Anything On Your Mind?
1993, my sophomore/junior year in college. At the start of my junior year, I enrolled in Operating Systems and Computer Architecture at the same time, which everybody would tell you is a mistake, as those were widely considered to be the hardest classes in the program. Not only that, I missed the first day of Architecture when they assigned groups, and the professor just told me I had to do everything on my own. I think that was an implicit “you should drop”, but whatever, I decided to go ahead with it. So I was buried with school work. Added to the stuff at the radio station, and I was kind of a mess. But on top of that, I also made a new friend Erich (and I genuinely don’t remember how I did so) who not only played my kind of games, but also played Bridge. That’s a game that my friends and I had taught ourselves in high school, and I was excited to resume playing it. It’s not a game that very many people of my generation knew how to play.
I joined a regular game with him, which often took place in the hallway outside of his dorm room. Well, outside of the dorm room where he was staying. He didn’t like his roommate, so he was crashing in the room of a woman on the 5th floor of my dorm. Their relationship was inscrutable but not really any of my business, other than the time I found them using my copy of Minor Threat’s Complete Discography as an ashtray. Good bit, but not great for the CD!
Whatever his living arrangement, I was on the 6th floor, so that was convenient. It was a little odd that he was there, since the floors were gender segregated, but again, not really my business. Anyway, one evening, we were playing in the hallway, and one of the people across the hall was sitting outside her room working on architecture homework. Which meant hot gluing balsa wood together. Clearly bored, she watched us play some, asked questions, and even after the the game wrapped up, we continued to chat. At one point, we hot glued some change to the stairwell.
That’s how I met Megan: playing cards in her hallway while she was gluing things together. I tried to figure out an excuse to talk to her again, and a little while later, the perfect idea occurred to me. See, I was assembling some miniatures for Man o’ War, the sailing game from Games Workshop that I absolutely loved. I managed to superglue myself to a model, and I didn’t have any solvent to free myself. “Oh!”, I think. Maybe Megan from the other night has some nail polish remover! I could go ask? And so, the smoothest re-introduction ever ensued: I went downstairs, glued to a toy, to ask someone I’d talked to once (who was not wearing any nail polish when I did talk to her) if she had nail polish remover, to help me deal with the toy which, again, I’d glued to myself. Friends, this is not a great way to impress somebody. Also, she didn’t have any nail polish remover, so on top of feeling like a huge idiot, I also still had a model glued to my hand.
Eventually, one of the guys we played with failed out of school, we made Megan learn how to play, and we just started hanging out regularly. So despite my lethally oafish approach, it all worked out. It’s still a little unclear how it did so, but fortune smiles on us morons every now and again. I guess I must have at least seemed like a different (stupider) sort of person.
Turning to music, I do expect to be pretty on top of the chart this year, and I’ve got 14 of those in the library. One thing I haven’t mentioned so far but which was a key part of my music information was Usenet and mailing lists. Between some of the Usenet groups and some interesting mailing lists, they provided a great way to find out about underground stuff. And now in 2026, I’ve kind of looped back around to mailing lists being the best way to discover stuff. Like this one! (Hell, thanks to Tag Sale, even I’m learning from this thing.)
What Are You Listening To From 1993, Josh?
A sampling of albums that I’m playing regularly from 1993.
I’m not going to write up Gentlemen by the Afghan Whigs here, because I wrote about them pretty recently, but that album totally rules. And of course the Wu-Tang Clan dropped Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) in ‘93, and I would never dream of disrespecting the Wu-Tang Clan by assuming you don’t know about it. And Midnight Marauders. Fugazi’s best record. And a bunch of other classic things. Damn, what are the odds that all the best music came out when I was 18?
Nespithe, Demilich
There was an awful lot of experimentation in extreme metal in the early 90s. The second wave of black metal was doing its thing. Death metal was still very much expanding and still being dragged into new, strange forms, and it was also reaching a commercial “peak” around this time (along with the usual moral panics). This was also a period when I, personally, was paying decent attention to extreme metal, guided by some of the various noise and metal Usenet groups (alt.music.allmusic was weirdly a big haven for this kind of thing). I would gradually lose touch with extreme metal after graduating, so there’s a pretty big gap in my knowledge in the late 90s/early 2000s. But for this time, I was still checking out lots of interesting stuff.
And Demilich’s release was one of those interesting records. Yes, it’s absolutely stuffed to the gills with riffs, riffs that will just go past without notice unless you’re paying attention. Their generosity with riffs would be enough to make this an album worth paying attention to, but if you’ve started it, you’ve noticed the other big reason. The vocals are just preposterous. This kind of subterranean burbling would become…not common, exactly, but would be one of the markers of brutal death metal. But that genre was still coming together at this time, and the combination of Demilich’s incredible technicality and insane vocals were really something else. What’s more, this album still holds up today. They’d never follow up this thing, so it stands as an anomaly in metal history.
One Sock Missing, Grifters
Memphis group the Grifters put out five records in total, with the last couple having relatively high profile by virtue of being released by Sub Pop. But for my money, this record (their second) is their best work. One mostly irritating trend in the 90s was the whole “lo-fi” thing, which was an excuse for a lot of half-assed recorded music. I recognize that this seems against my stance I’ve posted about here where I like hearing the humans behind things, but it’s not that I mind rough, lo-fi recording. For the right songs and the right band, I think it can be great! But there were a lot of artists who made lo-fi their entire approach, hiding crappy songs behind washes of static and noise.
Anyway, let’s talk about the Grifters. They definitely had lo-fi as part of their approach, at least pre-Sub Pop, but the noise and roughness I think helps enhance things. The songs are kind of ramshackle, at least a bit, and it would sound wrong to have them recorded squeaky clean. There’s a real charm to how the songs were recorded, with the sonic artifacts really amping up the mystery as well as letting lots of different parts of the songs shine through. I don’t think the Grifters ever sounded better across their five records of blues-inflected indie rock.
Enta Da Stage, Black Moon
I didn’t finish listing all the landmark hip-hop releases up above that everybody knows from 1993, but there were also some all-timers that were released that year that didn’t turn into universally acclaimed records. At the front of that list is Black Moon’s record from that year. It’s an incredibly hard NYC hip-hop record that is just pure skills front to back, on production and on the mic. It’s actually an album of two halves - the first part was recorded in one studio where the band wasn’t feeling it as much, and then DJ Premier suggested a new studio to them where they finished the record. (That info comes from Check the Technique, an excellent read for anybody interested in classic hip-hop.) And you can hear the shift in the record halfway through, sure enough. But it’s all excellent, an incredibly tight and focused record and as good as classic hip-hop gets.
Let’s Talk 1993 Some More
Records come out every week, and there’s no way to stay on top of them. This isn’t a comprehensive look at everything, just a few things that have caught my ears out of recent releases. Any impressions here are very early!
Solid Brass, Circus Lupus
Post-hardcore is a genre that is in my bones, and of course Discord (due to Fugazi) always feels like a natural home for it. The second Circus Lupus record represented a big jump forward for the band. The songs are better, Chris Thomson’s ranting is integrated better, and the band is tighter. Arika Casebolt on the drums in particular is the star of this album. This is one of the non-Fugazi Discord records I return to a lot. And “I Always Through You Were An Asshole” is an all-timer.
Quetzalcoatl, J Church
OK, look, I wasn’t going to let the debut J Church record go by without noting it. You know I’m a J Church sicko, you’ve probably been ignoring me, and that’s fine. But do me a favor, have a listen to “Good Judge of Character” and “Yellow, Blue and Green”, it’ll take six minutes.
(NB: this isn’t a link to this album, but a comp that encompasses a bunch of their stuff from that era. It does include those two songs.)
Motherscratcher, Ed Hall
The association that Ed Hall was never going to escape is being “like the Butthole Surfers”. They are both from Texas, both plan an anarchic, playful form of noise rock, they played together (with Ed Hall opening, of course), and the Surfers even signed Ed Hall to their label. It’s a more than obvious touch point, but is it a fair comparison? I mean, not really, it’s not particularly fair to compare anybody to the sui generis Surfers. But sure, there are plenty of similarities there. Anyway, it’s a fine record, a slab of noise rock worthy of inclusion on this blog.
Zücker, Fastbacks
One of the Seattle bands that had been together for ages, pre-dating the grunge scene, was the Fastbacks. They were around long enough and early enough that even Duff McKagan did a stint in the band. The core of the band was Kim Warnick, Lulu Gargiulo, and Kurt Bloch, the latter of which also showed up quite a bit as a producer for various records (and in the Young Fresh Fellows). The band arrived on Sub Pop in 1993 and produced this, maybe their best record. With Rusty Willoughby (Flop) on the drums, they cranked out a great set of pop-punk tunes that aren’t pop-punk in the Bay Area sense but instead more power pop. Given the choice between going for a catchy tune or anything else, the Fastbacks prioritized catchiness. I don’t think they ever achieved anything other than cult status, but this album is a blast.
(NB: the linked record is the remixed version that Kurt Bloch did in 2020.)
Five Random Songs
Yes, it’s the “classic” five random songs format. It’s been told before on this blog many times, but basically, on an old forum, people would post the last five songs their shuffle pulled up. I liked it, so I made it into a blog. And now, here we are.
“Lollipop”, Snoop Dogg
Shit, man, listen to that flute. I think Snoop’s discography is a mess, with a bunch of records where he was kind of sleepwalking through the proceedings, as well as albums that really needed some editing (often both). Among that mess, Paid tha Cost to Be da Bo$$ is among the best.
“Serve the Servents”, Nirvana
The opener to In Utero, one of the most divisive records that has come out in my time of being aware of music. It’s a bit of a maddening record, in that the high points are so high but there are just so many spots where it betrays itself. Would it have been better if it didn’t get the remix to soften Albini’s production? I dunno, but it probably would be more to my taste. Obviously, saying that Kurt Cobain was being self-destructive with this record is underselling things, given his sad end, and it’s basically impossible to view this album through a lens that isn’t colored by his ultimate fate. In the end, Nirvana’s three albums are all pretty different from one another, and it’s pretty easy to construct people who might only enjoy one of the three. Me, I don’t listen to any of them much any more, primarily due to how much I burned myself out on them back in the day. But I do appreciate all of their records for what they are, even if I wish In Utero didn’t have the flaws it does.
“The Project(s)”, DJ Logic
This song is actually an anomaly on DJ Logic’s album, uh, The Anomaly, which is mostly full of hip-hop/jazz/funk fusion. Logic worked with various jazz artists as well as his own band to put together songs that sit pretty neatly in-between the three genres. I think this is the only song on here with lyrics? So this isn’t any way to judge the album, and if you want to get a sense for it (or are intrigued by the description), I encourage you to try it out, it’s good stuff.
“Marijuanaut’s Theme”, Sleep
After a label fight led to the epic Dopesmoker to get shelved, Sleep broke up. Dopesmoker did eventually emerge and gradually built up a legend around it. To this day, it’s probably the most common record that people talk about that emerged from the metal underground of the 90s. (I’m sure I’m forgetting something.) Anyway, that belated love for their magnum opus led to a reunion and very eventually to this 2018 release. And it’s fun stuff. You have to know that Sleep is really only interested in weed and giant riffs, and as long as you know that going in, they deliver.
“Pablo’s Cruise”, The Avalanches
Great album, but this is just an interstitial piece.
Josh, What Are You Doing Here?
I’m just writing about music. A structure like this blog helps me get my thoughts out, and it’s a way for me to explore my own music collection through various lenses. My sincere hope is that some folks out there find some new music they love. That’s all I’m up to. Sincere thanks to everybody who sends me feedback, with news that they’ve found a new favorite especially fun for me. There’s no monetization, no metrics, no ads, no promos, no nothing. Just some static web pages, some links, and my scribbling. If you want to support it, just shoot me a note! Thanks for reading.
Some Better Places To Learn About Music
Check these folks out, you’ll learn more for sure. In no particular order: To The Teeth, Wolf’s Week/Plague Rages, The Devil’s Mouth, Burning Ambulance, Lamniformes Cuneiform, Hex Records, See/Saw, Starkweather, Treble Magazine, The Quietus, Stereogum.