TALES OF LOHR: ROB HARVILLA'S "60 SONGS THAT EXPLAIN THE '90S"

How to eavesdrop on your own cultural touchstones

In one of the most compelling chapters of his prismatic book 60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s (2023), veteran music critic / podcaster Rob Harvilla discusses the idea of aesthetic eavesdropping. Music with intensely specific cultural roots can allow outsiders a glimpse into these milieux that can prove intensely seductive, but that nevertheless will ultimately always deny them definitive entry into those places the songs evoke. Harvilla is largely framing this concept in the context of certain particularly bracing hip-hop tracks of the era, most notably Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day” and Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise.” (Harvilla, intriguingly, links the latter cut to its Weird Al Yankovic parody “Amish Paradise” by suggesting that most listeners likely find both songs’ respective cultural backdrops “equally remote, equally exotic, equally unimaginable.”) But to some extent, any time Harvilla evokes this notion of artistic slumming, I couldn’t help but think, at least to some degree, He is addressing this directly to me.