It's been a couple of months since I checked these youtube videos, but it seems they added a few more years. Now they go up through 1994.
It's very interesting how they combine fragments of songs and videos to create these and I enjoy them immensely, at least from the early-90s. But my interest in popular music started dropping early. I'm listening to these videos again as I write this but at the moment, I don't recall recognizing songs from 1994, even ones I know I've heard like Nirvana's cover of David Bowie's "Man Who Sold the World." There was a little more from 1993 but even there most of the recognition I had was from the videos themselves, not the music.
The videos are great. They put together clips from the originals very well and generally it all looks like everybody's having a party, not a highly intellectual concept description but it's very well done visually. Musically I quite like how they're generally aiming at pop songs, not focusing on hard rock etc. too much unless they were genuine hits. There's too much rap music for my taste though, that's one of the reasons I left pop music. Nirvana and Pearl Jam were the other reasons, it was obviously where things were going.
I don't know if I'll see many future videos. At least I paid enough attention to recognize most of the stuff from the early-90s, later on I'd be lucky to recognize one or two songs from a given year. I just had to look up what year Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman brought us Bat out of Hell II and it turns out to be 1993, so I guess it wasn't even mentioned in that year's video. Dammit.
Even there, I will complain how a lot of song references only appear to be in the video itself and it's impossible to tell if they're citing the actual songs. There's so much editing being done that it may be just a bassline or drumbeat, modified to the point that it's unrecognizable. The 1990 video even has Slash playing on guitar and I had no idea what song it was even though I knew I'd seen it countless times. [Turned out to be "Knocking on Heaven's Door"] It's stuff like that which can make the overall track fail when you can tell you know the reference but cannot place it.
It also goes both ways on how they focus on music or vocals. In some ways it might be better if they just picked a few of the singers and went back and forth between them while the music ran across the year's hit songs and grew in a dramatic fashion, almost making a new music. But perhaps that would have been too hard. And maybe it was just because 1994 was the least-familiar, but I liked the way it seemed to mostly focus on the music. But even there, it's just moving from one section to the next, A to B to C with no real connection other than because they claim it does.
1991 is probably my favorite and seems closer to a song, focusing on Mariah Carey singing and the guitar riff from Michael Jackson's "Black or White" on the first 'verse,' then switching to Tom Petty, building to a bridge and then REM for the final verse although I only recognize the video and not any part of the song from "Losing My Religion." Oh well just wonderful to see/hear it all again.
1992 had a few great moments, most especially building up to Whitney Houston for a climax. I also loved how drums from one song backed up En Vogue singing, I loved the part that had the Annie Lennox "Walking on Broken Glass" music backing up other songs. Then there was Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg's entry which reminded of me of how I stopped listening to pop. They even used the edited version of "Nuthin But a 'G' Thang" which is especially pointless, although granted MTV wouldn't have played the real version.
1993 had stuff I recognized but almost none of it had stuck with me all these years. Ace of Base's "The Sign" was about the best it came there. I did like the last minute or so which just sounded like happy music, even blurred together like this. And they did use a couple brief clips from a Meat Loaf video so there's something.
1994 had almost nothing I knew. One song I recognized and according to the list, there's an Elton John song that I know very well but I didn't even recognize the video, much less the song. There's a Seal song for a Batman movie that I know I've seen but didn't catch a thing. I did hear a soft guitar with Nirvana which must have been the Bowie cover, so there's that, but it's it. I did like how the music mixed and moved along although perhaps it was my lack of memory of the works that made me enjoy that for what it was.
I had left pop music after that for the most part. There were some times in the next decade where I would listen to it but not many. My interest was clearly headed towards rock music that was around before I was born, or at least made by bands who were formed. It's clearly where my interest remains. I noticed a few years ago that I can tolerate Country music, but not by much. The only exception there is Johnny Cash and he's been dead for almost 20 years. That's not how a musical genre gets fans.
A few years ago, I put together a bunch of songs that I had on computer to create "My favorites." I still find that's worked really well, I can just link on a bunch of songs and listen to them all. It's not from my complete collection but most of that is on CDs I haven't touched in many years, now that computers don't even have a way to play them. But most of it is rock and pop, the majority of it older than me. And that's the way it should be.
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