Whatever: The '90S Pop & Culture Box CD

Liner Note Authors: John Srebalus; Cory Frye; Jim DeRogatis; Joel Stein; Clark Humphrey; Brian Ives.
Given the success of their box sets celebrating the pop culture and music of the '70s and '80s, it was inevitable that Rhino would release a set devoted to the '90s, so it was no great surprise when the label released the seven-disc set Whatever: The '90s Pop and Culture Box in late July, 2005. Some might say that 2005 is a little early to dive into '90s nostalgia, but six years into the '00s, just past the halfway mark of the Dubya administration and nearly a decade-and-a-half away from Nevermind, the '90s feel very, very long ago indeed, so this is as good time as any to start repackaging the '90s. The problem is, the '90s aren't quite as easy to pigeonhole as either the '70s or '80s. Of course, neither of those decades were quite what Rhino presented on either Have a Nice Decade or Like, Omigod! The '80s Pop Culture Box (Totally), but both of those provided nice overviews of the sounds, trends, and fads of what was on mainstream radio -- or with the '80s, MTV -- during those decades. With the '90s, it's not nearly as easy to pinpoint what the sound of the mainstream was during those ten years, because the mainstream began to break down. Not just because of the changing tastes ushered in by the alternative rock explosion of late 1991-1992 (aka "The Year Punk Broke"), but because in the aftermath of the alt-rock boom, radio became more corporate (meaning tighter, stricter play lists), and MTV gradually shifted away from being a music channel to being a pop culture TV station. Add to this a pop audience that was becoming progressively niche-driven -- supported by a music industry that was eager to feed the niche and not cross-pollinate because it was easier to hit your target demographic if they all stuck together -- there wasn't a mainstream pop audience in quite the same vein as there was in the '70s and '80s.
This, of course, gave the producers of Whatever a problem, and they acknowledge this in Cory Frye's producer's note to the set, where he writes that the compilers decided to "(acknowledge) some of the decade's bigger mainstream explosions while also hopefully drawing the listener's attention to...the rumblings below that would eventually surface as the renaissance of our generation." In other words: all the alt-rock and indie rock that defined the rock culture of the first part of the decade and would run out of gas around 1996. Of course, during the years between Nirvana's 1991 Nevermind, the album that kicked off the alt-rock era, and Radiohead's 1997 OK Computer, the album that effectively killed it, nearly everything was tagged as "alternative," whether it was the Spin Doctors' hippy-dippy jam band, Candlebox's lumbering heavy metal, Digable Planet's jazzy hip-hop, Korn's rap-rock or acid house, punk-pop, neo-swing, or any number of off-shoots and hybrids that littered the landscape in the early and mid-'90s. The compilers decide to focus on what was alt-rock between 1992 and 1995 -- songs and sounds that formed the backbone of MTV's weekly Sunday night show, 120 Minutes and the songs that spilled over into their "Buzz Bin," plus a handful of edgier, noisier punk-based American guitar rock bands. These are balanced by several pop, urban, and hip-hop singles that were ubiquitous, but the way that the box is sequenced, the first disc contains the great majority of urban and mainstream pop songs, with alt-rock taking hold as the second disc comes around and then sticking around until the very end of the seventh disc. The ultimate effect is that the listening effect mirrors the experience of a white kid who spent the first year or two of the '90s in high school, went to college and discovered alt-rock, got really involved in music for about five years, and then slowly stopped paying attention by the end of the decade.
Inevitably, some listeners will complain that Whatever favors alternative rock too much and gi