Q is for Queer

Garbage's self-titled debut album came out in August of 1995, right about the time I moved back home. WFNX had been starting to play "Vow" and "Only Happy When It Rains" (the first two US singles) earlier that summer and both went over well, despite their completely different sounds. "Queer", the third single, was an extremely weird, clunky song that didn't have the rock drive of the other two singles, but there was something about it that drew fans to it. Maybe it was Shirley Manson's slinky delivery (and her creepy-sexy performance in the song's video), maybe it was because it was so different from so much else out there. It definitely gave me the impetus to buy the album from the RCA Music club that autumn.

Extending on my previous post about the alt.rock of the mid-90s...as I'd mentioned, by this time the genre had become pretty much the mainstream rock of the moment, at least until the rap-metal and the Girl Power pop arrived later in the decade. It was kind of interesting to hear the commercial alt.rock of Garbage, Dishwalla, Collective Soul, and Tonic on the mainstream stations, leaving the college radio stations scrambling for the next phase of alternative--the "true alternative" of noncommercial rock. College radio was pretty much slim pickins for a few years there in the mid-to-late 90s, as they were playing mostly alt.country and the quirky art rock of local bands. Many of those stations were running on the old late 80s-early 90s rule of "if it's on a major label, we shouldn't play it", and that caused a lot of college stations to extend their sound even further--many college stations now played multiple genres like rap, jazz, outsider, and so on. As long as it wasn't the mainstream, it was okay to play.

I think it wasn't until at least 1999 or 2000 when college radio returned to the alternative sound, and even then it wasn't the same as the old days of the 80s. The multigenre sounds of rap, folk, and everything else had finally made itself known by then. The halcyon days of 80s college radio were definitely over, and a new kind of college radio was arriving.

R is for Renaissance Affair

I've said this many times before...I loves me some Hooverphonic. Blue Wonder Power Milk is one of my go-to albums during writing sessions. "Renaissance Affair" wasn't a single, but it was used in a handful of commercials like the VW Vapor in 2006. This one came out while I was working at the HMV in Solomon Pond Mall, and you'd hear me playing this one in the back room constantly (along with Dishwalla's And You Think You Know What Life's About, which came out on the same day). There were a lot of good releases out in 1998, and that was also a good year for creativity for me. I was headlong into writing The Phoenix Effect at that time, and experiencing a resurgence in my poetry as well. I'd pretty much gotten past the frustration of the 1995-96 failures and setbacks and was aiming forward at this point. I was also taking quite a few roadtrips across the state, both to comic stores and to various Boston hangouts. It was a good year for me.