Word: americana
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...late January, Roadshow (Mondays, 8 p.m. E.T.) has become the top-rated weekly program on public television, overtaking Barney and such staples as This Old House and Nova. A knock-off of a long-running British show, it's being propelled by a booming interest in collectibles and Americana, from Beanie Babies to 18th century furniture, and the growth of the Internet, where surfers flock to online auction sites such as eBay and Auction Universe. In a nation full of junk keepers, Roadshow is sending its 10 million viewers rummaging through their attics in the belief that "you could find...
...start there. In its heyday Club Passim (then Club 47) was a familiar nightspot for Harvard students: "It was the House of Blues without the booze," says co-founder Betsy Siggins Schmidt. Over the years though, student nightlife has fragmented as venues multiplied, and the Club's Americana format has become less immediate than it was when folk musicians were creating a vocal canon of protest in the days of Vietnam and the civil rights movement...
Just as folk has handled even its most disconnected moments, Club Passim quietly thrives in the Palmer Street alley, watching Harvard Square grow up and retaliate against itself. Its folk platform has become "Americana," a broad, historically oriented aesthetic that unfortunately seems neither to play to the young nor to exhort the masses. The emcee and speakers at Passim's 40th anniversary concert emphasized that the club was "as good as it ever was," yet this impulse to confirm folk's endurance suggests insecurity over the more insular, less underground but perhaps less relevant position of Americana folk music today...
Siggins Schmidt discusses a "vitality that doesn't seem to go away." With more folk festivals around the country now that five years before, Club Passim may be in position to facilitate another folk revival, but whatever the status of folk-Americana across the country, Club Passim seems content to go on, regardless...
...best-selling punk band, but it isn't a great one: the group lacks the caustic poetry of Nirvana, the righteous snarl of Rancid and the amiable snottiness of Green Day. In its new album the Offspring attempts to make a virtue of its creative limitations: the songs on Americana are basic and direct, and a few of the tracks, including The Kids Aren't Alright, have a brutal appeal. But the band's weakness for cheap laughs soon grows tiresome--there's even a punk-rock parody of the easily mocked standard Feelings. For a group that revels...