1999 // Matthew Sweet, In Reverse // “I Should Never Have Let You Know”
Reviews: Pop Matters / Pitchfork / Rolling Stone
I would be lying if I said that Sweet’s In Reverse, brimming with pre-millennial tension, was the inspiration for this little project. No, it was merely the first disc I picked up from a haphazard pile at the end of my CD rack. But, that was fortuitous. I was a semi-serious music geek with pretty questionable taste before its release, hanging around used CD stores, just listening and chatting up the clerks for suggestions. (I rarely read music magazines or the spartan music writing available on the web at the time.)
But this album, for some reason, tipped me over the edge of reason: It led me to start writing about music. It was also probably the last good thing Matthew Sweet recorded. It’s the very best first selection — what with the lyrical themes and the perfectly retro production techniques (if I remember correctly, several songs were recorded in the studio where Phil Spector developed the Wall of Sound), as demonstrated in the selection above, the sonorous, short and sweet “I Should Never Have Let You Know.”
Popular music is, in itself, inherently cannibalistic. But you know this. Trainspotters have always argued the merits of one composer over another, one band over another for eons. It’s just good we don’t resort to duels anymore. If successful, this blog will attempt to document the best music created in the past 10 years. The sauce before the supper, I suppose.
I have a wide and varied taste, but I am limiting myself to what’s currently in my house — be that vinyl, CD or digital file. There’s no faking, no revision here. This is what I’ve listened to in the past 10 years. And perhaps you’ll find something that you’d forgotten, or didn’t know about. I hope you do.
CD sales peaked in 1999, according to the IFPI. That year, the industry sold 2.5 billion albums worldwide1. By the next year sales began to decline a bit, and the uncomfortable whispers had begun: Napster. It’s killing the industry2. But we all know now that digital piracy wasn’t the smoking gun; what really happened is that an antiquated industry, already cracked and held together with string and chewing-gum and pretty veneers, began to show its age. Technology just tipped the industry’s hand, global economic factors and social progress did the rest.
Sometimes I think that 10 years is enough time for us to look back and understand what’s happened — but the reality is, we’re still in the middle of the change cycle. An interim analysis is good now, but everything is in disarray. Music has become a commodity, milked for every last possible cent — and oddly, everyone wants to cash in, despite the potential for a very negative return on investment. Your best friend’s garage band, not content to make an embarrassing racket at people’s house parties, records songs on someone’s Mac and has an online PR rep and a “digital marketing plan.” Not that there’s anything wrong with the democratization of the the distribution model, but let’s not kid ourselves. We’re playing the same game, just with different rules.
So, disappointingly, I can offer no answers here, no pat endings tied with a bow. But this, too, will change eventually. Just give it another 10 years or so. In the meantime, try and enjoy yourself. I promise the rest of my posts, hopefully at the rate of one per day, will not be quite so TL:DNR.
1. http://www.ifpi.com/content/library/worldsales2000.pdf
