Giving any historical account in terms of decades is generally a pretty facile way of doing such things. Socially and culturally, styles, trends and patterns do not all of a sudden dissolve or magically appear on New Year’s Day of a new decade. Packaging history and culture in neat, streamlined packages of the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and now the 90’s is designed to appeal to our nostalgic inclinations, whereby the past is always simplified into a bad haircut and even worse trousers. This is fine when your business is trying to flog off the past at a reasonable price for the consumer, but as compiling this list has shown, it’s a pretty meaningless way of understanding the past in any profound way. In fact, more often than not, it strays into the realm of complete lameness.

So why are we here, not only promising to look at one of those neat, streamlined packages, but also promising to look at in terms of the 100 best records we believe Australian artsits to have produced in this period? The simple explanation is that OMP is very much part of the 90’s. Beginning in 1999 as an online music resource, OMP comes squarely from that particular arbitrary chunk of time, and like everyone, we’re partial to clebrating our origins. More subtly though, the 90’s represents a time when most of OMP’s contributors passed through adolescence, and thus formed the attachments to bands, records and styles of music that defined their current tastes. To take it further, the 90’s was also when these contributors became familiar with the broader social and cultural climates which contribute to our understanding of what Australia is, our place in the world, and the role of our culture in defining that place.

The 90’s is when many of the children of the Baby Boomers came to adolescence en masse, and when the friction between these respective cultural backgrounds became most apparent. It is when the broad-based, by now institutionalised political aspirations of previous generations began to lose their validity among young people, and thus young people’s music began to lose its status as a unifying cultural force. Much of the loss of confidence can be seen in the manner in which major record labels began to feel their hold on the music industry loosen as music began to express itself in more locally-oriented cultures, and counteracted the trend by coopting the style and spirit of this music in order to bypass it and channel young consumers into a resistance-free flow of global culture. If the rush of Nirvana and grunge showed a reemergence of punk values, deeply rooted in the Seattle soil, then the explosion of the packaged ‘alternative’ culture which predominated in Australia in its wake demonstrated how even the most radical of political stances can burn up on reentry into the stratosphere of capital. In Australian music, this was manifest in the growingly reactive nature of much 90’s music; the endless procession of grunge wannabes, groups enraptured by Radiohead and the slew of young men with bad acne who dreamed of being Stephen Malkmus.

If that seems negative, it is only because it neglects the extent to which this acted as a spur to greater creative activity. While the music of the 90’s may not have reconstituted the culture of resistance that arose in the 60’s, the desire to avoid cliche and irrelevance also inspired one of pop music’s most innovative and imaginative periods, as represented in this list. The Australian music of the 90’s is what made the changes taking place around us comprehensible, and in turn provided a clear definition of the place we inhabited. Though it seems arbitrary, giving and account of the 90’s in terms of its music is to attempt to understand the upheavals that mark any period of time through the things that affect us most keenly.

To give this a personal centre, I began the 90’s as a nine year old with little interest in music, much less Australian music, and left it immersed in it. Along the way I discovered politics and subsequent disenchantment with it, that my parents didn’t always know what they were on about, the death of family and friends, mental illness among the same, girls and the ensuing disappointment and joy that came with that discovery. Going over the music I had accumulated in that time was a strange experience; music informed all of the above experiences in some way, and also helped me reexperience them. In the end, my choices were those tied most closely to this experience of growing up, to people and places that for me defined this period. So as arbitrary at top 100 lists of any period of time may be, this list tries to give an indication of a time and a place, of what it was like to be young in Australia in the 90’s and how between our individual personalities and the music we’ve come to love, there lies a very important account of an interesting historical period.

Tim Coyle