Sweating to the oldies (some thoughts on music from the 1990s)

Hi, blog! I thought you were dead.

The reason I'm getting in touch is that I've had some thoughts coalescing around the topic of music from the 1990s, which were my high school years.

The capstone that made me think about writing this was a Mary Chapin Carpenter (MCC) concert that I went to last night at Massey Hall. It was actually a joint concert between Brandy Clark (who I know more as a songwriter than a singer) and Ms. Carpenter. They shared about equal solo stage time with one set following the other and some songs together at the end. Very good concert, and amazingly (at the request of the artists) hardly anyone had their phones out. I can't remember the last time that was the case.

But that's not my point.

Although I was aware of her and consider MCC an artist of the 1990s, I didn't start listening to her until later in her career, after she'd left the more country-pop sound behind and moved on to singer-songerwriter folk. It was probably around the time of the "Ashes and Roses" album, although I moved into her back catalogue after that. I'd known people that listened to her in the past but her original sound didn't (and still doesn't) appeal to me much. I have not listened much to her earlier albums and prefer those songs interpreted through the lens of the her current style, which she's done on a couple of albums.

Case in point: my favourite songs of her are aligned to "Mrs. Hemingway", "Sometimes Just the Sky", or "Chasing What's Already Gone" rather than songs like the earlier "Down at the Twist and Shout" that a lot of the concert crowd went nuts for.

And, Brandy Clark? I briefly listened to country-pop artists like Collin Raye, Deana Carter, Kenny Chesney, and a few others back in the 90s, before getting myself back on the straight and narrow. So, I'm not a big country-pop listener but I still have a few select "likes" from the genre whose new music I always listen to and often buy, such as Kacey Musgraves (for /with (?) whom Brandy Clark has written numerous songs). But I liked Brandy Clark's set.

So, anyway... it got me thinking about all of the 1990s artists that became accessible to me in the same way that MCC did.

To start, from an unreliable memory, I'd say that my reliable go-tos active in the 1990s that I still listen to were:

• Morrissey
• The inimitable Morrissey. Unbelievably, even though I grew up in the UK, I was not a fan of The Smiths before I was a fan of Morrissey. When I went into their back catalogue after discovering Morrissey, I only recognized exactly one song ("Sheila Takes a Bow", which must have had significant radio play around the age I started paying attention). I became a fan of Morrissey around 1992-1993 based on radio play; the time of the "Your Arsenal" album. Had not heard of him before then.
• Tori Amos
• Tori Amos was a detour as well, but contained within the 1990s. Her most prominent albums were in early-mid 1990. I first became a fan around the time of Choirgirl Hotel, released in 1998, and came to like all of the back and forward catalogue, but not at the time the earlier albums were released.
• Sting
• Sting was obviously a pre-90s act, but I caught onto him in the 90s and still listen regularly today.
• Pet Shop Boys
• Also a pre-90s act, but they have continued strong output ever since they debuted. One of their best albums was released in the 1990s ("Very"), though for me some of their best albums were also released in the 2010s.

• Pearl Jam
• One of the few grunge acts I liked from the beginning, but I only ever go back regularly to their first album. Grunge was not as big as we think it was during the 90s - look at the 1990s charts for proof. But if you were in high school it was big.
• Lifehouse
• They came into the mainstream in 1999 and they are one of my favourite bands today (along with Jason Wade's solo output). In my mind, they are a crypto-Christian rock band - listen to "Everything", "Storm", and "Flight" (three songs that span 1999 to 2015) and try to deny that there are spiritual elements to those songs. Their music and image is just so wholesome.

But there are so many other bands that I wasn't interested in at their peak that I caught up with later, and it mostly revolves around bands you'd call grunge:

• Oasis
• OK, I still don't like them much, but I listen to them occasionally now and I never listened to them in the 1990s at their peak. I just shut my ears when "Wonderwall" was constantly on the radio and played by peers. I didn't and still don't like that song and it closed me off to whatever else they were doing.
• Smashing Pumpkins
• I recognize many of their songs from the first few notes just from being exposed to the metaphorical second-hand smoke of them in high school. I was not interested. And by the end of my university days in the early 2000s I had Machina - the first album of theirs that I bought (because it was cheap and I wanted to try it!) on repeat for what felt like an entire semester. I've since gone to their back and forward catalogue and can appreciate most of it (thought my affinity is still for post-2000, except for a few hits).
• Porcupine Tree
• This band came out of nowhere for me. Formed in 1987, I had never heard of them until their "Fear of a Blank Planet" album, released in 2007, and I didn't discover it until 2011. Most people have still not heard of them, even though they sold out big concert halls (and did so again in Toronto in a recent a one-off reunion tour). Incredibly, they'd mostly broken up by the time I discovered them, and then I moved onto frontman Steven Wilson's excellent solo career who may be a little more recognized but not much.
• Radiohead
• Another one that I was not interested in when they were big but caught up to some time later and like most of their catalogue now. Can't remember where.

It's interesting to me that this happened with so many 90s bands, and isn't really nostalgia. You'd have to be listening to this music because of the memories it evoked for that to be the case. I'm just listening to it because I like it. The memories of the music that I have, if I have any, are not bad but they're more  a shade of bad than they are of good.

So, just to prove I'm not the 1990s version of a Rolling Stone album reviewer (where only Paul Simon or the Rolling Stones will do), I do have some more recent likes and I will list a few of them for balance

• Sophie Hutchings (Australian - contemporary pianist) sample
• ELIO (Canadian - (catchy) pop) sample
• Röyksopp (Norwegian - electronic) - almost classifies as 90s, but the first commercial album was released in 2001 sample
• Ólafur Arnalds (Iceland - modern instrumental) sample
• Nils Frahm (Germany - modern instrumental) sample
• PinkPantheress (British... TikTok music?) sample
• Riverside (Polish - prog rock, for lack of a better term) sample
• Katatonia (Swedish - melodic metal) sample
• Opeth (Swedish - reformed death jazz/metal?) sample
• Jason Wade (Lighthouse) sample
• David Douglas (Dutch (I think) - electronic) sample
• Boards of Canada (Scottish (!) downtempo electronic) sample

Lots more, but that's good for now.

Oh, wait... I forgot Nirvana.

OK... Nirvana.

I did not like Nirvana until about 5 days ago. I still do not like "Feels Like Teen Spirit" - this has about the same effect on me as "Wonderwall" - but I've lately gone fully into most of the stuff on other albums (particularly the Unplugged album, which sounds timeless to me), am reading one of the definitive Kurt Cobain biographies.

So, there's my story, book-ended by Mary Chapin Carpenter and Nirvana. Imagine that.

fin.

Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada (2025 - ?)

 I hardly ever write here anymore, but you already knew that (if you - readers, that is - still exist).

But, I wanted to scribble down a few thoughts about our new Canadian prime minister and the ongoing fentanyl/tariff/NATO spending/governor Trudeau/that woman/51st state dispute with the US.

First, it's the first full day of Mark Carney's time as Canadian prime minister and these are some immediate thoughts on the landscape:

1. I've seen otherwise-sympathetic media commentary talking about how "boring" or "politically unskilled" he seems. The latter is understandable, although I don't know how you have the career that he's had, working across the political divide in different political cultures, without being politically-skilled. Maybe they are talking about his abilities in retail politics. But it nags me that some people are looking for our prime minister to be entertaining. Donald Trump is entertaining. Boris Johnson is entertaining. Javier Milei is entertaining. Surely there is room for leaders that are not entertaining. Entertainment is cheap but good leaders are not; can't we just have leaders that are good leading and trust them to get on with it?
   
   
2. Why is he so euro-centric? I found it difficult to accept that, while running to be Liberal leader, he was off giving more substantive interviews to places like the BBC in the UK than he did to any of the Canadian media. And now, as leader, his first trip as Canadian prime minister is to the UK and France when most Canadians barely know him at all. How about touring Canada before going abroad (again)?
   
   
3. The only thing that I can really call out as being different about his plans to date are those about splitting the budget into operational and capital buckets. Without deep operational (government administration) cuts, that doesn't change anything unless you are going to use it to blow out the deficit even more, but justifying it by saying that it's for growth. Even then, we've had infrastructure banks in various forms for a long time that have not been highly-effective. But, if anyone has the ability to surprise in this area then I think it must be him (though this is tempered by point #5).
   
   
4. The expediency to which he came to this position is mysterious to me. The conspiratorial part of my brain wonders if there's a non-democratic national desire to have this man in power to restore a business-as-usual-in-Canada program. The Conservative party were starting to sound a bit too populist. The frequent presence of Jean Chretien around Mark Carney when he was not visible around Justin Trudeau is a symbol to me, like a raven in winter. As a result, maybe the Canada/US divisions were amped up to give him a cause? I don't know. It was very neat.
   
   
5. I've become more conscious recently that hardly anyone I listen to about anything is actually involved in primary production of anything. They are either from thinktanks, news organizations, academics, content creators, political organizations, or banks. The number of people making money just writing and talking about stuff must be unbelievable. Do most of these people understand the real world, I wonder... and when the real world diverges from their understanding, how long does it take for them to realize it?

Second, on Canada/US relations:

1. I think it's a mistake to try and forge closer relationships with the UK and EU than we have with the US. The US is on the same continent as us, the easiest to trade with, are critical to our mutual defence, and are not going anywhere. While true that the current leadership is looking difficult to deal with (and it's not just one man; it is a movement), we should recognize that the UK and EU have never seen Canada as a peer or critical nation and if they run into critical political and/or economic problems (as they seem to be doing), Canada will be an afterthought. We have to make the US relationship work and it has to be our most important relationship. But, it still is and will continue to be; a lot of what's going on is temporal political and media noise (it's also jingoistic).
    
   
2. It is hard to understand what will improve the soured trade relationships with the US. It is an erratic and volatile conversation. Via tariffs and the resultant economic cost, the US are essentially putting a price on various perceived transgressions such as imbalanced trade (which is not as imbalanced as they say, but has become less-balanced since the pandemic), insufficient commitment regarding NATO spending, drug control, and money laundering. Now that these things have a price, we are more incentivized to tackle them. That's a very business-centric approach to relations.
   
   
3. Based on the more serious commentary I've seen on this, the US are trying to tackle an out-of-control deficit that will get more out of control the more the government is forced to refinance cheap, short-term debt taken on during the pandemic at higher rates or longer terms. That is what the tariffs are ultimately about; they are a new revenue source. And it's not a mystery because Trump created the External Revenue Service early on his presidency to collect them. Although the US has made their own political decisions that what social programs they provide to their citizens, why would anyone expect another country that is faced with such a problem to subsidize the defence and trade of countries that have more generous social programs? It bothers me that there isn't much visible self-reflection in Canada or Europe about their own role in this rift.
   
   
4. The notion that deficits don't matter has bothered me since it came into the scene because I know that they don't matter until they do. When deficits do come to matter it requires a drastic response that too many people will not acknowledge was tied to their not caring about deficits for so long. Canada and Europe are able to afford social programs that the US doesn't have because they rely on the US to disproportionately foot certain bills, with defence being the main one. It reminds me of the Alberta-Quebec imbalance to some extent, where the latter has many social programs that the former doesn't have because they are able to wield national political influence that forces proceeds of Alberta energy to subsidize Quebec while also criticizing Alberta for the things that provide that subsidy.
   
   
5. I can send $800 US worth of goods to the US without incurring duties or tax. I can only bring $40 CAN worth of goods from the US into Canada without incurring tax. There's an imbalance there, just as there's an imbalance that lets Canada collect HST on digital services that Canada had no hand in producing. The US would be right to have concerns about that. But, regardless, I have never liked the idea of cross-border shopping, and never do it (unless it is online and for something I can't get in Canada). It was never good for Canada to shop cross-border so you don't get kudos for stopping it for the time being. Many people that do it exhibit the characteristics in the above point: criticizing the US and talking up Canada while shopping in the US because it's cheaper because of many of the underlying currents in the country that you don't like. Unreliable narrators.

So, ultimately, I wonder if the US having put a price on non-compliance, whether it's going to be cheaper to move toward compliance. If our GDP is going to suffer by 1-2% because of tariffs, as some economists predict, then would it be better for Canada to simply make their 2% NATO defence spending commitment sooner? And since much of any defence spending will go to the US military industrial complex and feed needed revenues into the US (not to mention supporting their industrial base and improving the perception of fairness, which are two other key interests of the Trump presidency), would something like that be enough to make the tariff situation mostly go away? I would not be surprised if it did. The fentanyl issue is just the basis for emergency moves that allow the president to act unilaterally.

I assume that's why Mark Carney is going to the UK and Europe first: to get the background (scuttlebutt) on their very active US negotiations over NATO and Ukraine. In that light, it makes sense and it's the right priority. I just wonder why he would not be transparent about that. There's no reason for secrecy. I hope that he has an interest in Canada for Canada's sake and not mostly as a chess piece in a global chess game. Given his background and the natural inclinations of someone involved in global finance, I don't have a lot of reason to hope, but he can still be good for Canada wherever his allegiances lie.

Whatever happens, I won't demand that he be entertaining.