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Music > Features > The Edge of Change: The Most Memorable Albums of 1999 The Edge of Change: The Most Memorable Albums of 1999October - December 1999: Mos Def to Jay-Z[26 June 2009] By PopMatters Staff
26 October 1999
The title of Incubus’s Make Yourself suggests the creation of a person in essentia, the blossoming and emergence of a complete self. Just as its title implies, this album was as much a creative forging as a personal one. This notion plays out in the band’s video for “Drive”, the song that broke them into mainstream radio and turned them into platinum-selling artists. The video shows a meta-drawing of lead singer Brandon Boyd drawing himself, starting with the outline of his hand and continuing to fill in his face. The juxtaposition between Boyd’s artistic self-rendering and his human self performing the song with the rest of the band perfectly captures the album’s theme of creating and manifesting the whole artistic self. In the title track, Boyd sings, “If I hadn’t made me / I would’ve been made somehow / If I hadn’t assembled myself / I’d have fallen apart by now”. This seems particularly apt when applied to Incubus’s sound up to this point in their discography. Their previous full length, S.C.I.E.N.C.E., was littered with sampled noises, cut-and-paste vocal sounds, abrupt tempo changes, and a generally unpolished finish. It was their first album with DJ Chris Kilmore, and the seams were still very raw where they tried to cut their tracks. Each song sounded chaotic—as if on the verge of falling apart. With Make Yourself, Incubus became one of the first bands played on modern rock radio to effectively integrate a DJ into their sound. Boyd discovered his singing voice, and the band reassembled itself around it. Tracks like “Stellar” and “The Warmth” encompassed all the elements of an Incubus song, from hauntingly beautiful melodies to atmospheric guitars. I sometimes find myself digging out this album of my own volition just to hear some of my favorite tracks. While I now consider some of the lyrics cringe-worthy (“It feels like trading brains with an imbecile / For real”? For real.), the fundamental struggle for identity within these songs still strikes me with its relevance, and they never sound overproduced or self-indulgent. Make Yourself, then, is as much a command to the listener as it is the band’s manifesto.
26 October 1999
Finally, the punk rockers learned how to dance. Or is it the other way around—did the dancers become punks? Either way, it doesn’t matter: Le Tigre’s self-titled debut crossed all the right streams, and in the process reunited the realms of hardcore punk and electronic dance music. It’s easy to forget that modern electronic dance music was created by a proverbial rainbow coalition of early ‘80s New York, Chicago, and Detroit urban culture—black, white, Puerto Rican, straight, gay, punk, disco, salsa, techno. This was especially hard to remember back in 1999, when the plurality of dance music hitting the shelves during the “electronica” push was white (with some exceptions for jungle or trip-hop artists), British, and very, very hetero. Frankie Knuckles never hit the pop charts, so it’s easy to forget just how queer the whole dance thing actually was from the very beginning. If “riot grrrl” punk was aimed at reminding girls and women that they had as much right to be angry, loud, and passionate as their male counterparts—and to play loud rock and roll with just as much abandon—Le Tigre (ostensibly fronted by Bikini Kill alumnus Kathleen Hanna) was formed with the express purpose of re-colonizing dance floors for grrrls everywhere and re-appropriating synthesizers from humorless white dudes. There was still a lot of punk in their swagger. It’s rough in places, but arguably that’s the point: punk at its purest was never about perfectly crafted artistic artifacts, and musical virtuosity (or lack thereof!) could never take precedence over purely felt emotional experience. So, Le Tigre is kind of a mess—ramshackle, whip-lash inducing, but occasionally, absolutely brilliant. You’re not likely to find better examples of either punk or dance music than “Decepticon” or “Metro Card”. If left to its own devices, the patriarchy will move in and take over any old music scene that it happens to find unoccupied. Le Tigre stood up to remind all the superstar DJs that you don’t have to be a white, straight male to rock a party, and you certainly don’t need to check your politics at the door of the club.
26 October 1999
Emergency & I usually gives the impression of having been released in the 2000s. That isn’t just because the Dismemberment Plan didn’t break through until around 2002, when they floored concertgoers on a tour with Death Cab for Cutie, but also because the record seemed so far ahead of its era. It utilized the aesthetic of Weezer and the Breeders as a starter kit, but its Technicolor spazz-pop sounded like nothing else at the time and did more to move away from grunge clichés than any other rock record of the ‘90s. It predated and, in a way, predicted monumental releases by Enon, Of Montreal, and Wolf Parade, easing many of us into those bands’ spasmodic tendencies, and offered us a fresh, forward-looking alternative to the nu-metal that was just beginning to dominate the airwaves. Though it may have only been in hindsight, Emergency & I painted a rosy picture of indie rock to come. The songs rarely detoured from simple pop structures, but the Dismemberment Plan injected them with enough caffeine to knock out a bull elephant. Every instrument, from the guitar to the poor demolished keyboard, was consistently cranked to 11 and thrown into overdrive, even when the tempos weren’t very fast—rendered all the more vivid by eye-bulgingly clear production. At times, Emergency & I could simply be too much, its flurry of melodies often nearing combustion or teetering on the brink of collapse. The figurative and actual voice of the Dismemberment Plan was singer/guitarist Travis Morrison, whose sometimes quavering, sometimes shouted vocals mirrored what his band was kicking up around him. Half ingratiating party animal, half nervous wreck, Morrison perfectly encapsulated the twenty-something’s insecurity thinly veiled by extroversion. We might say that he and the Plan were clairvoyant here too, in that they foresaw over-activity—not apathy—as the prevailing problem among 2000s youth. Yet their music was such damn fun that the heady subtext never repelled their listeners, and Emergency & I remains as bracing and immediate as the day it was released. 
 The Edge of Change: The Most Memorable Albums of 1999 |
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Comments
A huge portion of this article is made up of bad albums by bad bands that are only memorable to people who were adolescents in 1999 and had little scope at that time regarding popular music. A smaller portion, but a significant one, is made up of albums that I will argue the writers do not really remember from 1999—but have come to like since then. I don’t believe for a second that most people who write or read PopMatters actually listened to Sigur Ros in 1999. If that’s true, their album (and anyone else’s in this second category I’ve created here) is not truly a “memorable album from 1999.”
Comment by FGF — July 1, 2009 @ 5:17 pm
Dr. Dre’s “2001”? No one paid attention to that IN 1999, let alone considers it memorable. And “Goodbye 20th Century”? Are you serious, or just trying to look scholarly? About five people bought that when it came out. Really, ask yourself: is that one of the MOST MEMORABLE albums of that year? This whole article reads like a bunch of people took a list of albums from 1999 and decided to pick some in this order: 1) What did I like when I was 15, 2) What in 1999 did I not know existed but has since gotten popular and should be represented in the interest of looking prescient, 3) What sounds important or impressive—you know we gotta have some “serious” albums on this list to make up for the junk we liked when we were little—oh, didn’t Sonic Youth put out a classical album that year? Let’s add that.
Comment by SFH — July 1, 2009 @ 5:23 pm