Reclaiming the 90s: New Miserable Experience
By Chris Polley
Daniel Wipert, apart from being a writer for this very site, is a man of inspiration to me. We’ve been buds since approximately the eleventh grade in a suburb of Milwaukee and even though he ended up with the rednecks in North Carolina for college while I only went as far as Minneapolis, we’ve somehow only become better friends ever since. Music, obviously, is a large common thread in our friendship, but specifically the passion this guy has demonstrated in his just-getting-started series Reclaiming the 90s, which you read about here and here, is what brings me here to jump on his bandwagon and share my first of hopefully more entries under the same feature banner.
My relationship to the man who started this nostalgia frenzy is key here because I’m pretty sure my rediscovery of the album in question today would not have happened if it weren’t for Mr. Wipert himself. You see, in a bout of hypersensitive self-doubt as a pretentious teenager fully immersed in the indie rock world of 2001, I purged my record collection of many of my distinctly 90s alt-rock albums. I had this inane worldview at the time that independent rock music was all that mattered, that it was the only music that was genuine and true. I‘d blame my identity-searching neurotic youth for this indiscretion, but I did the same thing with my C+C Music Factory, Aerosmith, and Genesis cassette tapes in the mid-90s when I discovered Bush. In either case, I thus felt I had to cleanse my wooden shelves of jewel cases the best I possibly could without it hurting too much in what was ultimately just an attempt to look cool and elite in front of my friends. To my stupidity, the real friends I had at the time (such as Wipert) didn’t care about this kind of ostentatious grandstanding. In fact, as I actually took the time to talk to what I considered my new and cool friends about music, they loved all the stuff I had just sold back to Disc-Go-Round or shoved underneath my bed because I just couldn’t quite convince myself to sell it back, nor could I muster up the courage to display it proudly in my bedroom (which by the way, no one entered besides yours truly).
What I’m getting at here is that Wipert (and a couple other notable music lovers I befriended in high school) showed me to hold onto my roots. In fact, it is quite possible that I still own my copy of New Miserable Experience because Wipert convinced me not only that it was okay to like it, but that it was indeed still a good record despite it not aging with the times. Hell, even though I’m pretty sure I won’t love it like I still love New Miserable Experience, all this talk is making me wonder if I should re-buy Sixteen Stone on Amazon to re-experience its splendor that I forced myself to lose around the age of sixteen.
And really, you need not go further than Gin Blossoms’ (that’s who we’re talking about by the way, for all you uninitiated) biggest hit of all time, much less of the record in question, “Hey Jealousy”. This is a song that possesses all the qualities needed to be a pop success (ridiculously catchy chorus, pleasant yet distinguishable melody, and cookie cutter as fuck) but retains more honest heart and pure raw power than the majority of the lost and forgotten radio singles floating about in my record collection of the 90s, both past and present. While the guitar work of the tragic figure and principal songwriter Doug Hopkins isn’t as notable as in other tracks on the album, this is Robin Wilson’s centerpiece. This makes sense because the vocalist is almost always the one responsible for making a great song stick and become a staple hit in the minds of millions, even when he/she didn’t choose a single note or lyric. Here he brings forth so much wide-eyed wonder and sincerity that if you close your eyes while listening for just long enough, you’ll start to feel yourself falling off your seat like a waterfall gently touched by the wind. I don’t know if that’s hyperbole, but that’s how I feel, dammit.
Similarly, Wilson’s silky smooth vocals tame down the flat crunchy distortion (which is the only thing about the guitar that doesn’t hold up, by the way) on other tracks as well, specifically “Hands Are Tied” or “Allison Road” where the flange makes the rock a little too dreamy to go down easy, but Wilson is always there to bring everything back down to earth. He effortlessly wafts around above the mix using a strange but monumentally effective combination of warbling vibrato and light and airy diffidence, turning what could be a generic jam song about feeling stuck into something that moves, that actually feels like its protagonist is trying to ravage his way out of the handcuffs, out of the frayed rope that he’s just seconds from breaking apart. Wilson sings on this record like he’s invincible, but in a way that is never overly arrogant or coyly cute. He’s singing it because he truly feels both permanently scarred but never able to die. He’s grappling with death and disease while never letting either touch him and ultimately I think this is where the 90s didn’t fulfill its promise and why it diffused with such a whisper. There were two directions to go and so many tried to only choose one, while geniuses like Wilson refused to make a decision and follow both tracks. Too bad it would ultimately lead the skeleton of the band that remained ten years later to play second-rate festivals and state fairs.
“Found Out About You” is where it becomes obvious that there was a band behind the man at the mic. Hopkins’ guitar mastery is evident here from purely a technical proficiency perspective, with its understated yet sublime picking, but as is always true with music, it’s what’s underneath the talent that counts. As he deftly moves from a dreamy countenance to an angst-fueled pastiche of acoustic and electric intertwining, the guitar practically sings for Wilson with every breath, with every inch traversed on the fretboard. There’s basically no other 90s song that matches the earnestness and desolation communicated through the guitar here. I would even go so far as to say that if more guitarists followed in the wake of Hopkins’ intensely thoughtful yet admittedly less outwardly appealing playing style rather than, say, Cobain or Cornell, then we’d have a lot less of the power chord monotony that plagued so much of the rock landscape in the late 90s/early 00s.
Even with just hearing a second of Wilson’s lines about the schoolyard, or really just knowing the title, you know that the guitar is wailing about nostalgia (fitting, by the by, for this series), and suddenly the room is filled not with machismo or epic posturing but rather a small story about a small boy and his eternal struggle with his memory. It’s told through words just like any proper pop song, but it’s supplemented and embellished by the guitar, and it’s shredded in a way that so few artists ever try to: through softness and subtlety, not bombast or muscle. Hopkins goes on throughout the majority of the record (save the exceptions mentioned earlier) to do similarly, but always with slightly different tones, voices, and results. “Mrs. Rita” turns the slinky guitar into something celebratory rather than sad, creating an effect that is not melodramatic but rather simple and bouncy, something that is often gone unappreciated and thrown by the wayside if it’s on a pop-rock record in the 90s. The heft comes back though in “29”, a track toward the end of the record that includes some heart-tugging slides and arpeggio-climbing that its quiet pontificating is almost implied enough by the six strings that Wilson’s bubbling vocals become secondary.
It seems a little silly to start discussing the album’s most insanely popular track and then slowly but surely get more and more wussy (if that’s even possibly when talking about Gin Blossoms from the beginning) until we end up talking about the single that is so dainty and fragile that it becomes more and more inherently obvious why this band ended up on the kind of respect level that it did. “Until I Fall Away” is a song that, yes, is incredibly dopey upon the first dozen listens, but keep digging if you dare and you will find a band that has conquered the ultimate 90s frontier: accepting fate while still fighting against it. Denying fate or nihilistically falling into fate’s deep dark hole was such an alternating undercurrent/motif in the 90s that it’s no wonder we ended up with the Creeds and Linkin Parks of the world by the time we hit the new millennium.
Instead, Gin Blossoms proved first (and never again, save for a killer song on the Empire Records soundtrack) that the only way to be truly real in the mainstream 90s alt-rock scene was to sing and play it softly and endearingly, and then never look back. Even with my later days spent with the wry humor of more socially acceptable albums such as The Soft Bulletin or If You’re Feeling Sinister, I can still only look back at New Miserable Experience as the record that taught me to keep it cool, play it cool, and let it all glide off you like there’s nothing we can do but let fate take us in its arms as we keep humming the tune to ourselves that reminds us of who we built ourselves to be. There’s no sarcastic fury lingering in the distance here: there’s just a band who wanted to sing and play the loveliest music possible and let bygones be bygones. “Lost Horizons” proves this right from the get go as the album’s gung-ho yet blissfully quivering opening track, that things have left this world and may never come back, but that’s the way it was meant to be. So we can struggle to remember together, but let’s not fight it too hard, because that will just result in things that shouldn’t be, like rap metal.
I’m even now starting to like the harmonica-infused “Cajun Song” which I always skipped past even in my more Gin Blossoms-obsessed days. So give New Miserable Experience a try again if you haven’t in a while. I dare ya.