George Lucas has never explained quite how the bulbous-headed musicians of Mos Eisley got hip to hot jazz. Maybe Jabba the Hutt got a hold of a hijacked cargo of scratchy 78s. Whatever happened, the players onstage — toting space-age clarinets of various sizes — sure are cooking when Luke walks into the smuggler bar where he first meets Han and Chewbacca.No matter how many times I’ve seen it, I’m always captivated by the music known as the “Cantina Theme,” perhaps because its loose-limbed vitality contrasts so sharply with the Wagnerian pomp that otherwise dominates John Williams’ scores for Episodes I-VI. As music designed for pleasure, it was a rare commodity in the dingy Republic that Luke, Leia and Han strived so hard to save.With the franchise in full swing once again, it’s high time to celebrate one of the most underappreciated facets of the Star Wars universe over the last four decades: its relationship with the dancefloor. You see, I wasn’t the only one struck by that cantina sound. A trombonist and producer who’d worked with Gloria Gaynor and Carol Douglas, Domenico Monardo was so obsessed with Star Wars and its score, he pitched the idea of a dancefloor-friendly revamp to Casablanca Records’ Neil Bogart. He also sweet-talked 20th Century Fox into green-lighting his scheme for a full-bore disco treatment, complete with 70-piece orchestra and an arsenal of synthesizers. Released under the droid-y artist name of Meco, the single supercharged both the main theme and the cantina music, and was a smash hit in 1977.Of course, Monardo wasn’t the first to fuse science-fiction tropes with earthbound grooves. Sun Ra, Funkadelic and Earth, Wind & Fire had all gotten plenty pan-galactic already. Futuristic fantasies had also become a core piece of code for electronic music, too, as evidenced by works as diverse as Bebe and Louis Barron’s score for Forbidden Planet (1956) and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s sci-fi opera Sirius (1975). But Meco’s success still ushered in a dazzling new age of space disco by American masters and European mavericks. It would also inspire similarly disco-fied themes for other movies and TV shows with starry settings and laser guns.The harder rock sound that Meco adopted for The Empire Strikes Back was a sad indication of disco’s waning potency by the turn of the decade. Yet the futuristic fantasies he sparked persist in the music that sometimes fills our cantinas. And as was the case for Monardo, sometimes they’re even sanctioned by the Lucasfilm empire, a fact that suggests there may be more going on in those rebel bases than the usual mission briefings.
The ’90s have never sounded better than they do right now—especially for modern-day indie rockers. There’s no shortage of bands banging around these days whose sound suggests formative phases spent soaking up vintage ’90s indie rock. Not that the neo-’90s sound is itself a new thing. As soon as the era was far enough away in the rearview mirror to allow for nostalgia to set in (i.e., the second half of the 2000s), there were already some young artists out there onboarding ’90s alt-rock influences. But more recently, there’s been a bumper crop of bands that betray a soft spot for a time when MTV still played music videos and streaming was just something that happened in a restroom. In this context, the literate, lo-fi approach of Pavement has emerged as a particularly strong strand of the ’90s indie tapestry, and it isn’t hard to hear echoes of their sound in the work of more recent arrivals like Kiwi jr. or Teenage Cool Kids. Cherry Glazerr frontwoman Clementine Creevy seems to have a feeling for the kind of big, dirty guitar riffs that made Pacific Northwestern bands the kings of the alt-rock heap once upon a time. The world-weary, wise-guy angularity of Car Seat Headrest can bring to mind the lurching, loose-limbed attack of Railroad Jerk. And laconic, storytelling types like Nap Eyes stand to prove that there’s still a bright future ahead for those who mourn the passing of Silver Jews main man David Berman. But perhaps the best thing about a face-off between the modern indie bands evoking ’90s forebears and the old-school artists themselves is the fact that in this kind of competition, everybody wins.
It may be that 2019 was the best year for ’90s metal since, well, 1999. Bands from the decade of Judgment Night re-emerged with new creative twists and tweaks: Tool stretched out into polyrhythmic madness, Korn bludgeoned with more extreme and raw despair, Slipknot added a new drummer (Max Weinberg’s kid!) who gave them a new groove, and Rammstein wrote an anti-fascism anthem that caused controversy in Germany (and hit No. 1 there too). Elsewhere, icons of the era returned in unique ways: Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor scored a superhero TV series, Primus’ Les Claypool teamed up with Sean Lennon for some quirky psych rock, and Faith No More’s Mike Patton made an avant-decadent LP with ’70s soundtrack king Jean-Claude Vannier. Finally, the soaring voice of Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington returned for a moment thanks to Lamb of God guitarist Mark Morton, who released a song they recorded together in 2017.
Taking a look at the playlists for my show on Boston’s WZBC might give the more seasoned college-radio listener a bit of déjà vu: They’re filled with bands like Versus, Team Dresch, and Sleater-Kinney, who were at the top of the CMJ charts back in the ’90s. But the records they released in 2019 turned out to be some of the year’s best rock. Versus, whose Ex Nihilo EP and Ex Voto full-length were part of a creative run for leader Richard Baluyut that also included a tour by his pre-Versus outfit Flower and his 2000s band +/-, put out a lot of beautifully thrashy rock; Team Dresch returned with all cylinders blazing and singers Jody Bleyle and Kaia Wilson wailing their hearts out on “Your Hands My Pockets”; and Sleater-Kinney confronted middle age head-on with their examination of finding one’s footing, The Center Won’t Hold.
Italian guitar heroes Uzeda—who have been putting out proggy, riff-heavy music for three-plus decades—released their first record in 13 years, the blistering Quocumque jerceris stabit; Imperial Teen, led by Faith No More multi-instrumentalist Roddy Bottum, kept the weird hooks coming with Now We Are Timeless; and high-concept Californians That Dog capped off a year of reissues with Old LP, their first album since 1997. Juliana Hatfield continued the creative tear she’s been on this decade with two albums: Weird, a collection of hooky, twisty songs that tackle alienation with searing wit, and Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police, her tribute record to the dubby New Wave chart heroes (in the spirit of the salute to Olivia Newton-John she released in 2018). And our playlist finishes with Mary Timony, formerly of the gnarled rockers Helium and currently part of the power trio Ex Hex, paying tribute to her former Autoclave bandmate Christina Billotte via an Ex Hex take on “What Kind of Monster Are You?,” one of the signature songs by Billotte’s ’90s triple threat Slant 6.
