The Music Blog of the Infonistacrat!

Wow, 1999 seems so long ago. Remember the whole Y2K scare, where supposedly every computer in the world was going to freak out and civialization was going to come to a stand still? I do. Being in the IT industry, I spent most of 1999 making sure that wouldn’t happen. And it didn’t, so that means I must have saved humanity. Or not. But I did listen to a lot of pretty good music that year. So you know, that has to count for something. 1999 was also the year that Napster was also going to ruin the music industry. If you ask me, they did a pretty good job of that by themselves by pushing no talent assclowns on us. But I digress.

1999 seemed to be a huge transition year for music. The last of the post-grunge bands were still charting, but the alternative music scene was definitely shifting away from grunge like sound. For one thing, punk pop really came on strong that year, with The Offspring and Blink-182 releasing pretty amazing CD’s. While The Kid’s Aren’t Alright wasn’t the number one song of that year, to me it was easily the best. Listen to the lyrics, and you’ll see some pretty deep truths being told in that song. Besides the pop punk stuff, some of the big post grunge bands, like Live, Foo Fighters and Bush, released some pretty decent, if not overly polished, stuff. It was a good, but not really great, year in music. Certainly better than we have had in a while.

If you want to know how sad music has really gotten, compare 1999 to 1994, or 1986 or even 1982. I think you’ll find no comparison. I’m not saying that there’s not great music being made now, there’s just not as much of it that gets the attention that it deserves. Record labels would rather put out rehashed crap by Brittney Spears and Justin Timberlake that take a chance on that next B-52’s or Talking Heads. In engineering there is a term for what is happening in the music industry. Garbage in, garbage out. Simply put, it means that you can have the best system in the world, but if you put garbage into it, you’ll get garbage out. I think thats all I’ll say about that.

Happy Thanksgiving, to everyone, everywhere in the world. Peace.

1. Live - Dolphins Cry
2. Blink 182 - Whats My Age Again
3. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Scar Tissue
4. Foo Fighters - Learn To Fly
5. Unwritten Law - Cailin
6. Len - Steal My Sunshine
7. Lit - My Own Worst Enemy
8. The Offspring - The Kids Aren’t Alright
9. Stroke 9 - Little Black Backpack
10. Citizen Kane - I’ve Seen Better Days
11. Blink 182 - All The Small Things
12. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Around The World
13. Bush - The Chemicals Between Us
14. Ben Folds Five - Army
15. Fastball - Out of My Head