My favorite song of 1996 when it was 1996

1996 was the year before I went to college and my second year of reading CMJ, the College Music Journal magazine, which came with a free CD sampler every month. This was a big deal – I wouldn’t see my first mp3 until October of that year, when I started downloading them from IRC over a V.34 28.8k modem. So anyway, at that time, getting 20 new songs for five bucks was pretty exciting. My musical life was that, the radio, and the excellent, excellent Repo Records in Bryn Mawr, which has since closed down (what happened to you, super-nice Melanie who worked there?), and of course my friends’ taste.

So my favorite song of the year, Possibly Peking, was from one of those CMJ samplers, by a band called Sammy. The profound Pavement influence is clear now, but at the time all I knew of Pavement was that haircut song, and if Cut Your Hair was the only Pavement song you knew, wouldn’t you think Sammy was the better band? This album is interesting because it’s pretty solid, was issued on Geffen, and no one has ever heard of it. The album cover is really evocative of mid-90s New York for me, when everyone had bangs. Anyway…