As a Mormon, Jon Lamoreaux, a 6 foot 8 music nut and host of The Hustle podcast, served his mission in the early nineties. Two years without secular music, with his fingers in his ears and his nose pressed up against the window of the popular music candy store.
There are three flavors of Hustle episode, and I highly recommend them all:
Forgotten musician/producer revisits their career of near misses, lean years and occasional moments in the limelight.
Forgotten musician/producer runs through an album track-by-track and tries to remember who played which bits, and who was smoking what and stepping out with whom.
Eighties soundtrack top tens where the depth of Jon (and his friend Noel’s) knowledge of 80s pop culture will make you wonder how they had time for school or sleep between the ages of 8 and 18.
I suspect that Jon and I share a sub-par grasp of the music of 1991 and 1992. With a less noble agenda, I was on the road in South America with a transistor radio, at the mercy of Colombian and Costa Rican radio programmers for Latin music selections and the rare care parcels of British and American pop music that made it on air.
I missed Guns N’ Roses Use Your Illusion. Both volumes. I remember the death of grunge more than its birth. I know the Scorpions’ ‘Wind of Change’ better than I know the voices of my own children and I know ‘Things That Make You Go Hmmm’ by C+C Music Factory and Gerardo’s ‘Rico Suave’ backwards (and prefer them that way).
Film is equally spotty. I’ve never seen The Bodyguard, Batman Returns or Basic Instinct but I’ve seen Harley Davidson and the Marlborough Man a dozen times (twice in the last year alone).
I have no connection with 1992 chart hogs Boyz 2 Men and Whitney Houston but still get a thirty-year-old warm and fuzzy when I hear panpipe music outside a shopping mall or this gem from Mexico’s Lucero.