Tower of Sleep

Spin Doctors - two princes

So, Jen got this song stuck in her head last night and I got to thinking about how the 90’s were full of lightweight, upbeat, inoffensive guitar-pop and that this kind of music almost doesn’t exist anymore. There’s still Train and Maroon 5 and John Mayer, I guess, but they seem to come from a slicker stock. I feel like there was a particularly 90s brand of unpretentious goofiness, aimed at a mainstream audience (probably broad in age but still mainly white and middle-class) that was maybe not heavily invested in music fandom but enjoyed a catchy tune (perhaps best embodied by the Barenaked Ladies, but also including Cake, The Crash Test Dummies and real one-hit wonders like The Rembrandts and Deep Blue Something) that has passed out of the world. It’s hard to imagine the kind of person that would still want to make music like that. Sheltered college bros, I guess? I suppose that was always the main wellspring and audience for folky-bluesy middlebrow pop-rock. One of the less dramatic casualties of white rock’s loss of market dominance. Also, I guess there’s a fair bit of crossover between this variety of light pop and the full-on Phish-head jam band scene, which is self-sustaining enough to have carried on just fine on its own steam (or so I’m led to believe).