1995 Pazz & Jop Ballot
Ted Friedman’s 1995 Pazz & Jop Ballot
Albums
(30) Moby, Everything is Wrong
(20) Debbie Gibson, Think With Your Heart
(10) Randy Newman, Faust
(10) Yo La Tengo, ELECTR-O-PURA
(5) D’Angelo, Brown Sugar
(5) Original Soundtrack, Macross Plus
(5) Foo Fighters
(5) Orb, Orbus Terrarum
(5) Pavement, Wowie Zowie
(5) Matthew Sweet, 100% Fun
Singles
Alanis Morrissette, “You Oughta Know”
Skee-Lo, “I Wish”
Coolio, “Gangsta’s Paradise”
Hootie and the Blowfish, “Let Her Cry”
Seal, “Kiss From a Rose”
Rednex, “Cotton-Eye Joe”
White Zombie, “More Human Than Human”
Filter, “Hey Man, Nice Shot”
Jill Sobule, “I Kissed a Girl”
Soul Asylum, “Misery”
Videos
Soul Asylum, “Misery”
Bjork, “You’re In Love”
Coolio, “Gangsta’s Paradise”
Alanis Morrissette, “You Oughta Know”
Weezer, “Buddy Holly”
Seal, “Kiss From a Rose”
White Zombie, “More Human Than Human”
Madonna, “I Want You”
Skee-Low, “I Wish”
Primus, “Winona’s Got a Big Brown Beaver”
Reissues
Debbie Gibson, Greatest Hits
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Playback
Compilations
None this year, thanks. The promo pile’s getting thinner as my dissertation heats up.
On the Year That Was
I don’t buy this as the bummer year for music that everybody else is probably going to complain about. Granted, it was the thinnest year for hip-hop yet, with no new savior on the horizon. My theory there is that the Internet is what’s taken over hip-hop’s role as postmodernity’s frontier. The way I used to rush out to get every new rap record in the late ‘80s, realizing that I was listening to an art form in the process of inventing itself - I get that rush now from downloading the latest version of Netscape and playing with the new VRML and Java plug-ins. (Yes, I know it’s dorky, and yes, I know I’ve traded the vitality of the resistant margins for the pleasures of the technophillic elite. But my ears go where the action is, and right now hip-hop’s as aesthetically - and ideologically - as stale as country. More so, actually, if Garth Brooks ever returns to form.)
Even Moby’s masterful Everything Is Wrong feels, oddly, more like a summing-up than a breakthrough - more like, say, Daydream Nation than Zen Arcade. Certainly, he and Orb have more room to grow from here than hip-hop or grunge - hey, if copyright clearance ever eases up, techno could still turn into the great collage art form of the turn of the millennium. But it sort of saddens me that Everything Is Wrong feels like such a mature, wise album - for all its gestures to other genres, it has the sound of closure rather than rule-busting - the way, say, Astral Weeks invented a sound and summed it up all at once, so that it never ended up leading to anywhere else. That of course, is sort of the thematic point of both albums - they’re acts of elegy. And in the wake of so much giddy future hype, perhaps Moby’s state-of-the-art sobriety is a useful tune to hear.
But anyway, my point was that I liked rock’n’roll’s turn of events in ’95. What, I was supposed to feel sorry for Green Day that they can’t make a multi-album career out of blowing snot on their audience? Any year with a single as gratifying - hell, empowering - as “You Oughta Know” is already ahead of the curve. And as for the biggest story of the year, let’s start with the wonderful “Let Her Cry,” which features two references to sitting down in the same song. I love Hootie. I think I am Hootie. Along with Offspring’s, “Self-Esteem,” “Let Her Cry” marks the return of the senstitive doormat single. Hey, I never filed away my Chi-Lites records. I also like the way the gender keeps shifting - it starts out as if it’s in the “let her cry/’cause she’s a lady/let her laugh/cause she’s a child” tradition, concentrating on the pain of the female character. But by the time Hootie gets to the killer couplet, “She went into the back to get high/ I sat down on my couch and cried,” it’s clear who’s zooming who. Actually, Hootie claims he wrote the song aobut a relationship in which he was the jerk, and reversed the genders. Whatever you say. I won’t even get into the weird dynamics of their subsequent single, “Only Wanna Be With You,” a putative male-female love song dramatized in the video exclusively by male bonding, including a duet section with a kiss on the cheek. Hootie’s supposed to be the return of straight-white-boy frat rock, but nobody seems to be noticing that they’re not completely any of those things. And if all the frat boys were like Hootie, I might’ve gotten through college without turning to punk, rap, and existential dread.
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