Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Some of my fondest memories from high school include tuning into 120 Minutes every Sunday night on MTV. I discovered many bands, and in the process, developed my musical identity. I still have about fifty tapes of videos and interviews from the show, mostly from the 1990s. Watching them now is like a time capsule of how my musical taste changed. I wore those tapes out by watching my favorite episodes and videos over and over. One of my favorite episodes featured Matt Pinfield interviewing Rancid, mostly because the videos they picked and bands they recommended were so varied, including oi tastemakers like the Business, shoutouts to the Swingin' Utters, and discussions of Operation Ivy and reggae as rebel music. My taped copy of this show is unwatchable because it goes back and forth between speeds, so I am glad Eyesore Video Channel posted it on YouTube. Another favorite episode was when Henry Rollins and Jerry Lee Lewis co-hosted the show. This odd juxtaposition was even st...

Recently, my friend Joe and I were continuing our age-old battle concerning the merits of Ween, a band that is often labeled a joke band, who recently broke up after years of creating musically proficient, genre-bending "joke" songs. A quick search on the internet shows that Ween has battled this label for years, and they probably tend to even welcome it, given such song titles as "Poop Ship Destroyer" and "Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)." Yet in later years, the boys in Ween proved excellent songwriters, who could assemble a killer band. Their various pastiches of different genres helped define the "Ween Sound," a far-reaching enterprise, indeed. Whether creating twisted country records with actual country session musicians on 1996's 12 Golden Country Greats , giving into their psychedelic tendencies completely on 1997's The Mollusk , or perfecting the pop song throughout their catalog, Ween always surprised. The Zappa comparisons wer...

Oddly enough, Bob Dylan's songs on the Wonder Boys soundtrack marked a watershed moment for me as the 90s blended into the 2000s. I started going back to college in 1999 after a two-year break where I mostly worked and listened to records. My first attempt at college had been unsuccessful due to deep depression and homesickness that I did not realize was happening at the time. The period for me was full of change. I was trying to figure out who I was in an adult world, figuratively and musically. I was shifting between genres and personas like a man possessed.  My high school musical interests ran the gamut from 70s punk to melodic hardcore to indie rock, but I had fallen away from most "alternative" music as I reached that age in a young person's life where I felt like I needed to be defined by a "style." Needless to say 90 percent of my listening tastes were firmly entrenched in punk circa 1999-2000. While I never gave up the punk rock and indie rock o...