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I've been listening to stuff from 1991 all morning and am currently on Lenny Kravitz's Mama Said album from April of that year.  I've never been the biggest LK fan, but this particular album resonates with me.  I think it's because it's such a spot-on homage to 60s British psychedelia.  It's also that it was released during my sophomore year in college, which I think is probably when I was happiest during my college years.  Sure, I still had moments of being a miserable twat and still a bit of a naive idiot, but I'd also finally found a close and stable circle of friends (only two of whom I still have contact with at this time, but I digress...). 

Part of this optimism was because I'd really gotten sick of being that moody bastard that felt sorry for himself.  My long-distance relationship was kind of rocky at the time, very on-again off-again, and I'd gotten so exhausted by being the living embodiment of a Cure song that I needed to rectify that.  I was bored by the unrelenting pathos of my writing, and I was REALLY bored by my own irascibility, and I need a change, STAT.

A lot of that new energy was channeled into new writing projects.  The Infamous War Novel was set by the wayside for the time being so I could focus more on songwriting, practicing on my bass (and a dorm neighbor's acoustic guitar), smaller creative endeavors (mainly my Murph drawings and a hell of a lot of maps drawn in the margins of my notebooks), and my creative homework.  I was finally taking a few film production and writing classes, and though I would soon realize I was a better wielder of words than cameras, it was a blast to finally be experimenting with the visual medium.

Oh, and starting the summer of 1991, I'd stay in Boston instead of heading back home.  I'd be broke as fuck most of the time, but I still had my music and my writing!  And a really enjoyable day job at the school library that would keep me busy and entertained until I graduated.

This is the mood I'll be trying to mine while writing Meet the Lidwells.  I hope I can pull it off! :)

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I drew this in college in early 1991 as a response to everything that was going on in the Middle East at the time. If I remember, it took me all of 20 minutes to do. I'd originally taped it up on my dorm room door, but after quite a few positive comments, it got printed in the college paper. I had exactly one person dismissing it, who thought the "ignorant" segment was a dig at conservatives. As Orwell might have said...hey, you're reading into it, I just wrote it that way.
jon_chaisson: (Default)
So let's see...at this time twenty years ago, I was living sort-of offcampus with Lissa in an apartment on Beacon Street, just down the street from Emerson, back when its main campus was on the corner of Beacon and Berkeley. It was my junior hear in college, and things were...well, they were up and down for me. I was learning how to write a script, but I wasn't making any actual films. I was writing songs for the Flying Bohemians, but I wasn't really recording many of them. I was writing, but I was trying to revive the IWN for the umpteenth time. I was still going out with T., but our relationship was pretty strained by then. I was quite creative at the time, but I was pretty much told by my advisor that I probably should have gone to MA College of Art if I really wanted to make movies instead of just learn about theory. An emotional rollercoaster, to say the least.

But hey...that was twenty years ago, and I'm all over that. This is about the music.

It's kind of funny, listening to 1990-1991 again, because in Boston, alternative music was in the balance. WFNX was playing a great amount of Britpop and shoegaze, which I loved, but was of course tempering it with the emerging grunge sound from the opposite coast. With the Northeast being as collegiate as it is, it took awhile for the hard rock with dark lyrics to win over the bouncier, drug-infested dance rock. It really could have gone either way, if it wasn't for the prevailing mood of the Gen-X Slackers: ennui, frustration, and annoyance. Sure, it was nothing compared to nowadays, but at the time it was one of those times of assertion, much like the 50s, where the younger generation realized they could get away with it now.

So what have we learned, musically?

Children, I know, you deserve more than this world could ever give )

More tomorrow!
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Random song that popped up on my playlist today...
jon_chaisson: (Tunage)
One of the cds I found at the Book sale was Meryn Cadell's Angel Food for Thought, which came out in 1991. "The Sweater" was one of those fun spoken-word songs (though not as annoying as Nada Surf's "Popular" from a few years later) that WFNX used to play quite a bit. I remember hearing it all the time when I was working at the Media Center down in the library basement. Anyone else remember this song?

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I believe I've posted this song before as an audio-only YT video from The La's, but just found this one. Still a song that stays with me, and one I wish I'd written. Always kinda reminds me of the end of the year, when some things in my life are ending and other things haven't yet started...sort of that winter stasis before something new that changes everything. If that makes sense. ;)

(And of course, I always highly recommend their one (self-titled) album to anyone...still one of my top ten of all time.)

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