Top Ten Late 90s So-Cal One-Offs - Staff Top 10

Fuckin' A - you should hear their post-"Drinking In L.A." album (Discosis), it's incredible.

In college I got busted for drinking (imagine that) and I had no money, so I had to work off my fine in the cafeteria, which was outfitted with a radio, which was tuned to one station that played Fly (and some terrible Shaggy song) once every three hours. Two three-day weeks and two whole weekends of spraying off dishes my friends decorated with ketchup messages and sausage penises were enough to sour me on that song forever. As much as I hate to admit it, Steal My Sunshine is a fucking great song.

"Weezer was sowing the seeds of what we now call emo"

If I can nitpick for a moment, it might be more accurate to say something like "Weezer was sowing the seeds of the pop-punk music we now call emo" or something so it's clear you're not suggesting they helped invent the genre as a whole.

Good article. Memories...

well, that's why I said "what we now call emo" instead of just "emo". But yeah, point taken.

Some thoughts... That Forest For the Trees song is just plain awesome. Thank God "Butterfly," by Crazytown was only mentioned in the intro. For what it's worth, I too saw the Mark McGrath episodes of Rock and Roll Jeopardy.

The Rock n' Roll Jeopardy with Mark McGrath will go down as the finest game show performance of my lifetime. McGrath didn't simply win the show, he absolutely wrecked the competition. The final standings were something along the lines of: Graham Nash: $200 Joe Walsh: $8 Mark McGrath: $124,203

seriously. Ken Jennings had nothing on the dude.

Okay, the banner at the top of the page HAS to be an April Fool's joke, right? No way Pitchfork bought Stylus.

Nope, I'm personally retiring to the Bahamas with the fat cash Pitchfork gave us. Even split dozens of ways, it's still millions!

I'm not surprised you knew someone who thought the Urge was all that and a bag of chips. I really thought thouse guys would blow up something huge. They had a nice punk/metal/reggae? sound going that seemed perfect & mindless for the era. see the album: receiving the gift of flavor. good times.

What about "How Bizarre"? Four minutes of ersatz whiteboy rap (read: Loser) awesomeness that for my money beats Beck's entire "higher shlock" ouevre (Sea Change? Jonathan Edwards tribute album anyone?)

Fuck it, I know you kids won't know or care what I'm rambling about, but now that I think about it, Sea Change is actually a Val Stoecklein tribute record.

"How Bizarre" is great, of course, but I don't really see how it fits with the rest of the songs here. I don't even think it got alt-rock airplay.

[i]Fuckin' A - you should hear their post-"Drinking In L.A." album (Discosis), it's incredible.[/i] I'll take Glee (that's the name of the album) over Discosis any day

Yeah, McGrath's RnRJ performance was impressive, but RnRJ isn't a very hard game! I'm sure most of us here could have done just as well. Len did release a new album earlier this year. I haven't heard anything from it yet. It's called "Diary of the Madmen".

.....good times........

good times indeed. in canada at least, radio and muchmusic in canada spun it in that same context. i seem to recall burning a CD-R with pretty much ALL the above songs (which was a big deal considering I had a massive 4GB of drive space and a 2x burner) but really now, it was the summer of "barbie girl" and "tubthumping" and "spice up your life" wasn't it? such a good year for keeping an insulin syringe nearby.

would Self's "meg ryan" sneak in under the wire? i mean, every self respecting pop geek had an advance copy of that.

Dr. Bill - you can't make a list without putting "The Freshman" on it!

for another day.

The So-Cal tag isn't entirely accurate. I may just be pissed, being from the Bay Area and having lived through the scene from the mid 80's (a more fertile 'so-cal' period-See Black Flag, Agent Orange, Peppers, etc) on. But, whatever. Green day and Rancid are both from Berkeley. And isn't Len Canadian?