44. Elastica, Elastica I owe the 1995 on-air lineup of 90FM an apology. Down around #67 on our chart, I groused that the self-titled debut of Elastica didn’t show up anywhere on this list. Turns out my research methods were highly faulty, because the post-punk sensation out of London is right here, very respectably taking up territory right around the midpoint of the year-end tally. If the attention heaped on Elastica almost makes this placement seem modest, they were also one of those bands that endured one of those rapid-fire turn-arounds from hyped adoration to snippy backlash. Part of what … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 44-42

46. Wax, 13 Unlucky Numbers While the nineteen-eighties was surely the peak of influence for music videos, the nineteen-nineties, at least the early to middle part of that decade-long span, represents the stretch of time when the directors behind those promotional efforts had their collective heyday. I don’t remember anyone really talking about the filmmakers behind the seminal videos of MTV’s first years, but director Spike Jonze was as famous — or maybe even more famous at times — as the artists for whom he helped craft music videos. Yes, the Los Angeles punk band Wax had just enough credibility that … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 46 and 45

48. Push, Shamefaced Like a lot of college radio stations, 90FM proclaimed a strong dedication to local music. In the case of our station, we expanded “local” to mean anything that originated, even initially, in the state of Wisconsin. By the time I arrived there in the late nineteen-eighties, no one was really thinking of Violent Femmes as a Milwaukee band, for example, but that’s where they started, so that was good enough for us. There was one band that showed up in the mid-nineties that was not only from our town of Stevens Point, they were populated by, on … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 48 and 47