The 90’s Part 1: Foundational Changes

Writing history takes a very long time…sure, you could write down everything as it happens, but that’s really only like writing a diary…you only have a record of events—which is fine…but real history, meaningful history is something more…

To understand what happened in the past, more time has to go by so that we can observe the ripples events have the world…it’s only by examining those ripples that we begin to understand what’s happening in the present and what could happen in the future…

It’s often helpful and convenient to look at the past by decade…that’s certainly a favourite way to do things with music…in fact, that’s how we like to categorize music history…

If I say “50s music,” you know exactly what I mean…if we move to the music of the 1960s, same thing…the names or artists and songs leap to mind, just as they do if I said we’re going to talk about the 70s or 80s…

But what about the 1990s?...what comes to mind on that branch of music history?...grunge, Britpop, raves, electronica generation x, hip hop, sampling, cell phones, personal computers, the internet, MP3s, music piracy…

The 90s were a transformational decade, in so many ways, the end of the way music used to be and the beginning of what it would become in the next millennium…many people have come to the conclusion that the 90s were the last great decade for music…

Is that true?...now that enough time has passed, we can now look back on the 90s to help us understand where we are today…

And if we’re going to be successful at that, we’re gonna need to spread this investigation over out over a lot of shows…

These are the 1990s, part 1…