‘97-‘98: A Very Good Time For Music

Music-wise, the graduating class of 1998 had a particularly awful run. The grunge-era was long over, and the new boy-band pop movement was just beginning.

But among the piles of bland pop-rock and Limp Bizkit overcompensation, an undercurrent was creating some of the most influential music ever. Four albums that year routinely appear on critical all-time greatest lists. Let’s start with those, the very best of my senior year:

Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”.

Radiohead’s “OK Computer”.

Lauryn Hill’s “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill”

Elliott Smith’s “XO”

That’s a list, my friends. Beyond the great, there was a lot of very good. Spoon released “A Series of Sneaks”, promises of a great career still to come. Billy Bragg teamed with Wilco and Natalie Merchant to imagine stacks of Woody Guthrie lyrics. The album was especially huge in war-torn Serbia, where it was frequently played on anti-Milosevic radiostation B-92.

Blur’s self-titled release is primarily memorable for “Song 2”, but the album was evidence of Brit-pop at its best, especially songs like “On Your Own”, the video for which sent up Fred Durst’s idiotic mugging while Graham Coxon crunched guitar in the background.

Yo La Tengo’s “I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One”

Mainstream music wasn’t all bad, either. Puff Daddy continued to wrench Notorious B.I.G. from the grave in order to build his career.

And it’s difficult to imagine a more boiled pure version of pop than Hanson’s “MmmBop”. Even if it drives you nuts, you can’t fault such catchy melodies.

1998 also marked the first and last time Sheryl Crow put a good top-to-bottom album together with “The Globe Sessions”.

Finally, an odd little group of British anarchists hit it big with this anthem to drinking, “Tubthumping”.

If you’re reading this for the first time, be sure and check out the worst music for the graduating class of 1998, and have fun at your 10 year reunions, everyone. Damn, I’m feeling old.