5 Worst Bands of the 90s
Fake punks, boy bands and just bad songwriters
I’ll admit it. I am a fan of the 1990s and its music. I turned 20 in 1992, just seven months after Nirvana’s mammoth single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was unleashed upon the world.
And although alternative rock, indie and punk were around long before that moment in September 1991, I am grateful that as the decade kicked in there was a new revolution in rock ’n’ roll taking hold. Even if that party fizzled as Y2K approached.
There were hundreds of great bands and at least a dozen musical subgenres that made life in the 1990s much more worth living. But there were artists that came about and left their marks on the 90s—and not in a good way. So, I figured it was time to give five of them their due, and honor them as I should as the official worst bands of the 90s.
The following honorees are presented in no particular order.
Candlebox
Some artists get signed to record deals for questionable reasons, or one reason only. For Candlebox, just being from Seattle was enough of a reason.
Perhaps the band’s facey lead singer Kevin Martin sealed the deal with record execs. For certain his glam rock pipes helped their single “Far Behind” become a Top 20 hit and one that got the quartet healthy airtime on MTV from 1995 to early 1996.
Some could argue that Candlebox filled a void—and perhaps an untapped commercial market space—for music consumers not totally sold on grunge and its darker tones. This could be why Candlebox seemed to be so popular across the board with women in the mid-90s. But the band also boasted the kind of lovey ballads that could capture the faint of heart as well as sell millions of records.
And while bands like Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots demonstrated that the metal influences of Black Sabbath and Motörhead still had a mass appeal, Candlebox took a different note from the 1980s; that being the glamor or at least the sounds of hair metal bands like Europe, Mr. Big and even Poison, just a tad.
It could very well be that every era in popular music has its guilty pleasures for some, such as the way Nickleback and Creed appealed in the early 2000s to a post-grunge crowd that probably never really liked real grunge anyway. In the mid-90s Candlebox filled a similar role. Somebody had to.
Tripping Daisy
Some rock historians and enthusiasts name 1991 as The Year Punk Broke, in part because it was indeed the year that punk rock finally saw its influence take flight on a bigger scale. And it was in 1991 (albeit it very late 1991) that record companies caught on to a changing landscape and perphaps what music lovers really wanted. As such, commercial radio dumped the bright love pop of Paula Abdul and Amy Grant, along with hair metal’s crass and vacant creations, for something entirely new. Suddenly, bands that played their own instruments and who wrote and largely produced their own music, were in.
Yet, with the greater emergence of punk rock, there would be fake punk rockers too.
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Dallas-based Tripping Daisy was once described as a “neo-psychedelic band” influenced by West Coast punk legends Bad Religion. But from the very first notes from their one big hit “I Got A Girl,” it was pretty clear what Tripping Daisy was or was trying very hard to be.
From the band’s unnecessarily and purposely “weird” opening guitar riff in that song, to their empty lyrics about hot girlfriends who act crazy and ‘wear cool shoes’ to the lead singer’s timely, mid-music video hair color change (from bottle-blonde to pink—so rad!), it became evident that Tripping Daisy built their entire act on trends and trade winds. Punk was king, and, doggone-it, they were going to be punk, or would fake it, if need be.
I suspect that had the 1990s been won not by grunge and alternative, but instead by a sudden reemergence of 1970s Progressive Rock, bands like Tripping Daisy would likely have chosen to play long keyboard solos while wearing tunics and bell-bottoms, putting out “concept albums” about medieval sorcery the way Emerson, Lake & Palmer did.
But both Tripping Daisy and their label Island/Def Jam seemingly decided that instant, superficial punk-styled songs would make for a good product. Even if that style of “punk rock” was about as punk as a $75 vinyl man-purse from Urban Outfitters. Alas, Tripping Daisy served as a model for aspiring posers everywhere throughout the 1990s. And they will be remembered, if at all, for that.
Supernova
Since we’re on the topic of punk rock (or fake punk rock, as it were), Tripping Daisy wasn’t the only band out there who saw that punk was catching on and said “Hey, we can do that too!”
Enter Supernova, a band made up of three members who could play sparesly as many chords on guitar. The Costa Mesa, California trio also came with ready-made weird haircuts as well as catchy, fashionably silly songs that probably made Tripping Daisy feel inadequately not fake-punk enough.
Ironically, the title of Supernova’s 1995 album was “Ages 3 And Up,” perhaps because, like Mad Libs, it was meant for everybody. Unironically, the album also sounds like it was recorded by a bunch of 3 year olds, making the band possibly a proto-inspiration for the Imagination Movers or The Wiggles.
For as much fun as Supernova could have been to hear, had you been dancing drunk to their sets on the Vans Warped Tour, the band’s songs were astutely skin-deep. Again, perhaps this was on-purpose and for the sake of being “weird” and thus… “punk.”
A short listen of their single “Vitamins” (video above) shows that, musically speaking, Supernova makes Wesley Willis sound like a regular Igor Stravinsky.
Ugly Kid Joe
Like Candlebox, Santa Barbara’s Ugly Kid Joe couldn’t decide whether or not they were staying on or eventually going to get off of the late 1980s sleaze rock train that eventually broke down in the summer of 1991.
As it turns out, the song that would be the band’s biggest hit, “(I Hate) Everything About You,” was recorded in that summer, and then released on the band’s first EP just 28 days after Nirvana’s legendary “Teen Spirit” dropped on September 10, 1991. (Talk about bad timing.)
This fairly adept band had a polished studio sound and yet seemed to relish more in its budding image as surly bad boys in the vein of Guns N’ Roses.
The band would hang tight for a while and get some radio play, and even showed up at the MTV Movie Awards in 1992, playing their big hit, before covering Harry Chapin’s “Cats In The Cradle.”
But in the end, Ugly Kid Joe’s music is probably best remembered as one of the tunes featured in the movie Wayne’s World, and no less in the scene in which Wayne and Garth traverse around boring Aurora, Illinois on a dull Saturday night.
The Backstreet Boys
I mean, what else can I say? This Orlando, Florida-based vocal group took what Boston’s New Kids On The Block did in the late 1980s and gave it an extra pair of wings.
The Backstreet Boys ultimately grabbed the New Kids’ style of prefabricated radio pop by the neck, fusing it with blonder hair and nicer clothes, only to suburbanize it, commoditize it, and later disseminate into the dens of millions of townhomes all across the nation. The instant popularity that followed did set a new trend in motion, just as grunge started to wain.
In doing so, the Backstreet Boys also paved the way for more wind-up acts just like them, helping artists such as N’SYNC, 98 Degrees, O-Town and Take 5 break into commercial radio, also making the cohort’s style of music stick for years to come, like a bad case of untreated herpes.
But in the end, it was, as we know, all marketing. Just the term “backstreet” in the group’s name—presumably devised and polished up by the band’s promoter, Ponzi scheme convict Lou Perlman—seemed at least to imply some sort of streetwise spirit or a least a touch of E Street Band toughness.
But just like the bogus airline that Pearlman concocted to swindle his investors, the band’s name was also a falsehood, except perhaps for the “boys” part of it. Certainly the group’s members were not rough and edgy, nor street kids. Nor did their music have much soul.
But one thing they did do was sell a lot of records. Probably no other artist in history has parted pre-teen girls from their cash (or the cash in their mom’s wallets) as much, and at such an enormous scale as the Backstreet Boys did.
Andy Frye has written for Forbes and Rolling Stone, and his time travel book Ninety Days In The 90s is out now on Amazon.
