I don’t want to get into how or why Bandwagonesque beat Nevermind for Spin’s Album of the Year, 1991. I don’t want to discuss the obvious thematic similarities between the money bag and the baby with the dollar bill. And I’m not going to insist that, while Nevermind indeed shows some wrinkles 16 years after the fact (it’s not particularly well-sequenced, and it drags a bit between “Drain You” and “Something In the Way”), Bandwagonesque is still pretty much perfect, because it's not.
In fact, when I decided I was going to cover a ’90s power-pop album, I almost chose Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend, because I figured if I did Bandwagonesque I’d feel obliged to shovel through all that shit. It’s a record a lot of people have made themselves forget about -- when Spin released their 25th anniversary top 100 list, they made damn sure they left it off. Their guilt, while regrettable, is understandable. This was 1991, the year of Loveless and Screamadelica, records that broke sonic barriers, records that screwed everything up for everyone. Bandwagonesque was derivative and retrogressive -- a ripoff, more or less, of classic Big Star, with a dash of Television’s shredded guitar workouts.
What a beautiful ripoff it is, though. I remember watching Fanclub play “The Concept” on Saturday Night Live when I was but a mere boy and laughing out loud at the part that went: “She won’t be forced against her will/ Says she don’t do drugs but she does the pill.” At the end of their performance, they all sort of hunched over and hopped around playing feedback for, like, 30 seconds. I was roughly 10 years old. I didn’t know about grunge. I had no understanding of irony or artistic debt. I was sufficiently impressed.
And now I pause, fingers hovering over the keyboard. I’m almost finished with this album review, but have yet to actually review the album. It’s just playing over on my Windows Media Player (which is what music critics do, by the way -- sit at the computer and listen to the record over and over again until something comes out; so now when any critic friend of yours starts talking about his or her “process,” you can join in the conversation). What else can I write? Teenage Fanclub's music is near-impossible to intellectualize or describe without resorting to a batch of exhausted guitar adjectives -- sweet, crisp, crunchy, fuzzy, etc. The lyrics are inane. It’s all trash, really. But Spin loved it.