The 1990s are entering a strange zone in terms of cultural appraisal. Those who were formed by the decade — who experienced it as children and young adults — are in their 30s and 40s now, and thus are in the whirlwind of career ascendency and raising families. They haven’t really begun to color the collective memory of their formative decade in the way the older Gen-Xers have done with the 1980s, or how the Boomers did with 60s and 70s. And the later Millennials and Zoomers are too young. The decade is very much up for grabs.
I have a great deal of sympathy for the nostalgic take. I was blessed with a loving family in a peaceful middle class neighborhood in a pleasant hometown. I had the bygone luxuries many now mention about the time. Freedom to roam around town on my bike, a school life before social media, the chance to enjoy the early toys of Digital before they completely conquered our lives. But the way all those are discussed highlights a key point — the 90s were the end of something. Not just the usual way in which decades or other plots of time move from one to the next. But something truly seismic in the history of America and the world at large. Emerging victorious and wealthy from the Cold War but with a fraying social fabric and collapsing institutional trust, America had plenty of toys and still plenty of nice towns like mine. But there was something uneasy about that age of plenty. You could see in it the art of the time. The movies with their nihilistic horror and apocalypse fantasies. The television with the rise of “gritty” cop dramas and HBO portraits of social decline. And the music.
Perhaps it’s getting older. That can shuffle things from memory - make you hate things you enjoyed, make you love things you ignored. But today when I think of a singing voice from that odd interstitial decade, I think of Hope Sandoval.
Sandoval was the lead singer of a band called Mazzy Star, which released three albums in the 90s before breaking up. They had a marginal impact at the time. Too melancholy for the frictionless pop music of the day, too gentle for the disaffected rage of grunge and punk. Their sound ebbed along in empty space, with electric guitar strums that hung in the air as scattered drum shots and acoustic plucks hit fast and faded just as quickly. It was an ethereal sound, perched on the edge of something. And in songs like “Into Dust,” it could make you feel like you were being lulled quietly to your grave.
Central to this was Sandoval. I don’t see her mentioned much among the great vocalists of that era, but hers is a voice that has never really left me. It wasn’t a voice of spectacular range or raw power, and there are those that say a substantial piece of it was lost during live shows in large venues. But there was something about the way her voice was captured on the albums. Especially in songs like "Into Dust" and its associated 1993 album So Tonight That I Might See, Sandoval can waft from stereos and record players like a narcotic fume, hypnotic and consuming when listened to in small, quiet places. The songs are not aggressive, but they can be frightening. Like a siren calling to a ship, they suggest things will be ok if you just come closer. They’ll send you slowly toward the end with a slight smile on your face.
Sandoval herself was a story common among the Gen-Xers who headlined bands in the 90s, the “latchkey” children who were left to cobble themselves together in the wake of the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. Born in Los Angeles to Mexican immigrants, Sandoval spent her early years avoiding school to the point where she was placed in special ed classes. More from disinterest and absent social pressure than lack of talent, typical of her cohort. She stayed home and imbibed music all day long — became a creature formed of media culture — and was able to do so in that nascent social vacuum that arose in the 70s and 80s. “Some people, most people don't wanna go to school,” she once said. "I was just somebody who got away with it. There wasn't really anyone watching.” She dropped out of high school and got involved with the Paisley Underground music movement that grew out of the empty-swimming-pool neighborhoods of recession-plagued 80s California. The Paisley types echoed the psychedelic sounds of the 60s, but with that Gen-X perspective that said maybe things aren’t gong so well in this new world created by the Boomers. Maybe mistakes were made.
That’s something I think of when I hear Sandoval’s voice. I hear a lament, a ghostly sound from the past and the future that grieves what’s been lost and rests uneasy about what’s ahead. A voice that knows it exists in a continuum. If the 90s were a decade when people began to feel this nagging sense that the future may not be better than the past, Sandoval’s floating vocals both confirm that suspicion and ease the stress.
Just keep walking toward the edge, baby. It’ll be alright.