracked the Midwest High School circuits; the Nails not only did all of that, but they cemented themselves so firmly in the fears and disgust of parents and authority figures that, until Reznor's protege Marilyn Manson took over, it seemed like we might be under the dawn of a new Sex Pistols, or, even more eerily, a new Doors.  After all, Jim Morrison and Trent Reznor are both sex symbols who stride right past intelligence on big charismatic stilts, drunkenly proclaiming their song lyrics as if they should be filed alongside Voltaire.  Both men also fronted bands that, to anyone who was stone cold sober, weren't really that great in the first place--but that didn't stop them from becoming a polarizing factor, and a really dumb piece of fun.  Spin readers will always claim The Downward Spiral to be the best of the Nails releases--but Broken was the one that nobody had to take seriously, and, 14 years later, it's now the only one we can.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

The Best of 1992: #20

Tori Amos
Little Earthquakes

She's still out there: that musician girl.  Pulling strings on the new guitar she bought, red-faced and ashamed for no good reason because the music clerk treated her like a slut.  She's been going home early and skipping Sex and the City, feeding her cat and figuring out the guy in purchasing--she's practicing.  Her voice is still too high, and she's got too many words in a beat up allegory (or a metaphor, or a symbolism--she dropped out of creative writing after the goth kid told another molestation story.)  Someday she'll show up at a coffeeshop, or an open mic, and she'll spit out cracked pieces of bad poetry over easy chord changes.  The guys who buy her cd-r are doing it to flirt with her--right?  Do they like it?  She might come back--a little more confident, with lipstick this time.  After all, she's got her goddess now. Why can't she do it too?  Maybe next time she'll do the acoustic piece, the one she didn't play for her aunt 'cause "it's not any good"...but it is good.  It's the best thing she's got, and maybe they'll think so too.  Maybe it'll make them feel the way she did, back when she first heard "Silent All These Years"---maybe, maybe, maybe.  Every generation needs one--back in 1992, this is who the girls had: a sexy poet slut, a librarian reading Rimbaud.  Maybe this girl will be their new one--after all, they can't all like Dashboard Confessional.  It'll never stop being easy to laugh at Tori--but there's an entire generation who are never going to keep going home to her.  Whether that's a good thing or not, whether one enjoys this kind of naked emotionalism, Little Earthquakes is the sort of album that, for a decent amount of people, changes lives.  It's why people still well up over "Big Man With A Gun," and it's why that coffeeshop girl you're flirting with can't hang out on a Tuesday: because for good or bad, these are the albums that fire a thousand hopes of a future.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

The Best of 1992: #21

Sugar
Copper Blue

In retrospect, we know the mechanics of grunge and we secretly hate them:  the quiet-loud-quiet; the lethargic vocals; the swamp-water guitar.   No matter how well a given band used the mechanics, there would always be someone lurking around the corner, waiting to do it better—to do it cooler.   Subsequently, most rock from the early nineties sounds like dung today.   Sugar never quite fit in to the grunge label that frequently tagged them; frontman Bob Mould carried a hardcore pedigree over from his prior band, Hüsker Dü and, frankly, he had done all the grunge shit eight years earlier.  By the time Mould made Copper Blue, he knew how to use the mechanics in moderation—the album has a singular sound, but the songs don’t follow a particular pattern.  There’s even a bit of prescience in Sugar nicking some of My Bloody Valentine’s guitar licks, years before that became commonplace, and punk rock’s tug against Mould’s poppier impulses still make for a shockingly exciting listen.

-Marty Brown, 2006

The Best of 1992: #22

Morphine
Good

In terms of accurately named bands, Morphine ranks high on the list—somewhere between Semisonic and Giant Drag.   Morphine (the drug) results in euphoria and drowsiness.   It causes insomnia, though named after the god of sleep.   All of these contradictory effects well up in Morphine (the band) as well.   Good manages to be murky and buoyant at the same time.   Where else could the growling angst of “You Speak My Language” live alongside the serene saxophone in “You Look Like Rain”?   Describing the logistics of Morphine—no guitars, dude who plays two saxophones at the same time—will blow anyone’s mind, but hearing them for the first time is even more of an inexplicable joy.   Only metaphors will suffice.  Noir as a color that tinges everything.   An undertow.   A black market narcotic, but good for you.

-Marty Brown, 2006

The Best of 1992: #23

Stereolab
Peng!

Some bands show up and make a big stinking noise, steal a lot of hearts and make a ton of cash and then proceed to ride off nostalgia, riffing on their initial glory to diminishing returns.  (See Pearl Jam)  Others churn out a hit single and disappear, only to return, becoming rock behemoths with artistic cred as thick as 9/11 reports.  (See Radiohead)  Stereolab just dropped a debut album in the form of a Rubix Cube and then spent the next 14 years showing us what one of the sides look like after we've peeled the stickers.  Everything the 'Lab has since produced is here on Peng!, the fuzzed out guitars, the slacker vocals and all the beeps and whistles (which, in the 'Lab's case really are "beeps" and "whistles.")  In these storied Williamsburg days of Black Dice and Sleeparchive, it's easy to pretend that music and the sound the coffee maker makes didn't get married until after the final episode of Six Feet Under, but brother, please.  It just ain't so.  Of course, back in 1992, all Stereolab had to offer was getting served up, and served up fast.  Beginning a herculean release schedule that they've still maintained, Peng! was the perfect introduction of a band who would always seem to be right on the edge of making a really great piece of pop music--as soon as they got the whole "art" thing out of the way.  Thankfully, they never have: and we've got sexy pieces of distortion called "Stomach Worm" to prove it.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

The Best of 1992: #24

Pete Rock and CL Smooth
Mecca and the Soul Brother

Is 14 years long enough to declare an album most people have only heard of on their Playstation 2 a "forgotten masterpiece?"  What if said album straddles the line between Soul, Hip-Hop and R & B; a debate that's been resoundingly dismantled by R. Kelly and, less disgustingly, Montell Jordan?  We've decided yes: take out the usage of "shit" and remove the cover art and Pete Rock and CL Smooth gave us 92's best knapsack rap.  (Of course, they did it and then watched Dr. Dre and Ice Cube get rich off weed and guns, but that's not really our concern.)  The hottest tracks off Soul Brother, "Ghettos of the Mind" and "T.R.O.Y.", still hold up, losing none of their power to their current status as "Those old school hip-hop songs on NBA Street," in part because Soul Brother itself still holds up, a best case example of what the genre of Black Muslim Rap used to sound like, before airplanes made us leery of Koran quotes.  Pete Rock has seen a lot more love in his (ongoing) production career, CL Smooth just released his first solo album last week--and yet still, these guys are treated as archaic fossils.  At some point, hip-hop culture will need to stop archiving everyone who put out an album less than five years ago--and shout-outs on hidden tracks won't do it.  Until then, you'll find Mecca and the Soul Brother in the "Classic Rap" section.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

The Best of 1992: #25

James
Seven

Soaring, multi-octave vocals; dream-pop guitars; horn lines—when did these things become unfashionable?  In these days of “Chasing Cars” and X&Y, it’s not unreasonable to wish every earnest, British crooner into a vacuum.  Manchester’s James fits directly into the lineage that saw us arrive at Coldplay and Snow Patrol, but they—like U2—make those rock tropes work magic all over Seven.  What’s more, vocalist Tim Booth adds something that Bono never could—he has a sense of humor about his own earnestness.  In songs like the opening classic, “Born of Frustration,” Booth’s yodeling (there’s no other word for it, really) would never work if it weren’t delivered with his singular giddiness.  James would reach their popular and artistic peak in 1993 with “Laid,” but Seven is the foundation for that song’s success—beautiful, funny and true.  If Seven came out today, Grey’s Anatomy would be a better show.

-Marty Brown

Abandon The Old In Tokyo

By Yoshihiro Tatsumi
American Translation 2006
Original Japanese 1970
194 pgs.
Published by Drawn & Quarterly

How is it possible for Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly to stay in business? They've continued to refuse to publish anything remotely popular, choosing instead to invest themselves in incredibly gorgeous hardcover books, often with a higher than average price tag, and almost always dealing, obsessively, with cartoons or comics of complete obscurity.  Be it the majestic Walt & Skeezix, the English translations of Frenchman David B, or this now two book old series of chronological reprints of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's never before translated Japanese work from thirty years ago, D & Q has chosen, again and again, to place artistic choices and personal taste over marketplace demand. 

In today's environment, how is it possible that they have a chance?

For now, and, one should hope, for as long as possible, D & Q are rescuing unknown masterpieces from obscurity, publishing books that will eventually sell on Ebay for ungodly amounts of money--just like the early 90's works of Kitchen Sink, another company that imploded after spending it's time trying to educate the English speaking world on comics they'd never had the chance to (not) read.  Tatsumi's second volume, (the first was The Push Man, published last year) continues to shock and amaze anyone who was operating under the assumption that Japanese manga never attempted to deal with honest, human stories in the attitudes and methods employed by American underground legends like Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar.  Tatsumi's art is a detailed approximation of the sort of manga Japanese style well-known among American teenagers; beyond that, his work is so refreshingly dark, dealing with male perversion and middle-aged ennui that it almost confuses the brain.  These sorts of pictures are so resolutely identified with stories about horny schoolgirls and idiotic ninjas that when the reader is confronted with a desperately lonely old man reaching out, horrifically, to the only animal that he's ever been comfortable with, one finds oneself in the midst of a near-religious experience: it's disgusting, terrifying, yes, but it's also so incredibly surprising, presented with a holy sense of sobriety that it comes across as one of the purest cases of innovative narrative seen in any genre.  There was absolutely nothing like Tatsumi's work in 1970: Warhol would've killed his grandmother for this type of mind.  Adrien Tomine, the genius behind the well known Optic Nerve, New Yorker covers and advertisements for men's clothing, tracked Mr. Tatsumi down and convinced him to unleash his creative salvos upon the American public.  Now in the midst of it, it would be unforgivable for anyone with the slightest interest in Japanese art, the comics-as-art argument or, simply put, excellent storytelling, to miss out on what is, luckily, our second chance.