Darren's long list of hand-picked songs has arrived at:
"Zombie", by The Cranberries.
A song from, as he well knows, my "lost decade", the 1990s, the decade in which I gave up in frustration as the good (Beat Happening) were ignored and the lesser (Nirvana) hit the big time. Also, the decade in which I found myself assuming that I was, or should have been, "growing out of" young people's music as I left my twenties behind, and that I should do the respectable thing and move to classical music and, you know, "Kind of Blue" (not to in any way diss "Kind of Blue", of course). As has since become obvious, I mis-read myself: I seem to be one of the sad minority for whom pop music runs through their veins well beyond the normal use-by date. It often seems like the only musicians I followed through the 1990s were Tom Waits and Nick Cave.
By the time I broke the back of my thirties, and started this blogging caper, I figured that there was no point in fighting against myself, and I came back to pop music. Maybe the break did me good. My listening has moved forward, into European techno, new traditionalists (M Ward, Iron & Wine) and the second wave of New Pop (Rachel Stevens, Sally Shapiro, Kathy Diamond, Robyn, etc), and backward, to the music of the seventies that I had previously summarily dismissed, cloaked as I was in my post-punk straight jacket. And there sit the nineties, unexplored and without any place in my heart. Maybe I didn't miss anything. And yet entire fields of music, much of it held up, talisman-like, by today's respected music commentators, draws a blank. Pavement. The Pixies. Throwing Muses. The Beastie Boys. Britpop of every hue. This is where Darren can perform his most important service. He knows which stones to leave unturned and which to throw through my window.
"Zombie", then, it seems to me, sits somewhere between, say, U2 in its Irishness and its anthemicness, and Nirvana in its opening guitar sludge/buzz and its quite/loud dichotomy. I don't know that I could ever grow to love a song like this, but I imagine that every day radio stations all around the world play songs many times worse.
[Editor's Note: the above narrative is not entirely free of artistic licence. In fact, by the second half of the 1990s I was alive to the possibilities of, at the very least, Tortoise, Stereolab, and Belle and Sebastian. And if it took good people like Bart to steer me on that course, I nevertheless was prepared to grab those balls and run with them.]
