It seems that in the last couple of years, more and more bands from the 1990s are coming back, either taking the reunion route like Pavement, Chavez, the long-inactive Superchunk, and even (God help us all) Soundgarden, or releasing new material long after their last memorable hit. Nada Surf, which you probably know from their 1996 summer anthem “Popular,” have actually built a fairly successful indie career over the past decade and released a new album this week, The Stars Are Indifferent To Astronomy. Their resurgence got us thinking about other ’90s one-hit wonders whose music is worth revisiting — our list of nine to add to your iPod is after the jump.
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Recently we read yet another article about the word “like” as used by those darn kids today. We feel like we’ve been reading incarnations of this article since we became aware of the phenomenon, a verbal tic that, like it or not, has been more or less embraced by youths and even adults since the ’60s. However you characterize it — a “filler” word, a nonsense qualifier, or, as we used to insist to our parents, a way of tempering whatever you’re talking about — it’s like, pretty much here to stay.
For proof, we’ve put together a brief history of the most prominent appearances of the “like” craze in pop culture, from a 1920s New Yorker cartoon to Clueless. Indeed, almost as soon as the word rose to prominence, the pop cultural references began to be self-aware, if not flat-out self-mocking. Shaggy’s surfer-dude lingo is already half-ironic, and of course by the time Zappa got his hands on “Valspeak” in the early ’80s it was already something to be cruelly satirized. However, this hasn’t staunched the flow, and teenagers continue to use the word willy nilly, no matter how their teachers wail. Click through to see some of our favorite ‘like’ abusers in pop culture, and let us know how you feel about the word in the comments.
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With Slim Shady making his airwave-monopolizing return, as well as our other recent check-ups on ’90s alternative kids and Nickelodeon stars, we thought it might be worth a trip down recent memory lane to trace another group of 1990s icons. That’s right, it’s class-reunion time, hip-hop edition. What’s Doug E. Fresh doing? Has Sir Mix-a-lot expanded his position on butt-bouncing? Can we still not touch this, MC Hammer? The answers to all your burning questions about the hip-hop stars of 20 years ago, after the jump.
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Yanni will always have the Acropolis, the Taj Mahal and Beijing’s Forbidden City. But when it comes to performing in the shadow of major historic landmarks, Brooklyn’s own David Fishel has the New Age pianist beat by a long shot. In the past two years, Fishel has danced at more than 50 sites across Europe and the United States, with landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the Golden Gate Bridge and Times Square providing the backdrop to his performances. He films all of his dances and posts them on a site called Davey Dance Blog. Read More »
