JOPLIN, Mo. —
For a couple years the fashions and trends of the ’90s have made a remarkable, if unsurprising, resurgence.
Obviously, there’s an argument to be made that 99 percent of American popular culture at this point is just a perennial reheating of the past, and the Internet has, rather than inspiring new, imaginative content, simply allowed us more ways to wallow in our nostalgia for stuff that was never as good as we actually remember.
I’ll admit I’m a little susceptible to this argument.
One only has to look at the current box office where every new movie appears to be either a sequel, reboot or film adaptation of a proven franchise to see Hollywood’s not exactly in love with fresh, commercially unproven content. On the other hand, I don’t think there’s been a better time to own a TV or a computing device capable of streaming content made for TV. So many great, original, well-written programs out there right now.
That said, the Summerland Tour will arrive in Tulsa, Okla. July 8, bringing Everclear, Lit, Sugar Ray, Gin Blossoms and Marcy Playground to the stage at the SpiritBank Event Center. And this has to mean something!
I think every ’90s band on the planet with more than five fans is touring, has recently toured or is musing the possibility of touring. I’m not complaining. I loved seeing two of my favorite bands, Pavement and Pulp, on their respective laudatory reunion laps. But I think this is the first time we’ve been confronted with the ’90s oldies package tour.
(Somewhere Smash Mouth is surely cursing Art Alexakis, lead singer for Everclear and organizer of the Summerland tour, for not calling them.)
I tend to think humankind is a relatively static species, and our capacity for nostalgia, or any other vice, remains constant. If the Internet’s changed anything, it’s that data miners can more easily exploit us or, to use softer language, market to us.
The Facebook fan page for Marcy’s Playground’s 1997 single “Sex and Candy” has 2,413 likes. That’s 2,408 more fans of that song than I would’ve guessed existed today, and that kind of data has to be useful when predicting the financial viability of a tour like Summerland.
I do worry what the tipping point is here, though. A realistic Tupac Shakur hologram performed at Coachella with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, a hologram of the deceased Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes will go on tour with a reunited TLC this summer and this week it was announced a Freddy Mercury “optical illusion” would perform with Queen in London. These are wondrous times, truly, but if our nostalgia isn’t even constrained by the physical inevitability of death itself, at what point do we even bother wanting something new?
Jack White: “Blunderbuss” Rating: C+
Jack White is as famous as ever. As one half of The White Stripes, he is one of the few breakout acts of the ‘00s whose popularity hasn’t waned over the subsequent ten years.
The ’00s were a very boom-and-bust decade for new music acts, the Internet somehow both intensifying a band’s initial impact and shortening its lifespan as people move on to the next thing.
Perhaps White has endured because he never seemed to belong in this century in the first place, preferring old-fashioned songs about old-fashioned subject matters and actively engaging in such outdated rock-and-roll concepts as mythmaking.
Regardless of the reason, White seems to be enjoying a moment: his first solo album has topped the charts, earning almost universal critical praise; he owns a thriving niche record label; is an in-demand producer; and, in a remarkable New York Times Magazine profile last month, it was revealed he is good friends with Bob Dylan.
It doesn’t get much better for a rock star than popularity and enduring cultural prominence. I just wish I enjoyed “Blunderbuss” more. I concede it’s a sturdy, well made album, but after more than two dozen listens, nothing hooks me as hard as The White Stripes.
“Sixteen Saltines” is the closest the album comes to a primal Stripes barnburner, but even the softer, country-inflected songs aren’t as interesting as their Stripes analogues such as “Hotel Yorba” or “Sister, Do You Know My Name?”
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Jeremiah Tucker
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