Welcome to the Maybe Mixtape, the new home for my series of essays based on great albums from the 1990s. Today, we kick things off with Daniel Johnston’s 1990. This essay first appeared on Maybe Today, my original Substack. My intent with the Maybe Mixtape is to provide a more consistent format for my music writing, while I will continue to use Maybe Today as a personal workshop for new ideas. If you like what you see here (or on the other site), please subscribe, follow, engage, and share!
Any personal story I want to tell about the 21st century is soundtracked by Kanye West, an artist every bit as vital to the popular music canon as Michael Jackson and Prince, his equally problematic forefathers. It may be the wrong thing to do….and it is certainly the wrong discussion to have today….but we will eventually forgive, forget, or ignore the red hat and Candace Owens and the fascism-as-fashion nonsense and allow The College Dropout and Late Registration to sit on the shelves next to Thriller and Purple Rain. We will separate the creator from the creation, even if it makes no sense. This is the way we consume art.
Seventeen years ago I went to New Orleans. I had a wonderful time and vowed I would return again and again. I didn’t return until last year. I was dismayed to find how little of my previous trip I could piece together. Where did I eat? In which neighborhood did I sleep? How did I get around? It was a week….one of my favorite weeks ever at the time. But it’s gone. I have no idea what I did all week. Just a vague haze and a memory that, yes, I do believe fun was had.
But do you know what I do remember? I created a master mix of all my favorite songs on my iPod to put on shuffle for the road trip there and back. The first song that played as I headed west on US-34 after I got off work was “I Love My Car” by Belle and Sebastian. What an unlikely stroke of fate! It was snowing and I saw a tree that looked beautiful in the storm. And I still remember that.
And I remember the first time I listened to every Kanye West album. If I really wanted to bore you I could probably give you a run down of my initial impression of every Kanye West song. Maybe someday I will….if it ever feels appropriate again. The soundtrack is the glue. It allows the years to flow seamlessly together, it’s the ever changing constant between the person I was in 1990 and the person I was in 2006 and the person I am today.
But glue can be messy. We loved Kanye. His music was forward thinking while still respecting its roots. He wanted to be A Tribe Called Quest, but he also wanted to be a gazillionaire. This type of duality may not have been new in rap, but nobody quite wore it on their sleeve the way Kanye did. It was so human, this desire to use your microphone to do the right thing, while the money, hoes, and rims are spinning right outside the door. And Kanye put this all on wax for us. Isn’t this what the best art is supposed to be? We want to watch an artist wrestle with his humanity, take on the same struggles as us, but create something out of it that we cannot. This was what we loved about Kanye West.
Until it went too far. Until it was TOO real.
Kanye was brash. It wasn’t always attractive, but it seemed heartfelt and, after all, he was an artist, so we forgave him. I mean….he was an asshole, but what was he wrong about? George W. Bush DIDN’T care about Black people. Beyonce DID make the greatest video of all time. He was saying what we were thinking, even if he was saying it in a way that we never could.
Until he started saying things we weren’t thinking.
It’s natural to feel like we were duped, that we somehow didn’t catch some hidden clues of fascism in Kanye’s art. That’s not what happened. Maybe there were hints of mental instability, but not THIS. The record is still there for us to see. The first song on the first album is about the overidentification of Black students in special education, for Christ’s sake. I work in schools and I didn’t hear this discussed until years later. Kanye was talking about conflict diamonds, rampant capitalism, and federal drug policy. It may be easy to forget in a post-radio world, but before Kanye West there was a sharp divide between what mainstream and underground rappers were willing to address on an album. Kanye was a mainstream rapper with the sensibilities of an underground rapper. And he became wildly successful.
We watched his descent in real time. We even enjoyed parts of it. At some point our relationship with Kanye transitioned from fan-artist to fan-celebrity. In modern America, celebrity is a type of a theater, and we all had a ticket to watch Kanye West fall from grace, turn into a trainwreck, and hurtle off the tracks. We all had a moment where we agreed he went too far, then we crossed our fingers that Donda would be good, and when it sucked we had no problem hurtling him into the sun when he doubled down on the antisemitism. I wonder what the hell we would have done if Donda had been great.
Our artists are our prophets. They interpret our humanity for us and, in exchange, we give a few of them tremendous wealth and power. When they desert us it stings, we want to think better of the person who helped us be human. We can - and probably should - dispose of this prophet.
But the art remains and it will never go away.
I want to tell a story. Part of the reason I want to tell a story is that storytelling is relatively easy. I don’t need some sort of certification or specialized expertise to tell a story. The story I tell is my own and I cannot tell it wrong. It is mine. The best you can do is ignore it. Or say nasty things in the comments section. But you can’t tell me I’m not qualified to tell this story, because it is mine.
The story I want to tell is about the decade that began on January 1, 1990. I was a child that day. On January 1, 2000 I was….well, a different kind of child. I guess you could call these years “formative”, but, if I’m being honest, they really weren’t all that much more formative than the decade that followed, or even the decade we are currently in.
This is my story, but it is only sort of about me. Things that happen to me matter, but not in any way greater than the things that happen to anybody. You don’t really care where I was on the first day of the '90s or where I went to school or what music I was listening to. You may care about the Fall of the Soviet Union or the rise of the internet, and that is what this story is about too, but you can learn more about those things from people far more knowledgeable than myself. And I really don’t know much about music either, and I knew far less about it in the '90s. But I’m hoping that by filtering the events of a decade through my own personal experiences, both in that decade and in the years that followed, I can help a few people think about life in an original way.
The '90s are so in right now. Chuck Klosterman and all the Ringer-type culture personalities are all over the decade. Somebody had the bright idea to create something called “That ‘90s Show”, which most of the world just went ahead and ignored. I lack originality. I’m inspired by Chuck Klosterman and all the Ringer-type personalities because I didn’t really realize those kinds of jobs were an option when I was a journalism major. So it goes. This, too, becomes part of my story.
The difference is that this story is mine. As a storyteller I can create whatever map I like, even when it doesn’t make sense. I can make connections between songs and events and personal stories and I can jump around from the '90s to modern times to things that happened before I was born and I can start a series of essays on ‘90 music by discussing Kanye West, an artist who didn’t release any music before the turn of the millennium, and maybe it will be brilliant and maybe it will be sheer nonsense, but the real joy is found in figuring out which is which.
And since it is my story I can make grand claims like this one: The first important album of the '90s was released by a man named Daniel Johnston and it was called 1990.
In 1990 I did not know Daniel Johnston existed. In 2000 I still did not know Daniel Johnston existed. In fact, I’m not sure I had ever heard of him before, oh, maybe 2005? I kept hearing his name spoken, or his songs covered, by my favorite artists. I heard one of his songs on “Friday Nights Lights”. It sounded like this guy was a titan of songwriting, so, as a fan of great songwriters, I found one of his CD’s at the public library and gave it a spin and I thought the disc was scratched. THIS was the genius that all of my heroes looked up to? He sounded like a child. He could barely play his instrument, even his lyrics struck me as dreadfully basic given the fanfare.
I was listening to Daniel Johnston without the gift of context.
A good way to understand pre-1991 indie rock is by reading Michael Azerrad’s wonderful book, Our Band Could be Your Life. Azerrad tells the story of underground rock in the 1980s by profiling 13 now legendary bands, such as Black Flag, Dinosaur Jr., and Fugazi. Today these bands are royalty within a certain subculture, but in their prime, real life was seventeen kids in a Kansas City club on an odd Tuesday night. It wasn’t glamorous. In a chapter on Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore is asked if the struggles of the road presented a challenge to his marriage to bandmate Kim Gordon. Moore thinks, then replies that one time at a rest stop Gordon returned to the van with an ice cream bar and he was pretty upset because he didn’t have any money to get one himself.
This story has stuck with me since I first read the book. I think about it every time the Pixies release some gimmicky new EP, or the Replacements accept a bag of cash to awkwardly stand on a stage together. These bands paid their dues at a time when being an outsider came without financial stability, much less wealth. There was no internet, no mass medium to distribute their otherness to larger audiences. It was word of mouth, zines, opening slots. Good luck was shaking the hand of the devil on MTV at 1:30 in the morning. They were not welcome in the overproduced, bloated music world of the 1980s.
This is part of what Sonic Youth and Firehose and so many others saw in Daniel Johnston. There is a naivete that colors every aspect of Johnston’s music….the childlike vocals, the simple rhyme structures, the loose recording. But all together, it felt like something. And that is what art is supposed to do. That is what all 13 artists covered in Our Band Could be Your Life were living for. Nothing could fly in the face of Madonna and Phil Collins and all the music execs and producers and the recording academy quite like this weird little troubadour who just decided, “Ehhh…why can’t I make a record too?”
So in 1988, Johnston’s famous friends brought him to New York to try and make him a star of alternative culture. It was a weird trip, which is probably what it was supposed to be. Johnston, who had spent the previous year stabilizing his mental health and living with his parents in West Virginia, immediately quit taking his medication. He became convinced that his trip to New York was a mission from God, was arrested for drawing a Icthus (that’s what those Jesus fish on the bumper stickers are called….if you don’t know, now you know) in a stairway at the Statue of Liberty, and spent his gigs attempting to proselytize his audience. His friends, initially drawn to Johnston for what made him different, began to worry, but the singer protested when they threatened to call his parents, fearing institutionalization.
Johnston’s struggles with mental health were real, and his music basically serves as a living document of his journey. His condition was what made him see the world differently and what made his art so raw and beautiful. It’s why he was loved by Sonic Youth and Moe Tucker and it’s why later renowned songwriters like Conor Oberst and Jeff Tweedy see him as a legend. But it also came with a dark twist. For all the stories that demonstrate Johnston’s genius, or highlight him as an interesting person, there are too many that are more than a little problematic. Once, he was arrested for breaking into a woman’s home in an attempt to exorcise her demons. Another time, while flying in his father’s private plane, Johnston received a message that God wanted him to pull the keys out of the ignition and throw them out the window, which he did. His father was miraculously able to land the plane and both were unhurt. Johnston was immediately hospitalized. Even his twenty year fixation with a librarian named Laurie, usually presented as an endearing anecdote by critics and fans, feels invasive and problematic by today’s standards. Johnston can be a difficult listen.
And the album Johnston released in January of 1990 may be the most difficult of all. He skirts between real religious paranoia and tongue-in-cheek humor about, well, religious paranoia. He paints his home state of Texas as a battleground between good and evil on “Spirit World Rising” and leads a live audience through a rollicking chorus of acceptance of their own demise on “Funeral Home”. The latter song is humorous, but, set against the themes of the album, is it really? Even what seem to be the lighter moments of 1990 feel a little tragic. When Johnston covers his beloved Beatles on “Got to Get You Into My Life”, he beats the shit out of the piano keys and it’s hard not to think about that librarian with no idea that in another state a mentally ill musician was using her as a muse.
But we love Daniel Johnston and we love this album. We see a person in pain and we know what pain feels like and we allow the artist to feel his pain a little more freely than the rest of us because we need something to make it through our days.
On the first day of 1990 I was nine years old. I didn’t know who Daniel Johnston was. I barely knew who Michael Jackson and Madonna were. I remember being at my grandparents house in Southwest Michigan. I remember going to the mall in Kalamazoo and then going back to the house to watch the Rose Bowl. USC beat Michigan 17-10. This I remember. Perhaps I should write a letter about random sports scores I remember.
What I had never heard of on the first day of 1990 was the internet. Yet that very day, as I sipped my Orange Julius, a company called PSINet became the first to sell internet access to commercial customers in the United States. One of the defining characteristics of a story is a clear cut beginning. Obviously, a year holds no special significance for ending in a zero, but as the storyteller I can draw meaning wherever I wish. So in this story the first record that matters from the ‘90s is called 1990 and the story of the ‘90s begins with the creation of the internet. If I do my job I make this sound purposeful.
By the end of the decade we will be well on our way to an interconnected world dominated by this medium. Today we are beyond any kind of moralizing about whether this new world is “better” or “worse.” It’s irrelevant because it’s here and not going away and this is the world we have. The internet has given us the capacity to be better, even if the short-term consequences don’t always make that obvious.
With regards to the music world, the internet has changed the way we consume. Without the rise of streaming services there is no way I would have been able to compile a list of thirty or forty favorite albums in 2022. It wouldn’t have been financially possible. But this privilege comes with a cost. It’s always on to the next one. I will never love another album quite the same way I loved Weezer’s debut or Bright Eyes’ Lifted or The College Dropout. I won’t smell the plastic or feel my heart skip a beat as I insert the disc into the car stereo in the Best Buy parking lot. I won’t wear out a new release, because there is more music to be heard and I haven’t invested $16.99 in the new Belle and Sebastian album. But the passion doesn’t go away. It just reforms itself into a new shape. And I think that’s a pretty good way to think about everything in life.
But our discussion today is about our relationship with the artists who create for us. One effect of the internet is that we now know an awful lot about our favorite artists. Perhaps too much. Where previous generations could bury their heads in the sand and claim a broad suspension of disbelief on the antics of David Bowie or Prince or John Lennon or, well, mostly anyone, today we can’t avoid the problems. And we haven’t come out with a clear cut procedure for addressing concerning behavior from our favorite artists because, well, that’s just not how anything works in life. The level of leniency we extend tends to be in proportion to the quality of the art we are being provided. And I ask again: what would we have done if Donda had been great?
“I can separate the art from the artist”, say some of us. No you can’t. Do some self introspection and stop lying to yourself. You aren’t separating the art from the artist and you really don’t want to. Your favorite artist’s actions, ideals, and politics are all part of the package. If you are having trouble stomaching Late Registration lately it is because Kanye West IS Late Registration. A pop artist IS his own pop art. You love Late Registration because it helps you relate to the world around you. Kanye West helped you relate to the world around you. Bigoted, misogynistic Kanye West taught you something about yourself and you loved him for it and that’s ok because you’re a human and he is a human and flawed, even vile, human beings can create work that teaches us, entertains us, soothes us.
Today we rarely crave high art. We crave pop art. It is more meaningful to more of us, and for the first time in the history of the world we have the technology to connect us. We love pop art because it is something we can share. We can feel it with each other and with the artist. It makes us feel less alone when millions of us press play on the new Taylor Swift record the moment it is released, phones ready for an immediate mass interpretation. We can experience this thing together, we can discuss it together, we can come to our own conclusions, learn something about ourselves, and find meaning in life. And for that to happen, context MUST matter.
What is Daniel Johnston without context? Just some poor McDonald’s employee with a hobby. Which is to say, he is every one of us, the most important thing any artist can be, but we just never know his name. Context delivers the discussion, the debate, the emotion. The tragedy.
Maybe someday a lot of people will read something I write. Maybe today. If that ever happens I will probably have to change the way I write in the future, knowing that more people are paying attention. I will need to be more responsible and verify small details and develop a little more consistency with my commas. I may have to go back and address things in essays I published in the past….like this one.
But that day is not here, and anyway I don’t care if it is….I feel like writing the way I feel.
1990 ends with a bonus track, an archaic device in which the artist would bury a track at the back of the record behind several minutes of silence, discoverable only to those with the foresight to look for it. Daniel Johnston is leading an audience in singing the great Christian hymn, “Softly and Tenderly”. I have searched the internet and cannot find the story behind this track. The recording seems to be at some sort of church revival, considering the crying baby and the fact that the audience knows the words to even the more obscure verses.
But that’s not what I hear….
I hear a sweaty New York City club. I smell stale beer and cigarettes. And all Daniel Johnston’s famous friends and followers are in the audience….Thurston Moore and Jad Fair and Kurt Cobain and Jeff Tweedy and Conor Oberst. They are all singing and they don’t even know how they know all the words, but it must be in there somewhere. There’s a baby crying….still don’t know what that’s all about, but these are awfully old buildings after all. The man on stage spent the last hour screaming about Satan and stumbling through infantile compositions, but now here I am singing this hymn. You don’t see this shit at a Depeche Mode concert. But I’m not at a Depeche Mode concert. I’m in this club, with this weird little man, and who am I to say he is not a prophet. Just look at all the sinners he brought home tonight! This is art. This is church.