For many music lovers, what they could see on their TV screen in the early '90s thanks to MTV was a small cultural revolution. Videos and artists who appeared in the given era in daily rotation or could be seen in such night-time programmes as 'Alternative Nation', 'Headbangers Ball' or '120 Minutes', together formed a great genre mix of rock, hip-hop, punk, electronic, metal, and their mutual combinations. Thanks to that, today, the '90s are remembered as a decade when no genre crossover was considered impossible.
We have dug through the archives from 1990 to 1994 and carefully selected for you 333 songs by over 250 artists. Through the short commentaries, we tried to give you 333 good reasons why we got to like this period and, at the same time, provide you with the output of the most influential and most popular 'alternative' musicians in the first half of the 1990s. The selected songs can be ordered from essential to obscure; here, hits are just as likely to be found as forgotten compositions, and personal favourites occur side by side with generally recognised pieces. For company, they have a broad selection of indie artists releasing on respected independent labels, one-hit wonders, clever copyists, and anything and everything in between.
The book includes 111 QR codes with a link to one of the videos commented on so you can check out straight away what you have just read about. QR codes refer to videos from the official profiles of the artists and their record labels. This book is not a complex collection of songs you 'should listen to before you die'. It should serve as a springboard for your further discoveries. We tried to portray the amazing musical diversity of this period in the history of music with all its contributions, key new musical trends, and genres linked to it. Nevertheless, space is also given to momentary and unsuccessful experiments, or dead ends.
Each chapter begins with a journalistic overview that summarises current events on the music scene that year on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition, it introduces the reader to more than 100 albums, which could be described as essential, important, or at least worth listening to within individual genres. You will also be reminded of some of the highlights of the annual MTV Video Music Awards from back when MTV was still primarily music television.
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If you don’t know what to expect from the book, you can read samples from each chapter