1990s hypes revisited - loose series installmant 01 - "Easy Listening"

firefinga

Well-known member
1990s hypes revisited - loose series installment 01 - "Easy Listening"

I am going through my old music mags I started to buy as a teenager meaning in the mid90s (around 94, 95) and it's astonishing what trends I had already forgotten about which got featured there. So, anybody remebers "Easy Listening"?


I actually liked this. And still do, to be honest.
 
Last edited:

Leo

Well-known member
or was that jimi tenor? same thing basically

i actually like jimi tenor, kind of a goofball but a legit jazzhead who started out making weird electronic stuff on sahko. then put out stuff with african musicians, tony allen on drums, etc.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
51QJXSZ2Y1L._SX377_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I think this book from 1993 might be a start to the easy listening revival (or at least part of it becoming popular). There are already people moaning in it about record collectors buying stuff and the prices going up.

It's quite good and I did like it when the cooler indie / post punk people I knew in London got into lounge stuff. People threw fun parties and did that charity shop chic thing really well.

It did end up with Nouvelle Vague in the noughties though and then all those shit dreamy cover versions on John Lewis ads with someone singing a punk song with a ukelele. And I would argue dross like "Guilty Pleasures" and the rehabilitation of pomp rock like "Foreigner" et al. And the war in Syria.
 

firefinga

Well-known member
Good call, this book - which I also happen to have - was definitley helping to kickstart that Easy Listening trend. I also remember a deluge of compilation albums of tv themes or cheesy and/or obscure 60s and 70s movie scores were thrown onto the market around '95, '96.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
Industrial bods were doing the groundwork for nu-EZ years ahead of the 90s revivers


Gen P was going on about Les Baxter et al back in the early 80s

Well, RE/Search started as an industrial-culture magazine didn't it, before it got into the whole Mondo / Incredibly Strange Films / kitsch-music-salvage thing

Boyd Rice is another who has ironic love of kitsch - in his case, blander than bland Fifties-Sixties female pop which he compiled for the release Music For Pussycats. (One fears there's also an Aryan-womanhood subtext there as well)

https://www.discogs.com/Various-Boyd-Rice-Presents-Music-For-Pussycats/release/529814

Rice also put out an album with the title Music, Martinis and Misanthropy - featuring "restructurings" of songs by The Carpenters and Rod McKuen alongside lyrics with brutal Social Darwinist themes

You could probably file William Bennett of Whitehouse's love of Italodisco in this area

It's the same syndrome - the hardest-core realising that softness / sweetness is another kind of extreme
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I think with Rice it was just stuff he grew up with too? Or stuff that was hanging around in thrift stores.

You are right about that girl group comp, it’s pretty awful compared to the more well known stuff.

It’s weirdly monochrome still, all this industrial kitsch. “I’m not one dimensional - I like serial killers AND lounge music!”

In terms of 90s hypes RE/SEARCH’s “Modern Primitives” also massively amplified piercings and especially those thick black tribal tattoos.
 
Top