American Football was also a rebuke of the Midwestern scene that had been shaped by the incalculable long-tail influence of Mike Kinsella’s previous one-album supernova Cap’n Jazz, rerouting emo’s bloodline from hardcore toward minimalist jazz and meditiative math-rock. The trio had decided to break up even before the release of their first full-length thus, the album turned out to be a farewell from a band that had scarcely introduced itself. American Football: American Football (1999)īy the fall of 1999, the members of American Football were done with college, with emo, and with American Football itself. Its influence endures across generations, passed down via family gatherings, proms, and weddings these days, Boyz II Men count Tyler, the Creator, BTS, and Justin Bieber as their biggest fans and collaborators. But these nerds met at performing arts school, and their studious attention to their craft shines across the album, particularly on their a cappella cover of the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” Uncool and out of step, II was a collection of lush crowd-pleasers that spoke to the silent majority of the record-buying public. (Listening to the song now, with its gentle lyrics about respectful consent, it actually sounds strangely progressive.) An article about II in Entertainment Weekly was headlined “Revenge of the Nerds” and noted that they still lived with their parents. The first single from Philadelphia vocal harmony group Boyz II Men’s follow-up to their massively successful debut Cooleyhighharmony was titled “I’ll Make Love to You,” a wholesome anachronism at a time when every other R&B artist wanted to creep, freak, knock boots, rub it down, or sex you up. Over lacerating chords and a deft use of space, the band took the many indignities of the Reagan-Bush era into their own hands-a sound, and a political worldview, that would reshape scenes overnight. After two tremendous EPs (later compiled on 13 Songs), 1990’s Repeater was the definitive moment when “post-hardcore” finally crystalized. With these new members and bassist Joe Lally as collaborators, MacKaye paired slower and more rhythmically supple arrangements with an unrelenting commitment to his DIY, straight-edge values and the revolutionary spirit at the heart of the genre. He found kinship in the arty introspection of Rites of Spring, whose singer-guitarist Guy Picciotto and drummer Brendan Canty joined the fold of MacKaye’s next band. By 1986, Minor Threat frontman Ian MacKaye was bored and frustrated with the violent, pig-headed masculinity prevalent in hardcore scenes across the country. To save hardcore, Fugazi had to destroy it and build something new from what scraps could still be salvaged. These prankish interruptions and asides don’t take away from the music’s joyousness and near-mystical uplift they enhance it. On Super æ, they delighted in shaking listeners out of their flow states just as thoroughly as they did in drawing them in. Later Boredoms recordings and performances could resemble live-band DJ sets, with shards of noise and melody whirling around a single central pulse. A crescendo might gain thrilling momentum only to slam abruptly into silence. Two chords might repeat for 10 minutes, until that relatively small sliver of time feels like eternity. At times, they sound like a hardcore band that never got the memo about brevity at others, like a religious cult for whom the sound of a skipping CD is the embodiment of the divine. The Osaka collective’s fifth full-length comes the closest to encapsulating the entirety of their journey, with long passages of the ecstatic trance-rock that would characterize their later years, punctuated frequently with the cartoonish riffs and chaotic smash cuts that had been their specialty early on. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherdīoredoms started in 1986 as something like a noise band, and ended three decades later as something like a mountain. Salt-N-Pepa just happened to get there early. Blige’s “I'll Be There for You/You're All I Need to Get By” weren’t far away. More than that, though, hip-hop was beginning to thaw to the idea of incorporating R&B and pop: Puff had convened Bad Boy Records in 1993, and genre-shifting cuts like Method Man and Mary J. But in the wake of the so-called “ Year of the Woman,” their career-long pop sensibilities congealed in the hits “Shoop” and the En Vogue-featuring “Whatta Man,” positive anthems that remain stalwart in the wedding and auntie playlists. They didn’t change up their raison d’etre: Salt, Pepa, and Spinderella were still committed to women determining their own futures and calling out creepers and weirdos. Salt-N-Pepa were a rebuke to the music industry’s storied disdain for women rappers, having gone platinum on their first two records by their fourth album Very Necessary, which quickly went multi-platinum, the trio could not be denied.
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