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Bruce Springsteen at the Fleet Center. (Stan Grossfeld Photo)
Best Pop Music '99
By Jim Sullivan
1. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Fleet center
2. Richard Thompson/Lucinda Williams, Orpheum Theatre
3. Elvis Costello (with Steve Nieve), Orpheum Theatre
4. Moby, the Esplanade
5. Tom Waits, Orpheum Theatre
6. R.E.M., Tweeter Center, Mansfield
7. The Chemical Brothers, Avalon
8. The Delgados, VFW Post, Cambridge
9. Magnetic Fields, Middle East Downstairs, Cambridge
10. Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, the Roxy
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ineteen ninety-nine: The year of living vacuously?
A case could be made. There was a world of empty cheer and blustery rage out there. You have Britney, Christina, Jennifer, Jessica, and Shania - all those bare midriffs and frothy songs. You have Backstreet Boys, `N Sync, and Ricky Martin - good looks and hip thrusts. Over on the rage-against-anything front, there's Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock - flailing away with their sexist blather and big stupid noise. There was paint-by-numbers aggro-rock with Creed, filling the generic Pearl Jam slot, and Orgy scoring with a New Order cover.
Then there were the overemoting divas - Whitney, Celine, Mariah - where melodramatic octave-jumping equals success. Jewel? Pop poetry at its most banal. Sting is still with us, being mature and boring. As I write, Rosie O'Donnell's Christmas album is climbing the charts as Billboard's ''greatest gainer'' (Dec. 18).
If you're a rock fan, it's enough to make you want to crawl under a rock.
For anyone who has hopes that pop or rock music should have some semblance of substance - be it be grit, passion, or innovation - 1999 has been a highly disappointing year. Well, by one yardstick, at least. That is the most obvious one: Who's Hot and Who's Not as determined by MTV, radio, People magazine and Entertainment Weekly covers, TV specials, newspaper features, and sales figures. The mainstream media have bought into the notion that a hit single (or two) merits widespread attention, much of it uncritical. The echo boomers have the disposable income and youth must be served. Now more than ever.
So: If 1999 was such a cruddy year, why did I (and a whole lot of other people) have so much fun with music?
Simply put, there is a lot more than the flotsam and jetsam floating at the top of the charts. When I first started writing seriously about pop music, in the mid-1970s, the best stuff was found way outside the mainstream. You had to dig and dig. Over the years, critical and popular curves have come close together, intersected and gone their separate ways. It's always in flux, but 1999 was a year of a great divide, at least in these quarters. Great discs came from Nine Inch Nails, Moby, the Flaming Lips, Beck, the Lo-Fidelity All-Stars, Blur, David Bowie, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Beta Band, Steve Earle, the Offspring, Underworld, and Eurythmics, among others.
CDs and tapes are fine, in the car or at home, but they're more of a solitary pleasure. A lot of the joy and stimulation in 1999 came from the concerts, where you and dozens, hundreds, or thousands of others are there for, and focused on, the same thing. It's a form of group bonding, a case of feeling less alone in a hostile world. When it's working you become part of a club - whether it's a big one, as at a FleetCenter show by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, or a small one, as at the Delgados show at the VFW Post in Cambridge. At a concert, you're hearing - you hope anyway - the best of an artist's body of work, whether it's one album or more than a dozen albums deep. By buying a ticket, you're supporting the notion that this artist has something to say, has ways to move you that may be of the moment but nevertheless transcend the moment. In the case of veteran artists, you're saluting their past, embracing their present, hoping they have a future.
As to concerts in the Boston area, it was tough to whittle the list down to a top 10. As a fan of clubland - that is, rock that works on a more intimate scale - I'm a little surprised to find my year-end tally favors shows in larger venues. But my contenders certainly played all kinds of spaces. Among them: Afghan Whigs at the Paradise, Blondie at the Orpheum, Trans Am at the Middle East Downstairs, Bryan Ferry at Berklee Performance Center, the Residents at Copley Theater, Gomez at the Middle East Downstairs, Angels of Light (featuring Michael Gira) at the Middle East Downstairs, Buzzcocks at the Paradise, the Damned at the Paradise, Brendan Perry at the Paradise, Robbie Williams at the Paradise, the Del Fuegos reunion at the Middle East Downstairs, the Guiness Fleadh at Suffolk Downs, featuring Shane MacGowan and the Popes.
As for the list, well, any year Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band reunite and play town, it's a pretty safe bet that show will top it.
