Why was 90s pop music so preachy??
This was not a decade where we stuck to the rivers and the lakes that we were used to.
I recently finished reading Chuck Klosterman’s book The Nineties, and, perhaps not surprisingly, I loved every bit of it. I turned ten years old in 1990. I was 19 when the 90s ended. I was more or less of an age to remember things throughout the decade, and of course, it’s the earliest decade I can say that about. So this book was already teed up to be one giant nostalgia fest for me. News events, music, movies, odd forgotten cultural moments -- it’s all there, and it’s great.
The book makes a nice point early on about how we think of generations and the decades they go with as having their own distinct identity. As in – Boomers are this way, Gen X is that way, and Millennials are something else. The Eighties were full of corporate bigwigs in fancy cars, but the Seventies were more fun and everyone danced disco. But of course, that’s nonsense. There are millions of people who are Boomer-aged, and many of them lived lives in the 70s and 80s that were just their own and didn’t fit some stereotype. Some boomers today are compassionate and hard-working and generous and thoughtful and they keep up with new ideas and new technologies, and others are absolutely not that and they fit the Ok, Boomer label that the internet is so obsessed with. Same with Gen X — sure, Reality Bites was definitely a thing, and I love the aesthetic that movie tried to embody (Kicking and Screaming was honestly a better movie, tho). But it’s not like everyone was a slacker who thought the whole world was full of fake losers and thus hated anyone who could be accused of “selling out.” That was just the 90s Gen X vibe – and vibes aren’t universal.
It’s ironic1 though that for a decade that was supposed to embody the Gen X attitude of being totally disengaged and not caring about anything, so much of the pop music at the time was over-the-top preachy, moralistic, and lecturing about social issues. Everyone in the 90s wanted to care less, and god forbid you got caught out being earnest and sincere about something. Except for Top 40 musicians, who apparently climbed up on their high horse and didn’t come down. Klosterman doesn’t really mention this in his book (and I wish he did), but when you stop to think about it, the conclusion is kinda inescapable. Just to throw out a non-exhaustive list of examples:
TLC — Waterfalls. The preachy-ness of this song is just epic. This is a song about the dangers of drug use, dealing drugs, and promiscuity. The latter point is only really evident if you see the video, but the song’s message is literally don’t go chasing things for fun or give in to temptation, because you’ll end up with HIV and die.
The Cranberries — Zombie. How this song was a hit in multiple countries all over the world I have no idea, because the lyrics are a trite, holier-than-thou “sectarian violence is bad” sermon to everyone in Northern Ireland. They lay it on pretty thick.
10,000 Maniacs. Too many super preachy songs here to list, but I’m thinking specifically of Don’t Talk (spousal abuse and alcoholism); What’s the Matter Here (child abuse); and Candy Everybody Wants (which is kind of just a generic screed against all the sex and violence on that’s on tv these days). Again — not surprising that songs like these exist, I suppose — but these people were in their 20s when they wrote all this! What’s with all the jaded cynicism that the world is going to hell? And they were a main stream pop band, not some Christian rock group no one had ever heard of.
Soul Asylum — Runaway Train. This was a one hit wonder you may not have heard of, but it’s all the more reason why it sticks out. If your band is only going to have one song that makes it big, why would the song be about kids who go missing and teenagers who run away from home? To their credit, the music video for this song was kind of a PSA for trying to find specific runaway kids, which I guess is good.
Pearl Jam — Jeremy & Alive. Pearl Jam has a child trauma two-for here with these songs. They’re both really on the same theme, but the basic idea is that emotionally and physically abused kids with traumatic childhoods later act out that trauma in violent ways. Both of these songs were huge hits. Again.. kinda heavy stuff to be writing for radio-friendly pop music.
Phil Collins. Too many to list here. Homelessness is bad. Someone should really do something about it. I’m Phil Collins, and I’m disappointed in all of you.
Michael Jackson. Heal the World. Man in the Mirror. Black or White. The guy liked to preach words of profound moral conviction a lot. The less said about this the better. Moving on.
Hootie & the Blowfish — Drowning. This was by no means Hootie’s biggest hit, but it was a single in 1995 and you still occasionally hear it as background music in the grocery store. The song was kind of an angry cry of “why is there still such a thing as racism?”2 The song doesn’t really have an answer, but it does contain the line, “Why is there a rebel flag hanging from the statehouse walls” — which, of course, was a reference to the fact that South Carolina flew the confederate flag over their state capitol until 2015.
Some of these were really good songs! Some of them also have really good messages. But you get the idea. The sheer breadth of righteous social issues that you were confronted with on the radio in the 90s was intense. Drugs. Sex & violence. Sectarian warfare. Homelessness. Child abuse. Racism. All of it was fair game for Top 40 radio. It was as if every DJ in America was doing double-duty as a youth group pastor.3
So I’m left asking — what happened? Why did artists in the 90s feel compelled to write so many songs like this, and why did it all stop? In the modern era, I can think of Beyonce’s Lemonade and a few Lady Gaga songs that count as being social justice-oriented attempts at making pop music. But are there any others? It’s not as if the 2020s are a time when we don’t really talk about social justice. In fact we talk about it a hell of a lot more than we did in the 90s. We live in an era where everything has a political valence, and even just the casually-engaged consumer of pop culture knows quite a bit about BLM, transgender issues, mass incarceration, climate change, systemic racism, undocumented immigration, gun violence, etc. And then there was the fact that we actually lived through four years of what’s his name as president. But somehow none of these considerations really made it into pop music? Why?
Somebody (like Chuck Klosterman) who’s way better than I am at pop culture psychoanalysis should really weigh in on this. I can’t begin to formulate an answer myself, except to say that I do remember the 90s, and it was weird. For all the jaded “yeah whatever man” attitude that the kids aspired to, there was still this pervasive undercurrent of like … judgmental, condescending church camp moralism. Maybe that’s just what I saw from my own vantage point growing up in rural southwest Missouri, where the Christian bible belt culture was so strong — but I don’t think so. It just seemed like parents were always seriously worked up over sex and bad words on tv and a lot of other stuff that would leave us scratching our heads today. The mid-80s had Tipper Gore testifying before Congress and lobbying for the “explicit content” label on music, and the 2000s had Janet Jackson nipplegate, and between these two cultural moments sat the 90s, where we took all of this stuff SO seriously. I guess maybe viewed through that lens, the preachy moralistic pop music thing makes some sense.
Excellent 90s word.
In another supremely ironic commentary on racism in the 90s, Hootie had this song on their debut album, but the record label insisted that the album artwork not show any clear images of the band, because they wanted to hide the fact that Darius Rucker was black. Unbelievable.
Maybe this also explains the popularity of Joan Osborne’s insipid What if God was One of Us? I always hated that song.