Like most people, most snobs i guess, since i'm probably kind of one at least a little bit, i never gave Blind Melon much of a chance. Back in my college days, my first college days anyway, i was diving into the dollar bin at Half-Price Books almost weekly, and buying almost anything recognizable. It probably stemmed from a desire to outdo my dad's music collection at the time, and while i've certainly won that race by now, i'm not sure what it's gotten me. That was so many layers of digression we could call it a cake and it'd be a full meal.
So during those halcyon times, on one of those aforementioned expeditions, i fished out Blind Melon's self-titled first album. It never got much play, other than to slide No Rain onto my obligatory 90s alternative playlists. If i listened the whole way through the album, it never resonated with me. But for some reason, i've always been a completist, a habit i'm kind of trying to curb nowadays, and i also collected the followup, Soup. If Soup ever even touched my CD player, i do not recall it.
But here i sit, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Fifteen, an avid reader of The Onion's more serious but still foul-mouthed entertainment arm, AV Club, consuming a series of articles taking a look back at the world of twenty years ago, and a long article extolling Soup appears. I was more than a little surprised; i had previously felt of Blind Melon that sugary, pop-infused hippie vibe Steven Shehori describes at the end of the article's first paragraph. It didn't seem like the sort of entertainment The AV Club would, well, entertain.
I read the full article and i felt a little bad about my treatment of the band over the years, by which i mean completely ignoring them save for their one diabetic coma ballad. There was clearly more to unpack here. So i set about doing that.
The Mobyfort, of course, still contains virtually every CD i've ever purchased; when i was in high school i made the mistake of selling off an album i didn't like that would later become very important to me (Boys for Pele by Tori Amos). I simply hadn't understood it at the time. So i had vowed to never make that mistake again, a promise to myself which has paid off on more than one occasion. cKy, for example, had an album i didn't appreciate when i first bought it; since a track popped up when my iTunes was on shuffle one day, they've become one of my favorite bands. Elastica falls into this category. I'm probably going to have to write something up about Sunny Day Real Estate this year, too, because damn. So, i put on all of the Blind Melon i had and listened to it.
A couple of times.
That AV Club article was pretty eye-opening to me. Soup deserved to be a classic. It's truly saddening that the politics of the record industry did to that band what they did, although wholly unsurprising. Toes Across The Floor should have been Blind Melon's big 90s hit, over No Rain. There's so much raw power in that song that i wasn't expecting. Even Galaxie, the only charting track from the album, could've taken that honor under better circumstances. It may have fared better overseas, but the reactions at home were still not what the band deserved. Shannon Hoon's death was every bit a blow to music as a whole as Kurt Cobain's was; we just never saw it that way before. All in all, though, there's not much i can say here that the AV Club didn't say better.
I'm gonna go listen to this in my van for a while.
So during those halcyon times, on one of those aforementioned expeditions, i fished out Blind Melon's self-titled first album. It never got much play, other than to slide No Rain onto my obligatory 90s alternative playlists. If i listened the whole way through the album, it never resonated with me. But for some reason, i've always been a completist, a habit i'm kind of trying to curb nowadays, and i also collected the followup, Soup. If Soup ever even touched my CD player, i do not recall it.
But here i sit, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Fifteen, an avid reader of The Onion's more serious but still foul-mouthed entertainment arm, AV Club, consuming a series of articles taking a look back at the world of twenty years ago, and a long article extolling Soup appears. I was more than a little surprised; i had previously felt of Blind Melon that sugary, pop-infused hippie vibe Steven Shehori describes at the end of the article's first paragraph. It didn't seem like the sort of entertainment The AV Club would, well, entertain.
I read the full article and i felt a little bad about my treatment of the band over the years, by which i mean completely ignoring them save for their one diabetic coma ballad. There was clearly more to unpack here. So i set about doing that.
The Mobyfort, of course, still contains virtually every CD i've ever purchased; when i was in high school i made the mistake of selling off an album i didn't like that would later become very important to me (Boys for Pele by Tori Amos). I simply hadn't understood it at the time. So i had vowed to never make that mistake again, a promise to myself which has paid off on more than one occasion. cKy, for example, had an album i didn't appreciate when i first bought it; since a track popped up when my iTunes was on shuffle one day, they've become one of my favorite bands. Elastica falls into this category. I'm probably going to have to write something up about Sunny Day Real Estate this year, too, because damn. So, i put on all of the Blind Melon i had and listened to it.
A couple of times.
That AV Club article was pretty eye-opening to me. Soup deserved to be a classic. It's truly saddening that the politics of the record industry did to that band what they did, although wholly unsurprising. Toes Across The Floor should have been Blind Melon's big 90s hit, over No Rain. There's so much raw power in that song that i wasn't expecting. Even Galaxie, the only charting track from the album, could've taken that honor under better circumstances. It may have fared better overseas, but the reactions at home were still not what the band deserved. Shannon Hoon's death was every bit a blow to music as a whole as Kurt Cobain's was; we just never saw it that way before. All in all, though, there's not much i can say here that the AV Club didn't say better.
I'm gonna go listen to this in my van for a while.
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