FAVE SONGS BY YEAR CHALLENGE

1995: The Year Music Sounded Hopeful and Heartbroken at the Same Time

A nostalgic trip through the songs, female rage, grunge sadness and emotional chaos that defined being fifteen in the mid-90s

Image by klenova

In 1995, I turned fifteen years old.

I don’t need to tell you, dear readers, how different life was back then.

We didn’t have mobile phones, the internet was just beginning to exist, we listened to our tunes loudly whilst isolating ourselves in our bedrooms, and for the most part, my friends and I lived our lives completely offline.

Music was life, and because streaming music at the touch of a button also wasn’t a thing yet, MTV was our religion.

When I think back to being fifteen, I remember everything felt so intense.

We all wanted freedom, but still felt so insecure. Our friendships were truly ride or die, heartbreaks felt catastrophic and having made it through the emotional devastation of Kurt Cobain’s death a year earlier, music discovery felt so intensely personal.

For me, it felt like 1995 was the year music somehow sounded both hopeful and devastated at the same time. It was as though everything I listened to had a blend of vulnerability, anger, irony, melancholy, and weird joy all existing together.

And yet, because life was much slower back then, that undemonstrative aloofness in the air gave music enormous weight.

When I hear songs from 1995 now, I can still picture the version of myself I was back then.

My Doc Martens are dragging around the streets while walking to a destination with my friends. Never leaving the house without my CD wallet bursting at the seams. Teen magazines were scattered across bedroom floors while I’d be on the house phone to a friend, dissecting song lyrics as if they contained the meaning of life.

Back then, maybe those lyrics did.

So let’s pull out the 1995 mixtape, or, mix-CD if you will, and take a trip back in time…..

The Man Who Sold the World — Nirvana

The entire album, MTV Unplugged in New York, meant so much to me as a teenager. Despite being released in November 1994, throughout 1995, it remained sacred teenage bedroom listening.

Every single song on this album sounded stripped bare. In the aftermath of Cobain’s death, the music epitomised vulnerability, sitting inside acoustic guitars and exhausted, smoked-to-many-cigarette styled vocals.

I listened to *The Man Who Sold the World endlessly, and although, technically*, it was a David Bowie cover, for me, and many of us in the mid-90s, it belonged to Nirvana.

[embed]

1979 — The Smashing Pumpkins

No song captured the strange ache of what being a teenager felt like more than 1979. Even at fifteen years old, it somehow already felt nostalgic, like we instinctively knew those years would disappear before we were ready.

And boy, did they ever.

I loved the recklessness and boredom of the song that perfectly captured teenagehood in the mid-90s. It sounded hopeful and lonely at the same time, which was basically the emotional state of every friend I hung out with.

[embed]

Black Hole Sun — Soundgarden

Listening to Black Hole Sun felt like floating through the strange emotional haze of being fifteen in 1995. While the lyrics made almost no sense to my teenage brain, the song perfectly captured the strange psychedelic sadness that hung over the alternative music scene.

For me, it felt like this song captured the understanding of how optimism and dread could exist simultaneously.

[embed]

Misery — Soul Asylum

Even the title tells you everything about the emotional atmosphere of that decade!

In 1995, music was allowed to feel tired, cynical and emotionally frayed. Looking back, as an adult who has lived many lives, I don’t exactly know why, at fifteen years old, we all felt so much dismay at the world around us.

But, there was a strange comfort in how openly unhappy so much 90s music allowed itself to be. And what made it relatable was that no artists were trying to aggressively brand themselves as inspirational or motivational. I can only imagine if they tried, they’d have been knocked out with beer bottles thrown from the surly crowd at the live gigs!

[embed]

Comedown — Bush

Ahh, Bush. They had that perfect sound of wounded, slightly detached post-grunge sadness that dominated alternative music during that period.

I never did discover why Gavin Rossdale felt so tortured, but emotionally, I understood.

[embed]

Lightning Crashes — Live

Another deeply dramatic song that made us teenagers stare thoughtfully out of car windows, pretending life had personally wronged us.

Lightning Crashes somehow made grief, spirituality, and that weird psychological fog of adolescence sound like a religious experience.

We honestly ate that up, because we were nothing if not dramatic.

[embed]

The women of the 90s alternative music sound also had a huge impact on me because the female artists weren’t trying to sound perfect.

They sounded furious, wounded, sarcastic, exhausted and completely pissed off. Which, in hindsight, was probably the most honest representation of teenage girlhood any of us had heard up until that point.

My stereo played Hole, Veruca Salt, Garbage, and even Alanis Morissette on repeat.

Here is the playlist of the furious females that defined 1995 for me.

Only Happy When It Rains — Garbage

This was much more of an entire personality type for teenage girls in the 90s.

Shirley Manson was the coolest! She managed to sound sarcastic, exhausted, detached and effortlessly cool all at once, which at the time felt like the absolute pinnacle of what I hoped to be like when I grew up.

When this song burst onto the scene, it practically became an anthem for all of us emotionally complicated girls who were tired of pretending they were supposed to be cheerful all the time.

With our black eyeliner and headphones worn everywhere, we lived for this.

[embed]

Seether — Veruca Salt

Veruca Salt embodied everything that made mid-90s female alternative music feel revolutionary.

The women weren’t trying to sound polished or delicate, and they also weren’t attempting to connect with us, listeners. They gave us girls what we needed while sounding furious, messy, sarcastic, wounded and loud.

Seether felt volatile in the best possible way. Like teenage chaos wrapped inside distorted guitars.

[embed]

Criminal — Fiona Apple

Fiona Apple made teenage girls feel like complicated inner lives were allowed to exist.

She wasn’t tidy, agreeable or emotionally easy. She sounded intelligent, damaged, self-aware and quietly furious.

Criminal felt seductive and uncomfortable at the same time. The complete opposite of the shiny femininity that pop music would later become obsessed with. Her music told us, teenage girls, we had somewhere to belong, and it still does because thirty years later, my own fifteen-year-old daughter can’t stop playing Fiona Apple on repeat!

[embed]

Miss World — Hole

Courtney Love gave us who lost Kurt Cobain something to hold onto. From her look to her attitude, and in her music, Love sounded like somebody simultaneously trying to destroy herself and survive herself at the exact same time.

The song, Miss World, captured what it felt like to be making sense of the constant contradictions we wrestled with as teenagers back then. Society told us we were supposed to be attractive, effortless, thin, desirable, agreeable and emotionally controlled all at once.

When the truth of it was, most of us were barely holding it together, and I suppose we saw our feelings mirrored in Hole’s music.

[embed]

You Oughta Know — Alanis Morissette

No woman before Alanis had sounded quite so furious on mainstream radio or MTV.

You Oughta Know gave us a look behind the curtain of the world’s worst heartbreak. We felt Alanis’ humiliation, rage, jealousy and emotional instability screaming directly through our bedroom stereo speakers, and when singing along, we felt like we were joining together in a movement against all the boys who’d broken our young hearts.

[embed]

And lastly, one of my favourite songs from 1995 didn’t belong to the alternative music scene, but instead, it was the work of my queen of pop.

Madonna.

I’d loved Madonna, sorry, obsessed over Madonna since I was four years old and danced around the house singing into my hairbrush that I was a Material Girl.

Despite loving many genres of music throughout the years, Madonna was the one true constant, and in 1995, it was all about Human Nature.

Human Nature — Madonna

I lived for the fact that Madonna spent most of the 90s repeatedly horrifying conservative society by refusing to apologise for existing as a sexual woman.

Sure, she was provocative, and admittedly, back then, when I watched the music video for this song, I didn’t know what BDSM was. However, looking back, Human Nature felt like one of the earliest blueprints for the unapologetic female anger that eventually became accepted in society.

But the line, “I’m not sorry”, felt genuinely rebellious to me, growing up in an era where the adult women around me kept trying to instil in me the idea that femininity was about being palatable at all times.

It was honestly iconic for teenage girls growing up during that period.

[embed]

Maybe that’s why so many of us who were teenagers in 1995 still feel emotionally attached to the music from that era.

The songs weren’t polished within an inch of their lives, focus-grouped for mass appeal, or engineered for fifteen-second social media clips. They were messy, vulnerable, dramatic, cynical, wounded and occasionally made no sense, but we loved the bands and their songs because the lead singer was hot.

I also think that because life moved at a slower pace back then, we had time to properly sit inside and create a bond with the music.

We memorised lyrics, waited for songs to come on the radio, watched music videos obsessively on MTV and as embarrassing as it is to look back on, we built entire personalities around the bands and albums because music didn’t just soundtrack our lives, it helped us survive them.

When I listen to these songs now, I don’t just hear music; I feel the memories trigger emotions.

I hear the sound of the bedroom door slamming after an argument with my parents. The whirr of the CD player. The ring of the house phone stretched down the hallway.

Those memories of times gone by are nice, and more importantly, safe to revisit from where and who I am now.

Which is why I think the music I listened to from 1995 still matters to me so much. Because the music back then allowed us to be complicated before the world expected us to have ourselves figured out.

And when I’ve figured myself out, I’ll let you know!

PubBeat is a new Pub on Medium for all things music! Check out the Fave Songs By Year Challenge that’s kicking things off, and let Buddy Gott know if you want to write and join in!

[embed]The Fave Songs by Year Challenge P.S. — Welcome to the new publication PubBeat!medium.com