I Love the ’90s Tour
With Salt-N-Pepa ft. DJ Spinderella, Vanilla Ice, Coolio, All-4-One, Color Me Badd, Tone Loc, and Young MC. Oct. 29 at 8 p.m. Tickets: $39-$85. 800-745-3000, www.ticketmaster.com
When you project nostalgia from the personal to the cultural, the picture can get distorted. And no decade has been strip-mined for “remember that?’’ content in recent years like the ’90s. The decade of “Bridget Jones’s Diary’’ and the Starr Report, of “Saved by the Bell’’ and “The Blair Witch Project,’’ looms large in the minds of Buzzfeed listicle crafters (“48 Reasons ’90s Kids Had the Best Childhood,’’ “29 Signs You’re Stuck in the ’90s’’), tour promoters, and radio programmers alike.
The “I Love the ’90s Tour,’’ which stops at the DCU Center in Worcester on Saturday, presents a somewhat specific version of the decade, one that’s reflected by stations whose slogans include the code word “throwback.’’ (In the Boston area, that station — Hot 96.9 — also promises “today’s best hip-hop and R&B.’’) Representing the decade are the girl-power-focused hip-hop trio Salt-N-Pepa and the hot-then-not Miami rapper Vanilla Ice, two artists who ruled radio in the early half of the decade — and in the case of Vanilla Ice, became a running joke in the same period. But this tour’s idea of the ’90s extends back into the end of the ’80s, thanks to the presence of Tone Loc, the battery-acid-voiced California MC who broke through in 1988 with the Van Halen-sampling “Wild Thing,’’ and Young MC, whose songwriting credit on that track was the prelude to his goofy “Bust a Move.’’
Appealing to nostalgia is probably a good idea in the media-saturated world of 2016. In 1992 Bruce Springsteen released “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On),’’ which marveled at the vast array of entertainment available at home, if with a touch of disdain. Today, cable systems boast 10 times the number of channels, to say nothing of the on-demand programs offered by Netflix. Radio, too, has been boosted by satellite and streaming services, allowing listeners in Chicago to tune into Kiss 108’s Matty in the Morning and Bostonians to burrow into a rabbit’s hole of “American Top 40’’ reruns, both via the radio behemoth iHeart’s app. (SiriusXM, a merged version of this country’s two major satellite-radio suppliers, which had their first broadcasts in the early 2000s, is the presenter of the “I Love the ’90s Tour.’’) Streaming services like Spotify and Apple only allow more opportunity for listeners to customize their listening.
Yet there wasn’t necessarily more of a monoculture back then. The wall-to-wall, massively revenue-generating discussions of Beyoncé and Taylor and Kanye show that musicians can still dominate the conversation, even if they don’t necessarily appeal to everyone. But until the Telecommunications Act of 1996 loosened restrictions on radio station ownership, allowing companies like iHeart and CBS Radio to establish strongholds all around the country, a larger number of artists could reach if not the 99th percentile of fame then perhaps the 85th or 70th, or even the nebulous place where they’d receive late-night airplay on MTV. Check out the lower reaches of any Hot 100 singles chart from that decade — when the only criteria for making the chart were radio airplay and singles sales — and you’ll see gloomy alt-rockers butting up against big-voiced divas, jangly country-pop alongside sleek New Jack Swing.
Today, it seems like the 1-versus-99-percent idea that so animated Occupy Wall Street’s protesters just a few years ago can be transferred to any entertainment entity. Music offers perhaps the most severe example. Streaming services offer listeners the chance to browse through a good chunk of recorded music’s history; but spend one car ride flipping the channels on terrestrial radio and you’ll almost certainly hear the Chainsmokers’ laconic, blippy “Closer,’’ which has been atop the Hot 100 for the past 10 weeks. On a recent trip from Allston to Cambridge that topped out at maybe 22 minutes, I heard two Drake songs, thanks to the drum-tight playlist guiding Jam’n 94.5 that week.
No one tour can encompass the entirety of a decade, although even with the focus on hip-hop and R&B the “I Love the ’90s Tour,’’ which is rounded out by the New Jack Swing-tinged boy band Color Me Badd, the Compton-born MC-turned-chef Coolio, and the harmony-rich vocal group All-4-One, has some holes. There’s no big-voiced diva like Toni Braxton, nor is there an all-woman vocal group like En Vogue or SWV. Salt-N-Pepa being the tour’s only female representatives shortchanges a decade when women like Mary J. Blige and Janet Jackson were not only doing it for themselves, they were commanding pop.
Still, the tour will probably do well enough to be back next year. It’s a funhouse-mirror view of a decade suffused with optimism and ideas of individuality that proved potent — even if what we tend to remember are the songs that let us all sing and rap along.
I Love the ’90s Tour
With Salt-N-Pepa ft. DJ Spinderella, Vanilla Ice, Coolio, All-4-One, Color Me Badd, Tone Loc, and Young MC. Oct. 29 at 8 p.m. Tickets: $39-$85. 800-745-3000, www.ticketmaster.com
Maura Johnston can be reached at maura@ maura.com.
