Off the Charts With Chris Dalla Riva
Chris mapped every #1 hit since 1958... but that means he missed the counterculture. On the final New Music DNA, I make him a mix that pairs '90s classics he missed with new artists they inspired.
listened to every single number one hit from the last 67 years.
I bolded that sentence very dramatically as if it’s supposed to be the impressive thing about what Chris did, but anybody can listen to a bunch of music, really. So let me try that again.
Chris Dalla Riva listened to every single number one hit, and then turned those songs into a dataset that he analyzed for patterns that mirrored the shifting American cultural landscape of the last seven decades.
This week, he’ll be publishing the fruits of that labor in his book, Uncharted Territory.
I wondered how and when it clicked for Chris that analyzing music statistically could actually deepen his appreciation of it emotionally.
He admits that although “there are many cases where using data to understand music makes no sense,” it still felt natural to combine the two. “Now that I work on data analytics for the music streaming service Audiomack, music and data are basically all that I think about.”
“I love the unquantifiable mystery of song." -
Chris wasn’t exactly entering the great unknown when he embarked on this listening journey. Like many of you, he grew up idolizing classic rock and playing in bands of his own.1
Still, there was no way his tastes weren’t going to expand by taking on a project of this magnitude. When I asked him to name a genre that took him completely by surprise, his reply was unqualified:
“Disco. I went in thinking that most of the genre was unoriginal and derivative, standing in contrast to the authenticity of rock music. But I came away loving much of the genre. Great disco music is almost unmatched.”
Curious what genre almost made Chris give up?
Our full interview will be up later this week.
But what about the genres that #1 songs couldn’t reveal?
As illuminating as the biggest hits of the better part of a century can be, the constraints of this undertaking meant that he left entire subcultures completely untouched. He told me as much:
“There are many musical movements from the 1990s that remain foreign to me. I’ve talked elsewhere about how the 1990s was a very weird decade, and I’d love to get more into that weirdness.”
Luckily, the weirdness of the ‘90s is what New Bands for Old Heads does best.
The ‘90s, Off the Charts
Some of the best and most culturally poignant music of the ‘90s never reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
That means Chris never had a chance to explore entire genres and subgenres that were not only hugely popular back in the ‘90s2, but are seeing a massive resurgence today. He was also too young to really appreciate them as they were emerging.
That’s why in this, the very last edition of New Music DNA, I thought I’d do something a little bit different.
This series is normally about mapping people’s personal music histories and crafting them mixtapes of new music to match. But for Chris, I figured it might be fun to pull together a playlist of the music that his book leaves out (for him), along with examples of some new music it inspired (for all of you).
Uncharted Territory is the view from the top of the Billboard. This playlist explores what was happening underneath.
I anticipatorily regret categorizing the below highlights by genre, because the protestations are already ringing in my ears. I know that “indie” and “alternative” are vague and encompass other genres I’m listing out. I know that some of the bands I’ve listed belong in multiple categories. Just relax and enjoy.
GRUNGE
Picture the flannel shirts and stringy hair first; fight over the actual musical definition later. Just about every band coming out of Seattle in the ‘90s was branded “grunge,” whether it had much of the trademark gritty distortion or not.3
old heads: Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Screaming Trees, Soundgarden, Hole
new bands: Mannequin Pussy, Die Spitz, Teenage Wrist, Static Dress
try this pair:
BRITPOP
We may not have cared about the beef between Oasis and Blur here in the US, but we sure were into lumping all their completely unrelated music into one tidy umbrella category. Just like Seattle with grunge, as long as it was from England it was Britpop: from the light psychedelia of Madchester bands, to Pulp’s pervy swagger, to Oasis’ ripoff of homage to the Beatles.
old heads: Oasis, Blur, Pulp, The Charlatans, Kula Shaker
new bands: Courting, Stone, Pastel
try this pair:
SHOEGAZE
Because the bands playing this distorted, “wall of sound” style of music spent so much time staring down at their pedals — where their shoes are! — a genre was born.
old heads: my bloody valentine, Ride, Lush, Slowdive, Smashing Pumpkins (yes, really)
new bands: Slow Crush, julie, Paper Lady, feeble little horse, NewDad
try this pair:
BIG BEAT
Maybe I should have called this section “rave” or “EDM",” but I couldn’t miss an opportunity to share the Big Beat Manifesto (big beats are the best, get high all the time).
This was a somewhat embarrassing but equally delightful time in our collective memory (that perhaps many of us would just as soon forget) where grown adults wore a lot of neon, did a lot of drugs, and listened to a lot of noisy techno that sampled some seriously nerdy movies.
old heads: The Crystal Method, Orbital, Fatboy Slim
new bands: …actually, there kind of aren’t any. Nobody is truly reviving big beats or breakbeat. Somebody prove me wrong? I found a scant few Australian artists.
try this pair:
TRIP HOP
If Big Beat was the music you were embarrassed to admit you liked, then Trip Hop was what you’d show off that you knew. This smooth, downtempo, ethereal electronica was for the bedroom, not the club. You were cool and mysterious for listening to it… until it became the theme song to House M.D., I guess.
old heads: Portishead, Tricky, Massive Attack
new bands: FKA Twigs, Dummy, Erika de Casier
try this pair:
TWEE
Long before Zooey Deschanel donned a cardigan on TV, her musical progenitors wore them on stage. Twee really does sound exactly how you think it does: quirky, jangly, low fidelity, a bit off key, and whimsical in tone.
old heads: The Field Mice, The Softies, Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, Bunnygrunt
new bands: The Umbrellas, Chime School, Jeanines, The Reds Pinks and Purples
try this pair:
SLACKER ROCK
Before Beck became a loser, there were all kinds of other washed out, lo-fi, mumbling, shaggy-haired stoners making the rounds on college radio.
old heads: Pavement, Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr., Guided by Voices
new bands: Kiwi Jr., Courtney Barnett, Horsegirl, Tiña
try this pair:
MISC. INDIE + ALTERNATIVE
A cheater’s genre, because I needed a place to lump all the rest of the college rock (Sonic Youth, Pixies) with “femme” alternative bands and singers (The Breeders, Veruca Salt, Letters to Cleo, Liz Phair) whose actual musical styles overlap too much — with each other and many of the others — for me to separate them out without having a minor panic attack.
I’ll skip ahead to some old/new pairings in this catch-all category.
//yo la tengo/BEAK>
Experimental/indie rock. Alt-folk, maybe. Shoegaze elements with motorik grooves.
//PJ Harvey/King Hannah
Avant rock. Blues rock. Gritty, dark, and emotional.
//Sonic Youth/Dry Cleaning
Noise rock. Disaffected. Insouciant and cool.
The Full Mixtape
I consider this particular playlist a public service, so unlike most, it is FREE. It follows an old song/new song structure, so do not shuffle it (at least, if you want it to make sense).
Please take a moment to share!
Also on Apple, SoundCloud, and YouTube.
Paid subscribers, you have access to all other playlists on the New Bands for Old Heads Directory.
You may also like…
Billboard actually introduced their “Alternative” charts in 1988 — you might say it’s when alternative went mainstream!
People who make a hobby of getting worked up on the internet seem to really enjoy spending time classifying bands into “real grunge” and “utter poseurs”';a game I absolutely refuse to participate in.
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Incredible! Cant wait to give this a deep listen.
The nineties were my era. I turned 18 the week Nevermind was released. Last year I read Mark Yarm's oral history of Grunge 'Everybody Loves Our Town', which opens with members of the U-Men grappling with the logistics of setting fire to a moat. After the U-Men imploded, a couple of them went on to play in Cat Butt, whose tour with L7 is legendary in a 'I can't believe nobody died' kind of way. I recommend Cat Butt's first and only album - the unpolished gem 'Journey to the Centre of...'
Reading the Yarm's book made me realise what a stranglehold the weekly music press in the UK held over who got publicity. There are bands mentioned in the book who played a key role in Grunge who I had never heard of.
One of the biggest what ifs in popular music, as far as I am concerned, is 'What if Andrew Wood hadn't OD'd? Mother Love Bone were geared up to be the first breakout band from Seattle, but their album 'Apple' and the Shine EP are stadium rock records. 'Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns' rules but it's nothing that you wouldn't have heard growing up in LA in the late 1980s. It makes me wonder, had Mother Love Bone not come to an abrupt end, would the other Seattle bands have changed their sound to fit their template, in the same way that a load of UK bands in the early 90s dramatically changed their image to fit in with Britpop?
The albums from the 90s that I still listen to regularly are surprising to me: Sharkboy's debut 'Matinee' still gets a lot of love, as does Delicatessen's second album 'Hustle Into Bed' (I still listen to 'Buy a Chance to Breathe' a lot). Gene's first album 'Olympian', Suede's debut and its successor 'Dog Man Star', and the first two Saint Etienne LPs - 'Fox Base Alpha' and 'So Tough' - all get regular airings. Then there are outliers like 'New Wave' and 'After Murder Park' by The Auteurs, the first two Tindersticks albums (both titled 'Tindersticks'), 'Pastoral Hide & Seek by The Gun Club, 'Mexican Moon' by Concrete Blonde, and 'Setting the Woods on Fire' by The Walkabouts.
The most obscure 90s release I still play is 'Firebombs' by Chicane who seemed poised for greater things but imploded before they could record their debut LP. The album compiles their EPs in one place. A few years later another artist began using Chicane as a moniker which effectively erased them from history.
The nineties were great decade for music - the last great decade in my opinion, though I am certain that we won't see eye to eye on that.