Rob Harvilla Doesn’t Blame Me For Not Knowing Gwen Stefani Was in No Doubt

Catching up on what I missed is hard, especially when what I missed is 60 years of music and culture. I listen to catalogs of albums to try and fill in my gaps of knowledge and I read books to understand the conditions that produced begone times. Often the two intersect, as I chase the works of James Baldwin and Angela Davis to explain the textures and timbres of the hip hop generation.

Luckily, there is plenty of literature out there that successfully documents these trajectories. Books covering post-punk and its intersection with dance, electronic, and pop, or rave culture’s conversation with the politics of its eras have become cornerstones of my taste, thanks to their emphasis on music as a cultural history, rather than just an entertainment vehicle.

It’s ironic, though. From where I stand, as a child of the mid aughts, I feel a great grasp on the music of now and the last twenty years (My first person understanding of the 2010s made defining the 2000s easier). In conjunction, the sheer library of analysis dedicated to the 60s, 70s, and 80s have made understanding that era far easier thanks to its thorough chronicles; it’s also easier to understand a bygone era thanks to the shrinking of its classic canon.

But the 90s are hard. The decade is close enough to be a memory for those who typically pen history, but far enough to be a history for those who need to learn it most. This tension makes it hard to learn about the era as a bystander. Discussions often come with a presumption of knowledge, because of course you’ve heard It’s Dark and Hell is Hot and can articulate the impact of DMX’s Ruff Ryders Entertainment. What are you, twelve?

This disposition is what made 60 Songs that Explain the 90’s such a riveting concept initially. It proposed a great way to learn about music I struggled to understand, especially music that held great gravitas in the era, whose presence isn’t immediately felt today. Based on the titular podcast, storied rock critic Rob Harvilla uses a personal perspective to weave seemingly unrelated tracks together. “Enter Sandman,” Reel Big Fish’s “Sell Out,” and Fugazi’s “Merchandise” make up a chapter about selling out, while Body Count’s “Cop Killer,” Weezer’s “Undone (Sweater Song),” and “Creep” tell a story of teenage rebellion and cringe that induces.

A digestible and hilarious way of understanding the decade, 60 Songs that Explain the 90’s adds enough flair for those who were alive to tell the tale, while providing enough context for those who weren’t. As I sat down to chat with Rob about the book, I took it upon myself to slyly ask Rob the question people hate to hear: What was it like to be alive in the 1900s?

[Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]

That’s super kind of you to say, that really means the world, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. I’ve wanted to write a book for 20 years. And it’s surreal to think that there’s a book of mine that people are gonna read. I really really appreciate that man. Thank you.

Justify is absolutely the right word. So the podcast launched in 2020, I started talking about it in the summer, it came out in October, and of course, I’m on uber lockdown and my wife’s pregnant.

We have a baby and Halloween 2020, just a few weeks after the show starts I’m getting a much better and just much more of a response. I’ve been a rock critic for 20 years. I’ve worked at the Village Voice, SPIN briefly. Places like that, when you write a review of a Lana del Rey record, a few people tweet at you, or whatever, if they’re happy with you or unhappy with you. But that discourse always felt limited to me to the rock criticism universe. For me, I would worry that I was writing to, only talking to, only writing for fellow rock critics. And if you didn’t understand all these arcane references, it just wasn’t for you. It didn’t give you a way in.

So I wanted to start the show, opening it up and making it unavoidably about nostalgia, which was a very attractive notion to me in the summer of 2020. I think over time, it sort of broadened and deepened. I didn’t start the show at the idea of talking about myself at all and I was never gonna try and posit myself inherently interesting, and I still don’t think I am. But the idea from the beginning was, I talk about my fairly mundane memories of my teenage years, and the songs that I loved, and the songs that my friends loved, and that will activate in you, in the listener, the reader, their own memories. It’s not about my particular experience. It’s what my particular experience can activate in you going back to your own experiences.

I think after a while—the episodes are scripted, and the scripts get up to hundreds of thousands of words. They pass the half-million mark, and my first thought is, “Oh, I’ll just put out a book of the scripts. That’ll be easy. I’ll just take the Google Docs and send it off, never think about it again.” And that book would be like [gestures, alluding to a Biblical-length book]. So how do you consolidate 600,000 words into a normal sized book? And then the idea became to take individual chapters and put songs together in unexpected, sometimes personal, sometimes critical ways.

So a chapter about white suburban kids frankly listening to the Wu-Tang Clan or Mobb Deep, you know, and really connecting with it and loving it, but navigating what they know and what they don’t know, and what they can never know, and how that relates to a song like Pulp’s “Common People,” which is about like somebody pretending to be poor when they’re really not, and how THAT connects to somebody like Bjork or Missy Elliot, these wonderful artists, these visionaries who create, who feel like they’re on their own planet and you’re on their own planet, too.

Put all of those together and start thinking about music, 90’s music, and 90’s hits that are transportive in different ways. They’re transporting you to very gritty circumstances of people’s upbringings. They’re transporting you to these fantasy realms and everything in between. And that’s what the book became- to think about these songs that I’ve been talking about already, that everybody knows and everybody loves and thinking about them in new ways and putting them in new contexts and letting them bounce off each other and see what happens.

I’m picking as I go. There’s a few songs in the book that are not the songs I did an episode on. I did an episode on “Rosa Parks” for Outkast, and I mentioned “Elevators (Me and You)” briefly in the episode, but thinking about that context of outer space, different worlds, the idea of Outkast as aliens and weirdos and outliers like, “(Me and You)” suggest itself.

However, it’s weird. It was sort of agonizing to go from having 7000 words to talk about Outkast to having like 500. The realization that there’s 120 songs I wanna talk about and I gotta keep this under a certain length. So that radical consolidation is one thing. But there were a few cases where the song changed just because, again, in that case, “(Me and You)” just fit that framework so much better, there were a handful like that.

The Third Eye Blind episode was an early one that was super fun, and Steven Jenkins, distinct from anybody else I talked about, people just seem to hate him. His bandmates, his rivals, and he’s just so quotable and so punchable at the same time—trying to put that in different kinds of adversarial contexts. This is a guy in a band who alienates his bandmates, and also everybody else, versus like Brandy’s “The Boy is Mine”? Which is such a conflict driven song that doesn’t sound like it. But they’re still set apart from each other. They’re still fighting to this day in the minds of listeners,and so is Oasis, in the same sense, just the Gallagher brothers sniping at each other forever. So the songs change based on what those chapters ended up being. Where Celine Dion goes, I go back and read the Celine Dion script, and what part of this is most germane to making Celine Dion fit in the same chapter as Courtney Love.

When were you in the Bay Area? When did you grow up?

Okay, I was there—hahahaha. You were, you were a literal baby when I was there. 2003 to 2006 was my first stretch, and then a stretch when my firstborn was born in 2011 to 2013, and then I moved to Ohio and stayed there.

That stretch, 2003 to 2006, was one of my favorite eras of my life. Driving around listening to KMEL was just such a wonderful, just like a spiritual experience. And that’s right when a hyphy is happening right? And they tried so hard to make it happen, and they kinda did, you know. So like “Tell Me When to Go” [by E-40], Mac Dre, “I Got 5 on It” [by Luniz], and again, it’s the same idea. I’m from Ohio. I’m a white kid living in Lake Merritt. I know what I don’t know and I’m not from here. I’m never going to be from here. I’m never going to connect to Too $hort the way that actual lifelong Too $hort fans do. But it was such a beautiful harmony between the music I was listening to and the city I was in, you know, even the parts that I’d never have access to, I just loved it so much.

Boots Riley has a show right now on Amazon called “I’m a Virgo.” It’s about a 13 foot tall man, it’s about a giant, it’s just a surreal sort of science fiction show. But the soundtrack is all that stuff, like “Tell Me When to Go” is in the first episode, and my head just blows up. To see Lake Merritt, to see the Ruby Room, that’s one of my favorite times in my life, in terms of the music and the environment I was in harmonizing. So I will absolutely defend the Bay Area. I totally get you, When I was in Ohio, in the mid nineties, I was like, punk rock, oh Berkeley, Gilman, like I missed it. I’m standing in Gilman in 2006. This is cool, but it’s over. It’s not over, but it was never mine, I missed it, the peak of it. I’m never gonna see Operation Ivy here or whatever. But I do feel like I had a comparable experience, even as admittedly a tourist there in the mid 2000s. And I love the Bay Area so much, I love Lake Merritt so much.

I think the biggest difference for me personally is we had a newborn. We moved to New York in 2006, we moved back in 2011, like a week before my son was born. I was working at Rhapsody, which is a streaming service that got destroyed by Spotify, as they all did. I’m commuting from Lake Merritt to San Francisco every day, taking the bus or taking the rideshare across the Bay Bridge, and it’s the early days of the tech takeover, or the second one, or the third one, or whatever. I’m working in South Park, I’m surrounded by these people giving PowerPoint presentations and talking about the cloud, and I’m mystified by it. And some parts of the Oakland that I remember, and it was gentrified to begin with, but now they’re more gentrified. San Francisco—it hadn’t fully happened yet. I’m sure if I went back now, the apartment that I was living in 2003 on Park Street now is like $7,000 a month, or whatever. I have made my peace with the fact that, even to the degree it was ever my city, my city is gone, my version of it. You could see that it was happening, but it hadn’t fully happened yet, but the biggest difference for me, I was just not going out at night anywhere, because there was a baby in the apartment.

Defend college radio? Okay. So I went to college from ‘96 to 2000. And if I understood college radio, it’s the 80’s. It’s like R.E.M. and Hüsker Dü, and just that cool underground, our band could be your life; rock bands, primarily, that were just too cool to be played on mainstream radio. The Replacements, etc., etc., and then Nirvana comes and now that stuff goes above ground. Now, that’s mainstream, then “college rock” becomes “alternative rock.”

I loved college radio so much. I have said this several times: literally nobody was listening to us, because you had to have cable radio. You had to connect your stereo to your TV with a splitter, or whatever. And nobody would do that. It was pre-internet. Right? We were talking about the idea of Internet radio, but it sounded like a fly in space or something. It was not possible.

So we were just talking to ourselves. But to be in a room with a microphone and a wall of CDs behind you was just the most wonderful thing. And me and my buddy Jeff just talked and talked and talked and talked for hours and hours, and played Afghan Whig songs, and we’re content to not be heard by anybody. I do think that insularity you’re talking about, that’s an extreme version of it, but that is important. College radio is for college students, to listen to, but also to program, to be DJs. That means you’re new to it, but that means you’re fresh. You have fervor and intensity that a jaded classic rock DJ certainly isn’t going to have when he’s playing Pink Floyd, for the 10 billionth time. When I put on even a Cake song, I feel like I’m committing a radical act in 1997, even if that’s absurd. So yeah, I missed even what I have always perceived as the heyday of college radio as a taste making thing, of CMJ charts mattering, of the CMJ festival mattering to the degree that it did, I think we both missed it as a cultural phenomenon. But I think that college radio is a beautiful thing, even if nobody’s listening. And that was true for me. And that was for the best.

I don’t think that’s crazy, because I think that’s just true. You know her from The Voice, from Blake Shelton, from her saying I feel like I’m spiritually Japanese, or whatever she said. You know the wildly out of pocket elements of Gwen Stefani.

That’s why I’m so curious to talk to you, because I think the core of the people are listening to my show and reading this book are people like me, who are in their forties, who can talk about how much this music meant to them as a teenager in real time, who can remember listening to Nirvana on the radio when Nirvana were like touring, versus listening to Nirvana on the radio now because they’re classic rock. The personal connection means something. So I’m always fascinated to talk to somebody whose first Beastie Boys record was Hello Nasty and then went backward, like they start with “Intergalactic,” and then they go backwards. They do that before “Fight for Your Right.” To do that in reverse, and to have them age back into immature assholes, versus the reverse is fascinating to me.

Gwen Stefani, that solo album was huge, huge, huge, huge, at the moment you were born. I saw her live in Oakland, I saw her at the Oakland Coliseum. M.I.A. opened…that’s so wild. But she was everywhere, and she was the new solo superstar, and that didn’t quite work out long term. But now she’s settled into the celebrity marriage, reality TV arc, that’s very lucrative for plenty of 90’s people. It’s absolutely not crazy for you to not have first hand knowledge of songs that were popular 10 years before you were born. Where are you gonna hear “Just a Girl” when you’re 16 and it’s 2015 or whatever. You’re not gonna hear it. It’s not crazy.

What’s indefensible to you? I’m always fascinated by this.

Absolutely. I was thinking as much about my mother more than I was about somebody much younger than me. As I’ve said, what I don’t like about my own critical writing often is this presumption of knowledge. I’m gonna write a thousand words about Drake, but if you’re not up on every arcane detail of Drake’s life in the past year, you’re not gonna get all these sweet inside jokes that I came up with. That just shrinks your audience so much, it’s just alienating to people. And so I understood, going into this show that, again, my target audience will be people like me who knew these things intimately, who didn’t necessarily need to be reminded of how big U2 were prior to 1991. And so it’s the old trick of providing enough context to people older or younger, who don’t know this context that other people know so intensely and bring something new to it at the same time, just trying to thread that needle of bringing everybody along for the ride without boring the people who were already on the ride. So that’s super awesome to hear that’s working for you, because, again, I imagine that most of the people who would want to read this book don’t need to be told who Nirvana are or why they were important. And it’s not like I stop everything to do that, but just trying to bring enough context to get people aboard if they weren’t previously aboard. That was very important to me. That’s been important for the show from the beginning, and certainly what I try to bring to the book as well.

That’s what I keep trying to explain on the show and it just seems futile to try to explain to a young person now that you used to have to buy one album on CD for like 20 bucks, and that was it. You can listen to it as many times as you want, and of course you listen to it 200 times, even if you didn’t like it, because you bought it and you were going to get your money’s worth. And I try to talk about the agonizing process of being in a music store, and having this wall of CDs, and having $20, having to be like this one, this one, this one, this one. There’s like multiple sliding door moments, if I’d have bought that Teenage Fanclub record in 1992 like I was going to, I would be so much cooler now. Instead, what I bought was like Soul Asylum. Those choices, and just trying to imagine me in 1992 with like 8 CDs and a CD player, and that was it, you know. And so the gatekeepers were MTV.

MTV is the other thing that I cannot explain how monolithic and how important MTV was, and how I just hung onto its every word. When it’s playing Guns N’ Roses. I love Guns N’ Roses. When it’s playing Cinderella, I love Cinderella. When it starts playing Nirvana, I love Nirvana, and that’s how grunge takes over from hair metal. Rock radio, mid-western Cleveland Rock radio worked the same way for me. I’m beholden to whatever’s on MTV or whatever is on the radio. You get a little bit of word of mouth, cool friends in high school, people passing tapes around. I see the “Cut Your Hair” video from Pavement once and I get into it and nobody else does. And now I’m off on my own thing.

I go off to college, and now I have all the CDs behind me, and that opens things up. But it’s really hard, in a Spotify, in a streaming service universe, to explain how limited you were, and how stark and how lasting, how consequential the choices you made were, you know. The first record I ever owned was the Spin Doctors. So I’m listening to the Spin Doctors over and over and over again, when I theoretically could be listening to the Wu-Tang Clan, and Fugazi. But I don’t have the money for that and I don’t know anything about that. I’m not gonna spend twenty bucks, ten bucks on that, sight unseen. It worked totally differently. And it did make you a specialist, if only a specialist of your own collection, because that’s all you had.

I was going to have you talk about MTV in the nineties.but you touched on that. More broadly than MTV itself, the idea of the arbiter is really fascinating to me, because, in the 90s you had MTV. In the 2000s, Pitchfork could make or break a career. But in 2023, it feels like there’s really less and less emphasis on the arbiter. There’s no third party authority, or even group of authorities that have that power anymore. As someone who grew up in the age of arbiters like MTV, what do you make of that role? Or even as a rock critic?

Yeah, the 90s, it was MTV, it was Rolling Stone. It was SPIN as you got a little cooler, it was Alternative Press if you wanted to go that way. It was Vibe, The Source, if you wanted to go that way. And then the Internet takes over. I was a working rock critic starting in the early 2000s, and yeah, Pitchfork loomed large and suddenly overnight Arcade Fire are huge, and it’s more complicated than that, but that was a huge moment, both for Arcade Fire and for Pitchfork, and for this idea you’re talking about. And they did serve that role for a long time, and they still do for plenty of people, but it’s different now. I don’t think there is one entity on an MTV, Rolling Stone, SPIN level. Unless you wanna say streaming services, unless you wanna say RapCaviar, or just the playlist system, the algorithm. I understand that the gatekeepers are just better hidden now than they were, but they’re still around. But I do think that even then they’re less powerful.

And what does that do? I have a real, yet false memory of 1983, and I’m 5, 6 years old. Everyone’s listening to Thriller right. The only thing anybody is listening to is Michael Jackson, because it’s the only thing on the radio and the only thing on MTV. He’s selling 8 billion records or whatever it was. You don’t have that now. You don’t have the monoculture. The theory, anyway, is that the Internet ended that. And as the Internet has gone on and atomized, there’s less of that than ever. I do think it is broadly and finally a good thing, that there’s not one, two, five, ten people making the decisions about what everybody likes and listens to, or has access to.

You see Jann Wenner, recently stepping in it because he’s sort of honest about the fact that like, “Yeah, I don’t give a shit about anything but Mick Jagger, like other white rock stars.” And you go back then, and you realize—like I grew up on Rolling stone. I was a subscriber when I was 13 years old. And so that perspective, thinking about pop music, or even rap music, as secondary, as not as important, as not as articulate as, fucking, The Who or whatever. I never would have put it that way, but that mentality must have gotten to me somehow. I’m reading this magazine every 2 weeks. It’s for the good that there’s nobody, certainly like that, but nobody at all.

I do think it creates this vacuum. That, of course, creates a huge amount of anxiety for rock critics. We don’t have the influence that we did. We can’t make or break anything. A negative Pitchfork review used to be as impactful as a positive one. Pitchfork can, and arguably have, ended careers, just as many as it started. It’s probably for the better that that’s not true either, but as somebody trying to get paid money to do this, it’s still frightening.

Do I mourn the death of monoculture?

Taylor Swift is such a funny example because she’s so ubiquitous, and what changed? And it’s too inside baseball to get even into, but it’s the idea that what rock critics did starting in the 2000s, really, is embrace pop music, and the more popular artists in general. That’s how you get this deification of Taylor and Beyonce, and the music warrants it, more often than not, it’s not that, but there is this loop. We sort of created our own monoculture, without needing the gatekeepers, without needing the MTV, and not needing the scarcity of three TV channels and whatever was on the radio in your town. If you look at it that way, then Taylor Swift is just so dominant. Drake is still so dominant that we still have this choke hold at the top of the charts. The conversation is about the same 5 people all the time.

In that sense, it doesn’t feel like anything has changed at all. And it’s not a great thing that everybody’s walled off, and only into their own thing, and not really interacting with each other. That’s been disastrous in every other sector of American life. But I do think it’s cool that more things have the potential to get super popular, not overnight, but very suddenly. You could have a Lil Nas X, you can have a boygenius, I mean that’s a really weird career arc for all three of them and that band collectively. There’s cool stories like that all the time. You can see Taylor Swift as a cool story like that, that is now just blown up to gargantuan, intimidating proportions. But I don’t necessarily mourn it, even though I have an affection for it. That’s just a childhood affection of watching “Billie Jean” on MTV. You can’t replicate that experience, and I want that experience for everybody. But it’s over. I do think, even if it’s an illusion, even if the gatekeepers are still there, you do have more choices now, and there is more cool music than there ever was, and theoretically, more cool ways to get to that music. It’s imperfect, of course it is, but I do think that is intimidating as it is, at times, it’s still a very cool thing. How much music you have access to, and therefore, theoretically, how much music can suddenly become the center of the conversation. ⟡