#alternativemusic — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #alternativemusic, aggregated by home.social.
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This just in: new DJ mix by Martina Herlop. I'm enjoying it a lot :)
https://soundcloud.com/resident-advisor/ra-1057-marina-herlop
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This just in: new DJ mix by Martina Herlop. I'm enjoying it a lot :)
https://soundcloud.com/resident-advisor/ra-1057-marina-herlop
-
This just in: new DJ mix by Martina Herlop. I'm enjoying it a lot :)
https://soundcloud.com/resident-advisor/ra-1057-marina-herlop
-
This just in: new DJ mix by Martina Herlop. I'm enjoying it a lot :)
https://soundcloud.com/resident-advisor/ra-1057-marina-herlop
-
This just in: new DJ mix by Martina Herlop. I'm enjoying it a lot :)
https://soundcloud.com/resident-advisor/ra-1057-marina-herlop
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Playlist of the Day 🎧 Indie Music Hits — indie, alternative, pop and rock with warm guitars, fresh discoveries and real artist energy. #IndieMusic #AlternativeMusic #Audiartist
🎵 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0w3Je5h9MwGXxtQ2v1dnii
📩 Free Submit: https://music-submission.audiartist.com/ -
Playlist of the Day 🎧 Indie Music Hits — indie, alternative, pop and rock with warm guitars, fresh discoveries and real artist energy. #IndieMusic #AlternativeMusic #Audiartist
🎵 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0w3Je5h9MwGXxtQ2v1dnii
📩 Free Submit: https://music-submission.audiartist.com/ -
Playlist of the Day 🎧 Indie Music Hits — indie, alternative, pop and rock with warm guitars, fresh discoveries and real artist energy. #IndieMusic #AlternativeMusic #Audiartist
🎵 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0w3Je5h9MwGXxtQ2v1dnii
📩 Free Submit: https://music-submission.audiartist.com/ -
Playlist of the Day 🎧 Indie Music Hits — indie, alternative, pop and rock with warm guitars, fresh discoveries and real artist energy. #IndieMusic #AlternativeMusic #Audiartist
🎵 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0w3Je5h9MwGXxtQ2v1dnii
📩 Free Submit: https://music-submission.audiartist.com/ -
Playlist of the Day 🎧 Indie Music Hits — indie, alternative, pop and rock with warm guitars, fresh discoveries and real artist energy. #IndieMusic #AlternativeMusic #Audiartist
🎵 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0w3Je5h9MwGXxtQ2v1dnii
📩 Free Submit: https://music-submission.audiartist.com/ -
Blind Melon Play “No Rain”
Listen to this track by Nineties indie-rock poster boys Blind Melon. It’s “No Rain”, a big hit taken from their 1992 self-titled debut. Serving as the second single from the record, this tune was released the following year and proved to be the band’s biggest and most recognized song. It scored top ten placements across multiple U.S. charts and made a similar impact internationally.
There’s plenty to recommend this song, composed by bassist Brad Smith and brought to life by his bandmates, particularly lead singer Shannon Hoon who sings in a key just out of his natural range. His resulting grunge falsetto lends a pleading, agonized quality to a song about feeling alone and misunderstood. This is made all the more potent by the music, touched by blue sky brightness against lyrics that stand in direct opposition, lamenting the absence of rain rather than celebrating the clearness of the day.
The happy strum of acoustic guitar and the almost jazz-like lead that made this song so effusive on the radio in 1993 conveys the sound of an isolated, rainy-day soul stuck in the middle of a sunny world; out of place and out of sorts. This certainly fit in nicely with the social landscape coming out of an era that demanded something to which a lot of people were not willing or able to adhere: conformity.
This subtext was helped along by the song’s distinctive video featuring the adorable Bee Girl, a character who would become emblematic of an entire era. The image on the album cover shows a similarly dressed girl, a picture of drummer Glen Graham’s sister. In the video, the character is played by 10-year old Heather DeLoach, with the Bee Girl starting off as an object of ridicule as she tap dances in her bee costume only to be laughed off the stage by what sound like an audience of staid adults.
From there, Bee Girl goes on a journey, meeting people and offering her act to them with only middling results until she eventually discovers a crowd of similarly dressed people dancing in a field, all of them sporting the happy yellow garb so recognizably in line with her own. She’s found her people. As sombre as the lyrics to the song are, the video served as the perfect source of resolution that resonated with a generation of teens and twenty-somethings. We also sought to find our people in a world that seemed to be closing doors that were once open to our parents.
Cover of the U.S “maxi-single” release of Blind Melon’s song “No Rain”Saying that, if the Bee Girl’s journey is about the search for acceptance, the song is about feeling unworthy of it, thinking one is insane for points of view that don’t align with what is accepted as rational or reasonable by the majority. At its darkest, its narrator fears that there are no people for them to find, and that they are truly alone in the way they feel and thinks about the world. But the song isn’t just a monochromatic misfit’s story. It suggests something that was at least indicative of a social sea change by the early Nineties even without the video to bring the point home.
“No Rain” is one of the earliest songs on mainstream radio in the 1990s to suggest that the strict division between what’s normal and what’s not is ultimately arbitrary. As late as the 1980s, these ideas were not explored in such an overt way in rock songs. Even in the Sixties, songs like this (“Fool on the Hill”, “Madman Running Through the Fields”) became relegated to hippie costuming by the Seventies. Adherence to prescribed points of view and expression was still an expectation even in pop culture, and very much so by the end of the conservative Eighties.
In that environment, ridicule and even violence was treated as a natural consequence of rejecting or failing to respond to the social pressures to conform. After all, who doesn’t love a sunny day? Who longs for rain when there isn’t a cloud in the sky? Who stays inside to read books and sleep all day when the sun is shining and there are so many things to do? Only a sloth, a wet blanket, a doomsayer, a stick in the mud.
A crazy person.
“And all I can do
– “No Rain”, Blind Melon
Is just pour some tea for two
And speak my point of view
But it’s not sane
It’s not sane”“No Rain” made room for the idea that people with divergent perceptions and different experiences of the world for any number of reasons still have valuable inner lives. It subtly questioned the value of making generalized pronouncements on people who don’t, or simply can’t, conform or even perform under one-size-fits-all social conditions. It helped to give voice to the changing values of a generation different to the one that came before. Very subtly, it points out that a lot of what was and is still considered normal was always just an aggregation of societal constructs. Most of all, the song suggested that mental illness and addiction are issues to address seriously and with compassion, not to dismiss, ignore, or to vilify those who struggle with them. We’re still coming to terms with that distinction today, of course.
“No Rain” was never considered to be a political song. But it still suggests themes and issues which make it an important artistic signpost to how culture was changing when the song came out and how culture has continued to change since. Healthier and more informed discussions around orientations, identities, neurotypes, and points of view are ongoing today even if the powers of conformity still try to demonize and/or erase the experiences, conditions, values, ideas, and agency of people who contradict what is deemed to be normal. Looking back at this song, it’s easy to interpret it as one of great compassion and empathy that was well ahead of its time.
After their initial success and their second record Soup was followed by the tragic death of Shannon Hoon in 1995, Blind Melon have continued on their path. After a third album in 2008 and intermittent reunions, they are an active band today.
Learn more about them at blindmelon.com.
Enjoy!
#90sMusic #alternativeMusic #BlindMelon #IndieRock #radioHits
