Everything Flows: The Summer of 1990
The summer that the Berlin Wall came down. The summer that Nelson Mandela visited the U.S. The summer that Iraq invaded Kuwait. The summer of Wild at Heart, Pump Up the Volume, and Mo’ Better Blues.
Let me start out by saying that this week’s has been the hardest playlist so far to cut down to a moderate mixtape length… I spent an unreasonable amount of time considering whether L.L. Cool J or The Jesus Lizard should make the final cut (for the record, the Lizard wins out but mainly because the MTV Unplugged version of “Mama Said Knock You Out” didn’t come out until 1991)… I’ll include the 3+ hour “Director’s Cut” version at the end of this post as well.
This difficulty in sticking to my own rules about length is partly due to another crush of great albums being released at the same time but really the main cause is that 1990 comes at a pivotal time in my life. This is the summer before I went to college and I can clearly remember bringing some of these albums with me to Bard. The cassettes of Bossanova, Lovey, Goo, and Third Eye were rarely too far from my walkman. Ministry’s In Case You Didn’t Feel Like Showing Up and Yo La Tengo’s Fakebook were among the first CDs that I ever bought. Obviously there are things here that I wasn’t hip to at the time – I wasn’t a big Napalm Death listener and neither McCarthy nor Dead Moon were on my radar – but there are also songs that I’d completely forgotten about but I know the words to, like The Posies “Golden Blunders.” I definitely wasn’t cool enough to have purchased Pavement’s Demolition Plot J-7 7" on its initial release.
Apologies to those of you looking for diversity – this is a pretty alt-rock heavy playlist – and I’m a little embarrassed by that but (in my estimation at least) there are just too many great rock songs for me not to include them and I still can’t stand Mariah Carey (sorry). Hope you enjoy regardless and look out below for the “Director’s Cut” version.
Alright, here’s the initial 3-hour-and-5-minute version of this Summer of 1990 playlist… It includes some different selections – like Ministry’s amazing 11 1/2 min version of “So What” and my actual favorite song from Goo, “Mote” – plus a little more diversity (jazz!), more metal, and a slightly different track order…
