Every year offers music both good and bad, but some years have a special pull. In My Favorite Music Year, A.V. Club music writers choose the years that speak to them most deeply, however fresh in memory or far in the past.
1997 seems far too recent a time to put in the proper historical perspective when it comes to music, but the heart wants what it wants, and mine wants 1997. Part of the reason for that choice is surely how absolutely immersed I was during that period of time. I published/edited/lived a music fanzine called Milk from 1993-1999, during which time I was also dabbling in concert promotion (as “Milk Magazine Presents”). Oh, and did I mention that I was also manager/buyer at an indie record store—Atomic Records in Milwaukee—for that entire period? Yes, I was. So assuming I was awake for 16 hours a day—probably a low estimate—I was probably listening to music for 12. A nine-hour shift at the store with co-workers with wildly varying tastes and access to every record at all times left a pretty serious impression. I still listen to an inordinate amount of music, but I’ll probably never re-create the absolute immersion of those years.
In the inaugural My Favorite Music Year, Steven Hyden wrote about a friend of his who didn’t listen to any music made before he was born. While I don’t think that’s valid—he’s cheating himself!—I would definitely have a tough time choosing a favorite music year that I didn’t actually live through. Which isn’t to say that context is more important than the music itself, but your age, state of mind, and life situation certainly play parts in how music affects you. And for me, it was mostly about the nascent world of indie-rock.
Things were certainly becoming more segmented and rigid in the world of popular music at the time, with radio formats finding their way into stricter genres. Pop—the kind you find on the radio and the Billboard Singles chart—was going through a particularly fallow time: The year’s big singles included Jewel’s “You Were Meant For Me,” Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life,” and Sugar Ray’s “Fly” in the ubiquitous/insipid category. The Spice Girls’ Spice was the year’s best-selling album, but at least that provided a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun. The best-selling country album of all time, Shania Twain’s Come On Over, came out in 1997—it’s now platinum 20 times over—but none of those songs filtered their way into my existence much.
“Indie” still existed on the margins: Even a band like Pavement, which seems so major in hindsight, was barely a blip compared to Puff Daddy, who was all over the charts. (One incredible anomaly: the anarcho-punks in Chumbawumba, who hit huge with the fantastic fluke “Tubthumping.”) Pop-punk was already firmly entrenched on the charts thanks to Green Day, who made it extra safe for the malls—Hot Topic really started booming in the late ’90s and never looked back.
But there were a slate of records in 1997 that represented artistic peaks for some of the most influential independent (-minded or –labeled) musicians of the time. There wasn’t necessarily pressure for indie or underground bands to make mainstream records, because success on a grand scale just didn’t seem within the realm of possibility. Surely nobody would have guessed that Elliott Smith would end up on the Academy Awards stage, or that Modest Mouse would one day have a massive hit single, or that Neutral Milk Hotel would quietly sell more than a hundred thousand records after breaking up. No, these were acts that, in 1997, were still relatively unknown, with seemingly little hope of doing anything more than selling out thousand-seat clubs (Radiohead excepted, of course). Those relatively small goals may have resulted in a purer aesthetic. As different as my five favorites are, they share a spirit of independent authenticity.
JOSH MODELL'S TOP 5 ALBUMS OF 1997
1. Radiohead, OK Computer
Enough ink has been spilled on Radiohead’s career high point to supply Bic pens to the third world for decades. It’s a powerful, moving record that you’ve probably heard by now. It’s interesting, though to remember its context in 1997. There was a time when Radiohead, believe it or not, wasn’t flush with indie-cred. (Not that they were looking for any, of course.) This was the band whose greatest exposure to the world was via “Creep,” a song at this point best left forgotten—from a debut album also best left forgotten. Radiohead got far more interesting as songwriters and soundsmiths with the powerhouse The Bends, but nothing prepared listeners for the audacious darkness of OK Computer. Fun fact: Americans got an early taste of some of these songs when Radiohead did a brief tour in the midst of recording OK Computer. They were opening for Alanis Morissette.
2. Modest Mouse, The Lonesome Crowded West
On his way to slicker, more commercially successful times, Isaac Brock had an artistic breakthrough with The Lonesome Crowded West, a sprawling, messy, gorgeous distillation of his belligerent psyche. The world, strangely, seemed to respond: It’s easy to forget with the subsequent successes of The Moon And Antarctica and especially Good News For People Who Love Bad News, but West was an underground smash. And of course, sonically, its ripples were felt for years, both in Modest Mouse’s own mainstream success and in the bands that followed.