There is a revelation sweeping the broader The Barking Crow universe: It turns out the 90s Bangers vs. 2000s Bangers rivalry was misplaced this whole time. Those car bombs? For naught. Sinn Férgie can disband. Peace is returning to our interwebs. The real best decade of bangers wasn’t constrained by Dionysius Exiguus’s impression of the timing of the birth of Jesus, or by the decade delineations and even millennia that impression begat. The real best decade of bangers began in 1997, when Semi-Charmed Life jumped on the airwaves, the popular equivalent of the Prepare Ye scene in Godspell.
Songs released between 1997 and 2006:
- Semi-Charmed Life
- Blue (Da Ba Dee) – DJ Ponte Ice Pop Mix
- All The Small Things
- What’s My Age Again?
- All Star
- Bye Bye Bye
- The Middle
- Lose Yourself
- Mr. Brightside
- Since U Been Gone
- Sugar, We’re Goin Down
- Everytime We Touch
And this list doesn’t even include the top song in any of those ten years’ Billboard Year-End chart. The 1997–2006 era was loaded.
The question bangers historians (that’s us, by default) are now tasked with answering is, of course, why this happened. What in the world led to Stephan Jenkins and/or Kevin Cadogan penning those immortal words about meth and sex and onomatopoeia which kicked off such an incredible nine or ten years of tunes? One possibility gaining steam among scholars is, hear me out, the Clinton administration.
Now.
When we say “the Clinton administration,” we don’t mean to assign all credit to Bill Clinton. Every man is nothing without his wife, am I right, ladies?????? In all seriousness, though, what we’re really referring to is the broader vibe of the federal government at the time, which was, by our impression: Hey, most of our elected officials are shitballs (see: Clinton, Bill; Gingrich, Newt; etc.), but they are being responsible financially. This is a departure from the prior ethos of, Hey, most of our elected officials are shitballs (see: Kennedy, John F.; McCarthy, Joseph; etc.), and the global financial system is young enough that a government getting into horrific debt is very hard to do, as well as the current ethos of, Hey, most of our elected officials are shitballs (see: Trump, Donald; Feinstein, Dianne; etc.), and they have all realized that even voters who claim to care about responsible finances are more than willing to ignore reality and support fiscal recklessness if it gets their tribal juices flowing.
The 90s had their issues (it was the decade of sometimes problematic fellatio, from the Oval Office to the first verse of Semi-Charmed Life to Joey Gladstone and Alanis Morissette’s favorite movie theatre). But dammit, at the back end of it, we had a balanced federal budget. For four years! Then, of course, 9/11 happened, and carpet bombs ain’t cheap, but memory of prudence was recent enough and nonpartisan enough that most of us thought it’d be a blip of interest payments. Who among us hasn’t responded to a crisis by dipping a little into credit card debt? Then, we got Katrina, and we knew the balance sheet and a whole lot of other things were fucked. It would be another six years before Carly Rae Jepsen dropped Call Me Maybe.
We talk a lot around here about how people shouldn’t put the weight of every single thing in their life upon the federal government. For most people who read blogs, life doesn’t change by the man that’s elected (The Avett Brothers, 2009). But when it comes to bangers? Those seem pretty well tied to our federal government’s income and expenditures. If you need further evidence, check out what was on the charts in 1969, when LBJ and the boys (and Margaret Chase Smith) balanced the damn thing:
- Build Me Up Buttercup
- Come Together
- Leaving on a Jet Plane
- Get Back
- Sugar, Sugar
- One
- Bad Moon Rising
- Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man
- Hooked on a Feeling
Not all bangers, of course, but that word didn’t even exist yet, and you tell me what happens to a dance floor when The Foundations cry, “I need you (I need you!), more than anyone, darling.” Not dissimilar to the reaction when blink-182 gets to the “roses by the stairs” part. Some could call it the banger equivalent of Darwin’s missing link.
It isn’t cool to be a deficit hawk, especially in an era where gaps in American mathematics education are on full display in the form of Instagram story infographics. But you know what is cool? A ten-year stretch that culminates in Fall Out Boy’s greatest hit. The American government has a responsibility to the world. That responsibility is to foster an environment known to produce bangers. Balance it, you assholes.
AMEN!