Side A
Guns N' Roses-Paradise City
Stone Temple Pilots-Vaseline
Pearl Jam-Wishlist
The Specials-It's You
Third Eye Blind-How's It Going To Be?
Garbage-Only Happy When It Rains
Montell Jordan feat. Master P & Silkk The Shocker-Let's Ride
Tool-Sober
Sparkle feat. R. Kelly-Be Careful
Alana Davis-32 Flavors
Ben Folds Five-Song For The Dumped
Scott Weiland-Barbarella
Side B
Dave Matthews Band-Don't Drink The Water
Snoop Doggy Dogg-Gin & Juice
The Offspring-Come Out and Play
K-Ci & JoJo-All My Life
2Pac-Do For Love
Alanis Morissette-Uninvited
Fastball-The Way
Janet Jackson feat. BLACKstreet-I Get Lonely (Remix)
Fiona Apple-Shadowboxer
Nine Inch Nails-The Perfect Drug
Tori Amos-Spark
Jon B.-They Don't Know
Just looking at the selection from this volume and the previous one, I can't help but conclude that I had spent at least a few months without making a mixtape. I had always imagined that this was a near weekly experience for me, but that might not have been till '98 or '99 when I cranked them out on a consistent basis. If anything, this might have been very close to the end of spring since I always associate "Uninvited" and "The Way" with summer. I think I had pretty much recorded every current song that I desired for a certain time span and I may not have been in a rush to buy a blank tape. Plus, Christmas had passed, which resulted in me buying Janet Jackson's The Velvet Rope and Boyz II Men's Evolution on cassette, both of which stayed in heavy rotation for months since I only owned a total of five albums.
Usually while revisiting these mixtapes, I'm able to recall what the next song will be within a few seconds of hearing the end of the preceding one, but I had a lot of difficulty doing that with Vol. 4. I'm positive that I listened to it a lot, but it was probably not my favorite at the time. While I didn't record any songs that I flat-out disliked, I can't say that I was over the moon about a good deal of the stuff here, which no doubt has added to the disproportion in enthusiasm for it when compared to some of the other mixtapes.
As always, there were enough highlights to keep me coming back. I was still a huge Alanis Morissette fan at the time, even though it had been three years since the release of Jagged Little Pill, and the follow-up, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, was still months away. I would have been salivating for any new Morissette songs at this time and "Uninvited" only served to make her even more mythical in my head. Not only was there her typical vocal overdrive, but she now had a full orchestra to match her bombast. It's still one of my favorite songs by her to this day.
One of my favorite things about coming back to these mixtapes is getting reacquainted with songs that only received mild rotation on the radio. You would think that a Scott Weiland solo album around this time would have made more of a splash, but it was very much under the radar. I didn't know it at the time, but I was a sucker for any song that even slightly resembled glam rock.
With my purchase of The Velvet Rope using my Christmas money, it marked one of the first times where I didn't have to record a song off the radio since I already owned it. I would have certainly been all over the singles from this album and not having to record any made me feel older, as if this was one problem that people with jobs and money didn't have to go through. The remix and the original for "I Get Lonely" were basically the same, but the inclusion of BLACKstreet and a few other instruments made it worthy enough to put on here since I already loved the song. At the time, I used to wonder why Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis would have to lift a Timbaland drum pattern since I already thought they were phenomenal in their own right. I could have understood lesser-known producers doing it, but not these guys. That little dilemma in my head took away some of the luster, but not to the point where I still didn't enjoy it.
The song that I identified most with during this time was "32 Flavors," which I didn't know initially was a cover of a Ani DiFranco song. There was something about the line in the chorus, "I am 32 flavors and then some" that spoke to me about my diversity as far as my taste in music and my individuality overall. I saw myself as being all over the place with my interests, so it was the perfect theme song. On a sidenote, I had gone a very long time without seeing the video since I didn't have cable and when I finally caught a clip of it on NBC's Friday Night, I was immediately blown away by how attractive she was in. In my youth, I guess I equated contemplative songs with Plain Janes who didn't need to be telegenic because they were singing about something with substance. Never again did I make that assumption.
I never hope to be one of those guys who are always talking about how about the music of their youth is superior to the current era, but there are times when I think that those who came up in the 90s had it better. Now I know that Fastball's "The Way" isn't probably the best example to use while making this point, but I think the styles used and its success make for a relevant argument. Pop music is at its best when it allows for variety, and the fact that a tango-driven power pop song became a success on the modern rock charts speaks to the range of the landscape. Things just aren't as fun when everyone is trying to copy a select few.
One achievement that separated this mixtape from the others was that this was the first time a song didn't cut off at the end of a side due to running out of space. After "Barbarella" was finished on Side A, there was an alien sound known as silence that went on for a few minutes until the play button popped up. In the midst of doing this blog, I often wondered where would the time come when I got fed up and decided that it wasn't worth it to capture only a minute or two of a song. Thirteen tapes in, I now have my answer.
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