Yinz Luv

  Growing up in 1994 I remember thinking that I was living in the greatest year of music EVER. I also thought that using my summer vacation to make a four-and-a-half hour homemade gangster movie was an artistic triumph. Twenty years later, I’m still convinced of the former. (One out of two ain’t bad, right?) Looking back, 1994 was the most pop-culturally rich year of my life. It probably didn’t hurt that I was a teenager coming of age musically. Kurt Cobain’s suicide left behind a huge void, but the creative landscape Nirvana helped cultivate left the world of music in good hands—at least for the next few years. ----more---- 1994 was the perfect intersection of time between a thriving, artistic, free-thinking music scene and the watered-down version of it which would happen when record labels thought they could manufacture the next Nirvana, Pearl Jam, or Green Day. Besides alternative rock, hip-hop had a strong foothold in ’94. A handful of acts that would dominate the end of the decade sprouted up in this