1997: A year boomers and popists can be proud of

I can't remember what made my top ten list of 1997. Although I was the arts editor for my college paper, I (briefly) assigned more reviews than wrote them. Radiohead's OK Computer was released in the U.S. roughly ten years to the day, but even then I wasn't too fond of it, or of Bob Dylan's Time Out Of Mind (that year's Pazz & Jop poll winner). Janet Jackson's The Velvet Rope got too much credit for opinions on bondage and lesbianism as dilettantish as Rhythm Nation 1814's political commentary. Pavement's Brighten The Corners, Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott's Supa Dupa Fly, and Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out, however, remain touchstones (I didn't even listen to those Yo La Tengo, Biggie, and Arto Lindsay records until the following year); and, although I'd bought Tusk that February, I must credit The Dance for transforming me into a rabid Fleetwood Mac fan despite its irrelevance as a musical statement. I'm sorry I loved David Bowie's Earthling; I'm pretty sure it made my list.

In this retrospective, David Browne posits 1997 as a crucial pivot: the beginning of pop music's Roaring Twenties, an era characterized by ten million-plus sales of N'Sync, Backstreet Boys, Britney, and Eminem albums. I've tried to ignore Browne's pissy equivocations, like when he refers to this era as one "which only the most hard-core Justin Timberlake fan would recall fondly" or lets stand without comment a record company apparatchik's wheeze that 1997 "was a repudiation of all that 1967 San Francisco rock credibility" (a better repudiation would be to take the latest issue of Rolling Stone and crap all over it). The list of number ones that year corresponds with my recollections: 1997 may have been a pivot, but the big hits were a monochromatic bunch. We got artist-of-the-year Puff Daddy holding the Top Five hostage for more than nine months, a Hanson one-off they never duplicated, a Spice Girls one-off they hope to duplicate in 2008, and the second time Elton John's lugubrious tribute to another dead airhead hits the Top Ten, now riding on the coattails of yet another lugubrious tongue-kiss of a ballad. I don't remember those as well as the first stirrings of a 1983 revival, inaugurated during the early summer when Blur's "Song 2" and the first of Third Eye Blind's wonderful trifecta of hits ("Semi-Charmed Life") made the cars go boom. You had Sugar Ray's "Fly" channelling Dexy's Midnight Runners, Chumbawumba's "Tumbthumping" summoning "Rock the Casbah" -- geez, even Toni Braxton got into the act; "Un-break My Heart" has more in common with the histrionics of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" than with, I dunno, Anita Baker. Fisher-Price trip-hop like "Six Feet Underground" has as much in common with Romeo Void and the Human League as it does with Tricky.

In other words, even though I prefer the next two years, 1997 was pretty good pop-wise and about what you'd expect on the Grand Artistic Statements side...but it's hard to tell from Browne's sorry essay. Is he writing to gratify the prejudices of The New York Times' aging boomer readers -- the ones whose kids won't touch a print copy (and, as this article makes clear, for good reason) of the newspaper? I can't tell if he's being ironic when he calls 1997 "the last golden age of pop" when he's holding his noise while describing how supposed excrescences like Spice Girls kept -- well, who exactly off the charts? What exactly are Browne-nian exemplars of sixties cultural values? What kind of alternative universe is he positing? Time Out Of Fucking Mind won Album of the Year at the Grammys, months after a Top Ten debut and platinum sales!