It was the best of times, it was the beginning of the Durst of times. I was 15 in 1998 and the amount of incredible albums released that year changed my life. I also got internet in my home for the first time and that sort of ruined my life. But considering this is the only life I have, and I’m still in it, and we’re upon the 20th anniversary of said year, I’ve decided to stare it down head on and write about my feelinz and dreamz regarding this year. Using a series of albums as a jumping off point I hope to talk about what that year means to me, what it meant to me, and hopefully a lot of revisionist stuff where I pretend I didn’t spend most of it listening to Poe’s Hello and playing Duke Nukem 64.
I would like to begin with Sean Lennon’s Into The Sun.
This was one that was specifically made for me at age 15. I guess more accurately who I wanted to be when I was 15. I read the one issue I could get my hands on of Grand Royal cover to cover, repeatedly. I was obsessed with Spike Jonze’s music videos. At this point Beck was still the coolest person in the known universe. I had no access to new music aside from MTV and issues of SPIN because I lived in Vermont, hundreds of miles from NYC, and an hour away from the nearest mall. I did live in an impossibly cool little town though, with an impossibly cool record store. Ok I guess I lived in an impossibly cool town, but that doesn’t help much unless you have cool friends, and boy did I have none. When SPIN said Cornershop’s When I Was Born For The 7th Time was the best album of the year, I believed it, and listened to it repeatedly, waiting to be blown away, with no reference points to process what the heck that weird pastiche of an album was.
So when this little shaggy guy popped up on MTV with a silly low-rent high-concept video by Spike Jonze, all my favorite grungewave tones, and a Cibo Matto appearance, you bet your sweet ass I was on board. Enthusiastically. I rolled into that cool little record store and threw down $14 of someone’s money and bought Into The Sun on vinyl. (you see, at the time, this was a magical window where CDs were $16 but Matador and Grand Royal vinyl was around $12–$14, it just made fiscal sense. There was no audiophile or elitist posing here, I had one of those turntables that was built into the same unit as a CD player and a tape deck that was made out of plastic.) And you know what? I enjoyed the hell out of this album, and I still do. It is a very chill hodgepodge of low key ballads, coffee house lounge jazz bits, synth-porn beats that for a time could only be produced by gear collectors living off a trust fund, and scattered moments of glorious crunchy ass noise. After listening to that Cornershop album repeatedly trying to reverse-engineer why it was the ALBUM OF THE YEAR I was very primed and ready for something un-cohesive that gave off a cool vibe and often resembled background noise not unlike something I’d imagine was constantly playing a hip weed dealer’s apartment.
I guess it’s impossible not to bring up the Beatles connection, and it’s all over this album, and not just because of his namesake. Bizarrely, I don’t think any of these songs really resemble his father’s compositions. The album does carry a strong George Harrison vibe throughout, and in once instance straight up reeks of Paul McCartney. Which is surprising considering I feel like I’ve heard several people over the years say variations of “he’s just trying to rip off his dad” or saying their voices are too similar (they aren’t). Into the Sun today sounds like a great document of a very specific DREAM OF THE 90s. Lo-fi Beatles-y production Elliott Smith would soon corner the market on, bleeps and bops from the worlds rarest keyboards, all your favorite fuzz pedals, and the thrift store record collector sensibility that insists “Girl From Impenema slaps”. It’s every strain of impossibly cool late 90s NYC establishment-freak chic that would very soon move to Silverlake.