Hey everyone, welcome to the eighth edition in a series of
reviews of a year in music. So far I have covered all the 2000s together as the
Noughtie series,
and so far monthly, the year 1999,
then 1998,
followed by 1997
and 1996,
1995,
1994
and then last month, 1993.
Just in case you’re not familiar with it, here’s the format.
It will be done in five parts. I'll do a brief history of what happened in that
year, followed by my five favourite albums of the year, then what I think the
five best videos are. I'll then do a Top 10 most impactful (still refraining
from using the word important) songs from that year. To wrap it up, I'll do my
favourite songs in a mixtape format. So now that you know where I'm going with
this, let's get to it!
Brief History of the
Year 1992 in Music
- Nirvana's "Nevermind" gets to #1 in the US and is partly responsible for the huge surge of interest in the Grunge genre. Lead singer Kurt Cobain and lead singer of Hole, Courney Love, get married.
- "November Rain" by Guns n Roses becomes the longest running song to enter the Top 20 in the US charts, and also is the most expensive music video ever (at the time).
- Irish alternative singer Sinead O'Connor controversially rips up a picture of The Pope on "Saturday Night Live".
- Weezer form, becoming one of the biggest alternative rock bands of the past 20 years.
- A tribute concert to the late lead singer of Queen, Freddy Mercury, is held at Wembley Arena, England.
- Influential lead guitarist John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers leaves the band. He returned six years later.
My Top 5 Albums of
1992
#5 – “Kerplunk” by Green Day
Released: 17/1/92
Rating: ***1/4 stars
Stand-out tracks: “Welcome to Paradise”, “2000 Light Years
Away”, “My Generation”
Albums were not that good in 1992 in my opinion; very little
came out was that great. This is the first album to get a ***1/4 star rating
and make the Top 5 of a list so far in my Yearly Music Review, and this
emphasises on that point. “Kerplunk” isn’t a great album. It’s not a bad album
either, Green Day on a bad day are a listenable modern punk band, especially
their older stuff. This album is full of that type of material, passable modern
punk licks. There’s very little else to say about it. Even if I were to do a
full album review on this it’d be a struggle because in honesty, it’s just
mediocre. “Welcome to Paradise”, even in its early stages though, sounds quite
good and is definitely the best song on the album. If you like Green Day’s
basic sound you’ll like this, otherwise, avoid it because there was definitely
more to come from this band in the future.
#4 – “La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol. 1” by White Zombie
Released: 17/3/92
Rating: ***1/2 stars
Stand-out tracks: “Black Sunshine", “Thunder Kiss ‘65”,
“Welcome to Planet Motherfucker/Psychoholic Slag”
White Zombie finally found some commercial success with this
effort, their third of four albums, but for me it still lacks a lot of quality,
quality that was found in abundance on their final effort, and even more so,
when Rob Zombie embarked on a solo career. The two singles, “Black Sunshine”
and “Thunder Kiss ‘65”, their debut singles oddly enough despite them releasing
two albums prior, are by far the best things on this album, and everything else
pales in comparison. I’m surprised by a lot of the experimenting they did on
this album; there’s a certain psychedelic force turning the cogs of the
machine, and a mixture of heavy metal and early glimpses of the inevitable
industrial metal route that would force Rob Zombie into a more successful time
of his career. Overall “La Sexorcisto” is a decent effort, one I’d recommend
you get if you like Rob and White Zombie, but otherwise there’s not a great
deal to find here other than the two great singles that were released off it.
#3 – “Automatic for the People” by R.E.M.
Released: 7/10/92
Rating: **** stars
Stand-out tracks: “Everybody Hurts”, “Man on the Moon”,
“Nightswimming”
I once read somewhere that “Automatic for the People” is the
album of choice for many different people to attempt to get into R.E.M. That’s
not a negative at all by the way, that’s a major positive. The reviewer said
that this isn’t R.E.M.’s best effort (although personally, I think it’s my favourite)
but it will appeal to the broadest audience. The reviewer is spot on.
“Automatic for the People” had six singles off it released, and some may argue
that’s too many, but in honesty, every one of those singles are different, and
appeal to a different branch of R.E.M.’s audience. There’s a lot of diversity
in this album but what it does best is bring all that’s good about R.E.M. into
one record, the slow songs, happy songs, sad songs, the songs with a slightly
harder edge than most. “Automatic” has everything, and I couldn’t recommend
this album enough.
#2 – “Honey’s Dead” by The Jesus and Mary Chain
Released: 23/3/92
Rating: **** stars
Stand-out tracks: “Reverence”, “Teenage Lust”, “Sugar Ray”
The Jesus and Mary Chain are an awesome band. They were one
of my mum’s favourite bands and at one point or another I’ve heard all their
albums. Three albums come to mind when I think of their best work, their first
two albums and this one. Honey’s Dead is just a great album, and in terms of
both of the Reid brothers relaying song after song together, it’s arguably
their finest work. Jim and William Reid are both very good singers and Jim is
the main singer in the band, but William Reid sung a lot of the songs on this
album and for that there’s certain freshness to the album. That being said,
nothing tops Jim Reid’s “Reverence”, the main single and Top 10 hit in the UK,
which is a phenomenal track containing the lyrics “I wanna die just like Jesus
Christ/I wanna die just like JFK”. “Honey’s Dead” is an album you have to
listen to if you want to listen to the finest in the pre-Brit pop alternative
rock days.
#1 – “Rage Against the Machine” by Rage Against the Machine
Released: 10/11/92
Rating: ****1/2 stars
Stand-out tracks: “Know Your Enemy”, “Killing in the Name”,
“Wake Up”
Choosing three stand-out tracks on this album is a very hard
task because every single one of these 10 tracks is magnificent. Every song has
a purpose, every song has it’s own distinct sound, and somehow, every song is
balanced from start to finish in quality. Even the iconic, classic rebel anthem
“Killing in the Name”, one of the biggest, most important and best metal
anthems of all time, on this album doesn’t sound out of place. That track, and
I’ll go into more about it later, is grand in every way but it’s amazing to say
it but, it doesn’t sound that grand on this album, purely because all of the
songs that are on this album don’t sound inferior.
My Top 5 Music Videos
of 1992
#5 – “Feed My Frankenstein” by Alice Cooper
1992 wasn’t a great year for music videos in honesty. I
struggled for videos that I like, and this one is one that I like. It helps
when you have an awesome twosome in Wayne and Garth from Waynes World in the
video, naturally, as this song was a feature in Wayne’s World 2. The video is
no big deal, just your typical live Alice Cooper stage performance with Wayne
and Garth. That being said, Alice Cooper’s live stage performances are pretty fricking
cool, so if you haven’t seen one, it’s well worth checking this video out. Man,
I’d love to see Alice Cooper live, even now.
#4 – “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-a-Lot
This video may not be classy, but man, it’s important. I
love this song, and this video gets the message across. I find the video quite
funny in honesty. But why is it in this list? Well, for both good and bad, it’s
probably one of the most important music videos in history.
How can I say that? Well simply, if it wasn’t for this
video, we wouldn’t have music videos the way they are now. This song put
everything on the table, and said, “I love big black bums!” Sir Mix-a-Lot said
something that had been said many times in music history before, but never this
bluntly, never in a music video that showed close ups of black women’s behinds.
And since then, well, look at any pop or RnB music channel, and you’ll see lots
of videos have a lot of ass in them. This song is a big part in making things
the way they are today. As I said, it’s for good and for bad; there’s far too
many raunchy videos on pre-watershed TV at the moment, and you can blame the
rise in promiscuous videos for that. But at the same time, it broke new ground
for music videos, and that’s pretty cool.
#3 – “Smells Like Nirvana” by Weird Al Yankovic
What needs to be said about this video? If you’ve seen it,
you’ll know what makes it a combine of greatness and tragedy at the same time.
Weird Al basically parodies the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video by Nirvana in a
way only he can. Cheerleaders with hairy armpits, the janitor (who is the same
janitor from the original video) eating
from his mop bucket, the hair flailing all over the place like the Nirvana band
members do in the original, and much more. It’s just a great parody, and it’s
not to be taken seriously. Kurt Cobain himself loved this parody and its video,
so if you don’t like it then that’s your loss!
#2 – “Stay” by Shakespears Sister
I don’t know what you’ll think of this entry. In 2012 it’s
an odd choice of video to put in this list. But, I vividly remember this video
when I was a three, four, five year old boy. It gave me goosebumps. I couldn’t
keep my eyes off the video, especially when the song kicked in and Marcella
Detroit comes in looking all gothic and evil. Even now, it gives me goosebumps,
even if the video is a little silly by todays standards. But that’s what
childhood does to you, and for that reason, it’s still one of my favourite
music videos from 1992.
#1 – “In Bloom” by Nirvana
Videos
weren’t that great in 1992 either but this was brilliant. I love the video for
“In Bloom”. 1991 was the year of Nirvana’s rocket to superstardom and by
November 1992 (when this single was released) Kurt Cobain was really fed up of
how serious people were taking the band. The idea behind “In Bloom” was to show
that the band aren’t serious and can have a laugh as well. So they mocked a lot
of the hype and hysteria that was around in the 1960s rock ‘n’ roll scene, so
they all wore suits, played in black and white and played their instruments
like they did in the sixties. The crowd was full of screaming women, also like
the hype in the sixties. Towards the end of the video Nirvana trash the set, in
a way that they would on their actual live sets. The video isn’t that amazing
on the grand scheme of things, but it’s still a very well produced video, it
was very funny and I love the irony of them mocking the hysteria of the 1960s
when they caused a similar outbreak themselves, thirty years later
The Top 10 Most
Impactful Songs of 1992
As I said, I'm NOT calling it the 'important' list, although
it's more than just popularity as well. Anyway, here are the 10 songs of the
year. It's an unbiased list.
#10 – “Let’s Get Rocked” by Def Leppard
It’s weird going back in history sometimes. You associate
certain songs with certain eras and Def Leppard, being a hair metal band, I’d
associated this song with the eighties, remember I was only three when this
song came out so I didn’t remember it in ’92. So yeah, not only did this song
come out in the early nineties, but it got to a fantastic #2 in the UK charts,
and is arguably Def Leppard’s biggest hit in their career. They did have
another song that got to #2 but this is the daddy, this is the song that most
people will think of when they think of Def Leppard. And it was released in
1992, not 1985.
#9 – “Nothing Else Matters” by Metallica
There aren’t an incredible amount of ‘metal ballads’ that
stand the test of time. This is one of the ones that did. It was huge at the
time, getting to #6 in the UK charts, their third highest charting in this
country (“Enter Sandman” and “Until it Sleeps” got to #5). A song about
guitarist James Hetfield’s love for his girlfriend, he wrote the basis of it
whilst he was on the phone to her. It’s since become one of Metallica’s most
well known songs, especially on the softer side of their iconic heavy metal
sound. But the song blew up in popularity even more seven years later, when a
live version was released as a single, this performance being done with the San
Francisco Symphony Orchestra, a beautifully crafted arrangement that contrasted
with Metallica’s generic sound, but with this being an exceptional metal
ballad, the contrasts meshed perfectly. It’s a phenomenal song.
#8 – “Easy” by Faith No More
Speaking of “metal ballads”, this song is another one that
hasn’t gone away and won’t go away anytime soon. “Easy” is actually a cover
version of the original by Lionel Ritchie’s band the Commodores, and the song
deals with a breakup with someone and the best way to deal with it is by
getting over it, “easy like Sunday morning”. The Faith No More version was a
surprise hit, and is their biggest hit in the UK getting to #3, even higher in
the charts than the original released in the seventies. Faith No More were not
known for their ballads and slow songs, more for their alternative metal, but
this is their biggest hit and most well known track.
#7 – “Jump Around” by House of Pain
Long before DJ Lethal began turning tables for Limp Bizkit,
he was turning tables for House of Pain. “Jump Around” was and is by far, their
most popular hit. Getting to #8 in the UK chart, it’s a hip hop classic in many
ways. I don’t often include hip-hop in these listings but this song is
completely justified in its inclusion onto this list as it’s such an awesome
song, it’s a classic and deserves a mention as not only one of the biggest
songs of 1992, but one of the biggest tracks of the nineties, especially in
hip-hop. What’s weird? They’re Irish. Irish hip-hop? I find that weird for some
reason.
#6 – “Come As You Are” by Nirvana
I cap these lists for one song per artist. If I didn’t, you
would have found all three Nirvana releases in this top 10 because quite
simply, 1992 was the year of Nirvana. But if I had to choose one song between
“Come As You Are”, “Lithium” and “In Bloom” for its importance, its longevity
and its impact on music, “Come As You Are” wins by a tip of a nose. It was the
biggest hit of the three, getting to #9 in the UK charts (only “Smells Like
Teen Spirit” and “Heart-Shaped Box” charted higher), it’s probably played the
most of the three since 1992, and most importantly, there’s a horrible and
twisted irony in the lyrics “and I swear that I don’t have a gun” was a
potential precursor for Cobain’s suicide. There’s no proof of this of course,
but the link between these lyrics and what happened 2 years later will always
be made. Either way, onto positive things, this song is an alternative classic
and will be forever known as one of Nirvana’s finest music singles.
#5 – “Friday I’m in Love” by The Cure
Continuing the theme of songs released in the nineties that
I was sure that were released in the eighties, this song is one of The Cure’s
biggest and finest moments, yet it was released in 1992. The Cure’s legacy
speaks for itself, and most of it was written in the eighties, yet their early
nineties stuff is also really good, really popular and will be remembered for a
long time. “Friday, I’m in Love” got to #6 in the UK charts (only “Lullaby”,
released three years prior charted higher getting to #5) and is known to be one
of their most upbeat tracks. Not that this was supposed to be the case, Robert
Smith messed about with vari-speed on the tape before the recording. They
sometimes play the song live in its original intention, but it’s safe to say
that the messing about with the taping probably caused the song’s fortunes to
thrive. The fact that it’s so upbeat in comparison to other tracks is welcome
by most fans as it makes the song stand out in their discography. Either way
this is an awesome Cure song, one that’ll never go away and also be played
mostly on Fridays. No idea why.
#4 – “November Rain” by Guns ‘n’ Roses
I somehow missed this song when I started research for this
article, I don’t know how! This song is just epic in every way possible. It got
to #4 on the UK charts, and it’s the longest song to reach the Top 10 in
America (it clocks in at 8 minutes 57 seconds). The video is also incredibly
influential and a classic (it’s not in my Top 5 because I don’t like this song
or the video, but hell, I respect it). There’s a few Guns ‘n’ Roses songs that
are highly influential, classic, and will never go away, this is one of them. I
can’t say it’s THE GnR song, but it’s definitely up there. It’s just a song
that will never go away. Ever.
#3 – “One” by U2
“One” is one of the most covered songs of all time. It’s
also considered one of the most important songs of all time, and considered one
of the best written songs of all time. I’ve put the Top 2 ahead of this simply,
because it actually, for all the accolades and reception, it doesn’t often get
played for whatever reason. It got to #7 in the UK charts and was written when
the band were close to breaking up. It’s just a song that will always be
around, and played on occasion, due to many people associating with it when
they fall out with people they love. It’s a very important song.
#2 – “Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine
I was really close to putting this at #1. The Top 3 in this
list can all claim a justified stake for most impactful song of 1992 for
different reasons? This one? One word – rebellion.
All the proof you need is in the fact that this song was a
#1 hit… in 2009. I’m sure you know already but if you don’t, this song got to
#1 in 2009 because of the impact that X-Factor has in the UK. Every year
X-Factor was on TV, and the winner would be up for the running for the
Christmas #1 spot. And every year for four years in a row, the X-Factor winner
got the Christmas #1 spot. So many people were against this commercialised TV
show ruining Christmas #1s every year and decided to take action. Facebook was
used to gather support to get a song to outsell the X-Factor winner. The song?
“Killing in the Name”. And it worked, it got to #1, it outsold the X-Factor
winner and the band put all the moneys gained towards the movement to a free
live gig in the UK, and to charity.
It was an amazing achievement, and this song is about saying
“fuck you” to anything political or commercial that’s considered ‘too much’. And
even though this song got to #25 in 1992, it’s been this way for a long time,
twenty years in fact. It wasn’t just in 2009; it’s been this way since the song
has been released. The song is legendary; the song has made such an impact on
society, on music, like Rage have as a band. 2009’s Facebook campaign just
solidified its place in music history, that’s all.
#1 – “Creep” by Radiohead
As I said, I was close to putting #2 in the #1 spot but I
couldn’t. This song in my opinion, made a bigger impact, and means more to more
people than “Killing in the Name” does. It’s a dispute, a nice dispute, about
what song is more important, made a bigger impact, and will be remembered more
for years to come. If I were a betting man, “Creep” would be the song, if I had
to choose one.
“Creep” is a bittersweet song for Radiohead. The song means
so much to so many young teenagers and, still is, their most popular outright
song, despite making critically acclaimed albums and solid singles. While the
song didn’t sell well in the UK when first released (it only got to #78), it
started to gain momentum across Eastern Europe, New Zealand, Spain and
Scandinavia. It then got released in the States and was successful there too.
It eventually got re-released in the UK because of how well it did in other
countries afterwards, and got to #7.
The song is incredibly popular, and has been since 1993,
when it got re-released. But… it got too popular. Fans started to appear at
gigs only to hear this song, when it was a song that Thom Yorke didn’t think
too much about, especially after making in their eyes, better songs since its
release, songs from “The Bends” and then “OK Computer”. Eventually they refused
to play the song, and it was not played between 1998 and 2001. Now the song is
played, reluctantly, in some of the gigs on their tours.
But… despite all of that, and the feelings of the song by
Thom Yorke and co, this song simply is an incredible message, an incredible
song. The lyrics are simply by Thom’s later standards, but it’s the simplicity
of the message that makes so many fans relate to it. “I’m a creep, I’m a
weirdo, what the hell am I doing here, I don’t belong here”. It’s simple, it’s
a feeling many teenagers have, when they’re trying to find themselves, try to
understand the world around them and their place in it, and how many mixed
emotions that run through life, especially in adolescence.
The Year 1992 Mixtape
Just in case you didn't know by now...
"A Mixtape is a playlist of a certain genre, band or
era. The list is generally 80 minutes long, the same length of a blank CD, with
further recommendations if some of the songs aren’t to your taste. Remember
kids, downloading is wrong!"
So here we go! My favourite songs from the year 1992. Yes,
this is a biased list.
You can now listen to this playlist on YouTube! Just click here!
You can now listen to this playlist on YouTube! Just click here!
- Man on the Moon - R.E.M.
- Dreams - The Cranberries
- Friday I'm in Love - The Cure
- Breaking the Girl - Red Hot Chili Peppers
- Creep – Radiohead
- Jump Around - House of Pain
- Baby Got Back - Sir Mix-a-Lot
- Detachable Penis - King Missile
- Where's Me Jumper? - Sultans of Ping
- Reverence - The Jesus and Mary Chain
- Unsung – Helmet
- Them Bones - Alice in Chains
- Lithium – Nirvana
- Pretend We're Dead - L7
- Feed My Frankenstein - Alice Cooper
- Sad But True – Metallica
- Midlife Crisis - Faith No More
- Symphony of Destruction – Megadeth
- Killing in the Name - Rage Against the Machine
And here are the five alternative songs if you don't like
some of the above...
- Stay - Shakespears Sister
- Bruise Violet - Babes in Toyland
- Mrs Robinson - The Lemonheads
- Smells Like Nirvana - Weird Al Yankovic
- Everything About You - Ugly Kid Joe
And there we go! The year 1992 in review! Next month
naturally I’ll be covering 1991 and continue my descend into music history.
What we your favourite songs and albums from 1992? Any other comments or
queries? Raise them below. Thanks for your time.
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