But there are is also a subsection of summer songs that, if you hear them, can take you back to a very specific year, and often a time and place. These are the songs that were inescapable at the time, or were simply part of the mix you heard that year. This blog post is dedicated to jogging your memory of summer hits from twenty years ago: the year 1991.
The summer was part of the great early 90s recession in the wake of the S&L scandal, George Bush Sr. was in power, and female role models at the cinema included a kick-ass Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, and Thelma & Louise. Cell phones weighed five pounds on average and Apple was still pushing the Macintosh machine. The Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings were just about to kick off and the term “sexual harassment” became initially the catchphrase of the year, but quickly entered public lexicon and became an offence under employment law legislation. Times have indeed changed when your VCR was set to record Cheers, Roseanne and The Simpsons (although you likely are still doing that to the latter today). 
For those of you old enough to remember, a number of these tracks listed were interchanged with Bryan Adams’s ubiquitous blockbuster “Everything I Do” from the Robin Hood soundtrack, Amy Grant’s successful gospel-to-pop crossover, Guns ‘n Roses’ double Use Your Illusion set and Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”. While all of these artists have had long-term successful careers or at the very least remain instantly recognizable names (even Grant was referenced in a recent episode of 30 Rock), there are a number of other hits on the radio that summer that were there but you may not have remembered. They remain one-hit wonders and each has earned some recognition and fond memories. These sonic slices of joy deserve to be recognized, and some of them have sadly gone out of print. What’s memorable about this summer was that pop radio was carefree and joyful, and the grunge / alt-rock sound of Nirvana and Pearl Jam that came to define the 90s was still localized to Seattle, Washington. After 1991 and throughout most of the decade, summer singles were decidedly more downbeat and irony was required to turn street cred into a pop hit.
Here are five of the Blogger’s favourite singles and YouTube clips to jog your memory, or to give you a glimpse into what that summer sounded like, after the jump:
