HI54… THE 90s | #HI54MIXCDS ON MOUN.TOWN/FM
Sometimes, the easiest way to go back in time is to just put a time capsule collection of musical vibes in the headphones, close your eyes and drift away. You might even say that this is the only way to travel back in time. I don't know much about time travel, if I'm being honest.
Coming of age in the nineteen 90s is probably exactly like what it was like coming of age in whatever the decade was before The Iron Age started. I mean, transitioning from no-internet teenage years to Napster downloading everything in your twenties — that has got to be at least as crazy as transitioning from bronze to iron, no?
As a youth that spent A LOT of time getting lost in his Columbia House sourced CD collection and whatever limited discoveries the radio had on offer—which in rural Alberta, was not very much in the way of variety—I often think about how 90s me would have handled the infinite expanse of the internet. To be honest, I think it would have melted my brain.
I mean, I was so jones-ing for something different that I used to read descriptions of new albums in Rolling Stone—albums that I had no way of ever listening to—as if that was a way to check out new music. There was no magical musical "i pod" device in my pocket and, for me, there wasn't even a record store in town. I just read a description and went “this sounds like something I would enjoy more than this Creed guy they keep giving repeated plays on the radio… but what are you gonna do?”. And that was it, that's how I experienced new music discovery.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To make matters worse, we didn’t even have cable or satellite television at our house. Just the 3-5 channels you could sometimes pick up on the farm yard antenna. So, unlike most 90s kids, we didn't even have MTV (not even our Canadian version Much Music). Not gonna lie, music wise, it was kinda bleak.
Anyways, this is all to say that I have a special place in my heart for trying to re-experience the 90s.
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The above HI54… THE 90s playlist is partially made up of the music I spent countless hours listening intently to in the actual 90s (related: apparently I've permanently made space in my brain for liner notes, because 20 years later I still know all the words) and partially made up of a bunch of “new-to-me” 90s music (which is the stuff I had no easy way of accessing back in The Bronze Age), and then there are a few of those songs that you can only get away with listening to if you say you're listening to a 90s mix.
I will jump in and tweak the song selection regularly, so make sure to hit the like/follow button on Spotify if you fancy repeat listens and auto-magic updates to the human-made song selections.
You can also find this playlist included in the daily programming for the ‘pretend, for real’ radio station Mountown FM over on HI54’s mountain cousin 95EH.CA (hence the 95 total tracks). And, as always, when you hear something you like, do the universe some good and check those artists out further.
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And I don’t keep an ongoing Buy Music Club list going for all the tracks that are available on Bandcamp like I do with a lot of my other Spotify playlists (believe it or not… a lot of albums/artists from the 1990s are not on Bandcamp), but don’t forget to remember that you can always pop a Spotify playlist link into Hype Machine’s handy Merch Table if you ever come across a Spotify playlist that has a bunch of tracks/artists you’d be interested in supporting directly (ie. the Merch Table will try & automagically find which Spotify tracks in a playlist are available on Bandcamp for you). Sometimes you’d be surprised which tracks/albums are actually available on the better-for-artists music site that is Bandcamp.
Also, there are other ways to show support for the music/artists you love than buying on Bandcamp, no matter what era the magic was recorded in, so, sometimes it’s best not to overthink EVERYTHING and just enjoy really listening to some of the amazing music that artists keep making despite everything that works against it.
And then let’s work on fixing the things that work against it \m/
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