25 Years Since....November 1994

Time for our penultimate trip back to 1994 and the music I was enjoying at the time:

Green Day - Welcome To Paradise

We begin with the debut Top 40 hit for Green Day. We were definitely into my final days as a grunger by this point and that's not just to do with the fact this record isn't grunge.

Basically bands such as Green Day were the new bands the rock crowd were getting into in what was becoming the post-grunge era, but my time listening to it was very brief before I fully committed myself to rave. Although I heard the "Dookie" album plenty of times through friends, I never actually owned it myself until a few years later, shortly before writing loads of punk songs myself and forming a band.

The funny thing was that when the whole grunger thing came about, the unwritten rules were that any form of rock music was acceptable except for punk, yet that was exactly what people were getting into in the end.


(MC Sar And) The Real McCoy - Another Night

I would say liking this record was a sign I was getting into rave music, but even at the time before I really learned about the underground I knew this wasn't proper rave.

That said there's no denying it's dance music and you could say rave is to dance what grunge is to rock.

I do find Germany notorious for producing eurodance music that, whilst rather cheesy, is a lot of fun to listen to and this is one of these. It took me a while to buy the album though, maybe about 20 years or so when I saw it in poundland. I couldn't resist.


Aerosmith - Crazy

I thought this record came out earlier than this, but I also remember it coming out at the same time as the "Big Ones" album which did come out the same month.

I did think Aerosmith were a bit old at the time, but I still thought this was a great song.

What I liked even more though was the video and I'm pretty sure I wasn't alone in that. I did find it a bit disturbing though years later when I discovered one of the females in the video was Steven Tyler's daughter.


Baby D - Let Me Be Your Fantasy

By this point in time the rave scene had split into Happy Hardcore and Jungle, and there was a clear distinction between the 2. This record though was neither, more like how it was before the scene split. That's because it was originally from 1992, before the scene split.

I never knew any of that at the time, all I knew was this was a rave record and that I liked it.

What confirmed to me Baby D was proper rave music was when I bought a "Best Of Jungle" compilation shortly after and it had a Baby D track on it. Maybe Baby D should be considered Jungle then. I guess it's more similar to Jungle than it is to Happy Hardcore.

Blur - End Of A Century

At the time I remember somebody asking me whether I liked the "ants in the carpet" song. Being crap at knowing lyrics I had no idea what he was talking about. Then the next time I heard this I heard the opening lyrics and it became clearer

It was the final single from the "Parklife" album and to me it has a double meaning. First of all, after the end of the century the general quality of music went downhill. At the same time, after this single the general quality of Blurs music also went downhill.