Nepali couple dies in plymouth( Sunil Gururng and Hissi Nagarkoti)

Plymouth couple Sunil gurung and Hissi Nagarkoti dies in an plymouth accident after being in coma for a week in Boston Medical Center. Police suspected is as a murder suicide case. There was a sharp exchange of words just prior to the accident while nagarkoti was trying to teach gurung the basics of driving. But the witness tells that they took a quick reverse and they plunged into the wall and then to the harbour. The SUV was upside down for 2 full hours until the rescuer came for rescue. But the tragic moment was to come, so they died on thursday with thier family members on thier side>

For more information:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLi416criSk

Arniko: The Great Architect From Nepal

Nepal's temples, stupas, and many more structures are examples of this nation being a former leader in architecture.

Today's generation sees Nepal as a poor country lacking high-tech and engineering skills. But Nepal's past shows skilled manpower and a highly developed society. One example of this skilled manpower is Arniko, the greatest architect of Nepalese history.

Arniko was forced to live in China, where he drew great respect. He made lots of sculptural works which are still a great asset of China.

Nepalese author Satya Mohan Joshi who has researched Arniko said his works in China are really a great challenge to modern engineering. The works he did in the 13th century are unbelievable.

Nepalese history doesn't have any proof of where in Nepal Arniko grew up. But Joshi claims Arniko was from Patan, a famous place for sculpture.

Many Nepali architects made statues of special historical importance. However, Arniko was the only one who became famous not only in Nepal but also in Tibet, China, Mongolia and as far as Indonesia.

During Arniko's time, renowned Mongol emperor Kublai Khan was a great lover of art and architecture.

He wanted to build a golden stupa (a Buddhist shrine) in Lhasa for his teacher Pags-pa. In 1260, he decided to ask Nepal to send a skilled architect to supervise the work.

At that time, Jaya Bhim Dev Malla was the king of Nepal. When he asked for an architect to go to Lhasa, more than 80 people showed their interest.

The king had a great difficulty in selecting the most skilled artist to lead the mission. Finally, Arniko came forward and said that he was ready to do the job.

The king did not believe Arniko at first, as he was quite a young man. However, looking at his skill, the king made him the leader and sent him to Lhasa where he eventually built a beautiful pagoda-style monastery.

He carried out his work so well that the emperor's teacher Pags-pa requested he meet the emperor. Kublai Khan wanted to test him. Therefore, he asked young Araniko to repair a copper statue of a Sung emperor. When Arniko finished, the statue looked so perfect that even the most skilled artists of China greatly admired him.

Araniko through his works proved that he was an uncommon genius. He was equally good at painting, sculpture and architecture. He painted a series of portraits of Chinese emperors and impressed everyone there. By 1247, he was given a silver plate to wear with an image of tiger on it. The emperor became very fond of him and gave him the title "Duke of Liang" as an honor.

The white pagoda or the Pai Ta Sze in Beijing still today stands as the great work of Arniko. The other famous work by Arniko is the Archway of Yungtang. Its design exactly follows the Nepalese style.

Although Arniko married in China and died in there in 1306, he was a Nepali. The story of his success is highly admired in China.

Architecture in Nepal

Art and architecture overlap in Nepal, where temples and palaces are decorated with intricately carved windows, sculptural roof struts, and repoussé metalwork facades. The red brick and dark hardwood construction of densely packed neighborhoods has led many Western visitors to compare the cities of the Kathmandu Valley to medieval European cities. This architectural style is characteristic of the Newars, the ethnic group that has traditionally lived in the Kathmandu Valley. Newari architecture is Nepal's most distinctive architectural style. The rosy glow of pink brick homes dotting the terraced fields of the Kathmandu Valley at sunset is one of the valley's most memorable images, especially when seen from a plane.

Newari architecture reached its zenith under the Malla kings in the 17th and 18th centuries, and it is from this period that most of the Kathmandu Valley's most important buildings date. Since palace architecture was based on standard home styles, with one or more courtyards, it was in temple architecture that Newari architects experimented. Temple architecture in Nepal embraces a number of styles, though the most notable and beautiful is the pagoda style. Nepali tradition holds that pagoda architecture originated in Nepal. The style was later copied in Lhasa, Tibet, from where it made its way to China. Pagodas in Nepal have between one and five roofs, though there are only three pagodas in the Kathmandu Valley with five roofs. The Nyatapola Temple in Bhaktapur, a five-roofed temple atop a five-tiered pyramid base, is considered the most beautiful, symmetric, and graceful temple in Nepal. The Basantapur tower, within the Hanuman Dhoka Palace on Kathmandu's Durbar Square, is the only pagoda that can be climbed, and in fact not all pagodas have floors that correspond to their many roofs.

Most pagodas and buildings are constructed from brick, which, until recently, was the most common building material in the middle elevations of Nepal. However, a few temples are built in the shikhara style of architecture from northern India. These temples are usually plastered and whitewashed or made of stone. The Mahaboudha Temple in Patan is the most ornate shikhara-style temple in the Kathmandu Valley.

Two of Nepal's most important architectural constructions are the stupas of Swayambunath and Boudhanath. Stupas are large hemispherical mounds that represent the Buddha and his teachings. In some ways they resemble the pyramids of Egypt or pre-Columbian America, though they have never been used as tombs. Smaller stupas credited to Indian emperor Ashoka stand at the four corners of Patan. Chaityas, much smaller than stupas, are small spire-shaped shrines often found in courtyards in Buddhist neighborhoods of the Kathmandu Valley. Chortens, which are found in the Buddhist villages of the high mountains, are similar to chaityas, though they are usually a bit larger and are erected not in courtyards but at important religious sites.

Over the centuries, major earthquakes have repeatedly hit the Kathmandu Valley. In 1934, a devastating quake razed most of the temples and palaces in the valley. Since then, most, but not all, of the valley's damaged historic buildings have been reconstructed. However, the reconstruction did not always exactly duplicate the original architecture, as is the case with the Mahaboudha Temple in Patan. When reconstruction of this temple was completed, there were enough of the original bricks left over to build another small temple immediately adjacent to the main temple. The Bhaktapur Development Project, a German-funded program, has restored more than 100 buildings in Bhaktapur, making this city a showcase of Newari architecture. In Panauti, a small town in the southeast corner of the Kathmandu Valley, a joint French-Nepali project has been busy restoring an extensive temple complex.

Though Newari architecture predominates in the Kathmandu Valley, styles vary outside the valley. In the lowlands of the Terai, the Tharu people build their huts almost exclusively with grasses, using a mixture of mud and cow dung to seal the walls. In the high elevations of Solu-Khumbu, home of the Sherpas, most homes are built of stone; even the roofs are made of slate. This ethnologic architectural diversity is one of the reasons that a trek through the hills and mountains of Nepal is so fascinating.

A footnote worth mention is the construction of dozens of European-style neoclassical palaces and residences in Kathmandu during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Examples include the Gaddi Baithak on Kathmandu's Durbar Square, the Shanker Hotel, the old wing of the Hotel Yak Yeti, the recently restored Baber Mahal Revisited shopping center, the minaret-like Bhimsen Tower near the Kathmandu General Post Office, and even the Kathmandu Guest House. These buildings were constructed during the Rana regime when members of the Rana family traveled to Europe and became infatuated with what they saw. Nepal's coffers were emptied to erect these stuccoed, pilastered, and shuttered excesses, and today these buildings are nearly as interesting as the more traditional Newari temples and palaces.

History of Rock Music

-THE BEGINNING-

Chuck Berry invented rock and roll in 1955. Berry was a black man playing black music. But times had changed: white kids were listening to rhythm and blues throughout the Northeast, and white musicians were playing rhythm and blues side to side with country music. The music industry soon understood that there was a white market for black music and social prejudice, racial barriers, could nothing against the forces of capitalism. Rock and roll was an overnight success. The music industry promoted white idols such as Elvis Presley, but the real heroes were the likes of Chuck Berry, who better symbolize the synergy between the performer and the audience. The black rockers, and a few white rockers, epitomized the youth's rebellious mood, their need for a soundtrack to their dreams of anticonformism. Their impact was long lasting, but their careers were short lived. For one reason or another, they all stopped recording after a brief time. Rock and roll was inherited by white singers, such as Presley, who often performed songs composed by obscure black musicians. White rockers became gentler and gentler, thereby drowning rock and roll's very reason to exist. Buddy Holly was the foremost white rocker of the late Fifties, while cross-pollination with country music led to the vocal harmonies of the Everly Brothers and to the instrumental rock of Duan Eddy.

The kids' malaise returned, with a much taller wave, when folksingers started singing about the problems of the system. Kids who had not identified with Woody Guthrie's stories of poor people, identified immediately with folksingers singing about the Vietnam war and civil rights. Bob Dylan was arguably the most influential musician of the era. He led the charge against the Establishment with simple songs and poetic lyrics. A generation believed in him and followed his dreams. Music became the expression of youth's ambitions.

At the same time, the story of commercial rock music took a bizarre turn when it hit the coast of California: the Beach Boys invented surf music. Surf music was just rock and roll music, but with a spin: very sophisticated vocal harmonies. California had its own ideas about what rock and roll should be: a music for having fun at the beaches and at the parties. The Beach Boys' vocal harmonies, a natural bridge between rockers and doo-wop, turned out to be a fantastic delivery vehicle for the melodic aspect of rock and roll, that black musicians usually buried in their emphatic shouting.

--------THE SIXTIES--------

"Mersey-beat" changed the story of rock music forever. Mersey-beat came out of nowhere, but it came with the power of history. Britain had had a lousy music scene throughout the early Sixties. Mainly, British rockers were mimicking Presley. Mainstream Britain did not identify with rock and roll, was not amused by their "rebel" attitudes, did not enjoy their frenzy rhythm. To a large extent, though, the seeds had already been planted. Britain had an underground before America did: the blues clubs. Throughout the Fifties, blues clubs flourished all over England. London was the epicenter, but every major English city had its own doses of weekly blues. Unlike their rock counterparts, who were mere imitators, the British blues musicians were true innovators: in their hands, blues became something else. They subjected blues to a metamorphosis that turned it into a "white" music: they emphasized the epic refrains of the call and response, they sped up Chicago's rhythm guitars, they smoothed down the vocal delivery to make it sound more operatic, they flexed the choruses, enhanced the organ arrangements, added vocal harmony. In a few years, British blues musicians were playing something that was as deeply felt as the American blues, but had a driving power that no other music on Earth had.

In the early Sixties veterans of that scene, or disciples of that scene, led to the formation of bands such as the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds and the Animals. The Rolling Stones became "the" sensation in London and went on to record the most successful singles of the era. The Yardbirds were the most experimental of them all, and became the training ground for three of the greatest guitarists ever: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimi Page. From their ashes two blues bands were born, the Cream and the Led Zeppelin, that in a few years will revolutionize rock music again.

Liverpool did not have a great underground scene but had a more commercial brand of rock bands. The producer George Martin was instrumental in creating the whole phenomenon, with both Gerry And The Pacemakers and the Beatles, the band that went on to achieve world-wide success. The smiling faces of the Liverpool kids were in stark contrast with the underground club's angry blues animals. But the two complemented each other. "Beatlemania" stole the momentum from the blues scene and understood how to turn that music into a mass-media attraction. Rock music as a major business was born.

The most influential bands of the second generation were the Kinks and the Who. Both went on to record concept albums and "rock operas" that paraphrased the British operetta at the sound of rock music. While Kinks were still proponents of melodic rock, the Who's manically amplified guitars were already pointing towards a noisier and less gentle future. The Rolling Stones, the Kinks and the Who represent the triad of British rock bands of the mid 1960s that would influence entire generations of rock bands for decades. The Who were composing autobiographical songs of the angry and frustrated urban youth. The Rolling Stones were composing autobiographical songs of the decadent punks of the working class. The Kinks were composing realistic vignettes of ordinary life in bourgeois England. The three together provide a complete picture of the time.

Cream and Led Zeppelin upped the ante when they started playing very loud blues. Cream's lengthy solos and Led Zeppelin's fast riffs created the epitome of "hard rock".

The impact of British electricity on the American scene was equivalent to an earthquake. Kids embraced electric guitars in every garage of the United States and started playing blues music with a vengeance.

On the East Coast it was Dylan again who led the charge. His first electric performances were met with disappointment by his fans, but soon "folk-rock" boomed with the hits of the Byrds and Simon And Garfunkel.

The psychedelic movement that had been growing across the country somehow merged with the wave of electric rockers and the protest movement. They became one both in New York and in San Francisco. The Velvet Underground and the Fugs turned rock and roll into an intellectual operation.

On the West Coast both San Francisco and Los Angeles reacted to the boom of rock and roll in typically eccentric manners. San Francisco, that was becoming the mecca of the hippies, begat "acid-rock", and Los Angeles, whose milieu had produced countless literary and cinematic misfits, begat Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, two of the most influential musicians of the century. Zappa and Beefheart recorded some of the most experimental records ever and turned rock and roll into a major, serious art. San Francisco's bands, led by the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, endorsed complex harmony and improvised jams, thereby moving rock music towards the intellectual excesses of jazz music. Blue Cheer and Quicksilver laid the foundations for hard-rock.

Psychedelic rock was spreading across the country, and spilling over into Britain. Soon America produced the Doors and England produced the Pink Floyd, two bands whose influence will be gigantic. Texas psychedelia went unnoticed, but bands like Red Crayola were far ahead of their time. Detroit was also left out of the main loop, but nonetheless the MC5 and the Stooges helped move rock music one notch up the ladder of noise.

The boom of rock music in the United States helped resurrect the blues. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin became stars, while countless white blues musicians flooded the clubs of Chicago and San Francisco. The Band, Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Doobie Brothers reached new peaks in the revisitation of traditional white and black music. In the south this revival movement will lead to the boom of "southern rock" and the likes of the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Country music was still a Nashville monopoly, but several artists were merging it with eastern meditation, jazz improvisation and rock's freedom. Sandy Bull, Robbie Basho and John Fahey were playing long instrumental tracks that easily rank with the most ambitious pieces of the avantgarde.

In the meantime, black music was going through a metamorphosis of its own. Soul music turned into a form of party music with Tamla Motown's acts such as the Supremes, and rhythm and blues mutated in a feverish genre called "funk" for obscene performers such as James Brown.

In Britain, rock music took more of a European feel with the underground movement that was born out of psychedelic clubs. Canterbury became the center of the most experimental school of rock music. The Soft Machine were the most important band of the period, lending rock music a jazz flavor that would inspire "progressive-rock". Among the eccentric and creative musicians that grew up in the Soft Machine were Robert Wyatt, David Aellen, and Kevin Ayers. Their legacy can be seen in later Canterbury bands such as Henry Cow, no less creative and improvisational.

Progressive-rock took away rock's energy and replaced it with a brain. Traffic, Jethro Tull, Family and later Roxy Music developed a brand of soul-rock that had little in common with soul or rock and roll: long, convoluted jams, jazz accents, and baroque arrangements derailed the song format. King Crimson, Colosseum, Van Der Graaf Generator, early Genesis, Yes and started playing ever more complex, theatrical and hermetic pieces. Arrangements became more and more complex, insturmentalists become more and more skilled. Electronic instruments were employed frequently. Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, Third Ear Band and Hawkwind created genres that at the time had no name (decadent cabaret, world-music and psychedelic hard rock).

The paradigm soon spilled into continental Europe, that gave its first major rock acts: Magma, Art Zoyd, Univers Zero.

Even Britain's folksingers sounded more like French intellectuals than oldfashioned storytellers. The folk revival of the Sixties was mainly the creation of a fistful of three collectives: the Pentangle, the Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band. But around them singer songwriters like Donovan, Cat Stevens, Nick Drake , John Martyn, Syd Barrett and Van Morrison established new standards for musical expression of intimate themes.

The 1960s were the "classic" age of rock music. The main sub-genres were defined in the 1960s. The paradigm of rock music as the "alternative" to commercial pop music was established in the 1960s. Wild experimentation alloweds rock musicians to explore a range of musical styles that few musicians had attempted before 1966. Captain Beefheart and the Velvet Underground also created a different kind of rock music within rock music, a different paradigm within the new paradigm, one that will influence alternative musicians for decades. More than musical giants like Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, humble musicians like Captain Beefheart, the Velvet Underground and the Red Crayola may be the true heroes of the 1960s.

------THE SEVENTIES------

The deaths of the Doors' Jim Morrison, of Janis Joplin, of Jimi Hendrix and countless others, sort of cooled down the booming phenomenon. After the excesses of the mid Sixties, a more peaceful way to rock nirvana had already been proposed by Bob Dylan and others when they rediscovered country music. And "country-rock" became one of the fads of the Seventies, yielding successful bands such as the Eagles. Reggae became a mainstream genre thanks to Bob Marley. Funk became even more absurd and experimental with George Clinton's bands. Hard rock begat heavy metal, that soon became a genre of its own (Blue Oyster Cult, Kiss, Aerosmith, AC/DC, Rush, Journey, Van Halen). The Seventies were mostly a quiet age, devoid of the nevrastenic battage of the Sixties.

At the turn of the decade, the main musical phenomenon was the emergence of a new generation of singer songwriters that were the direct consequence of the previous generation's intellectual ambitions. Leonard Cohen, Tim Buckley, Nico, Lou Reed, Todd Rundgren, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Tom Waits, and the most famous of all, Bruce Springsteen, established a musical persona that unites the classical composer and the folksinger.

In Britain, the early Seventies saw the proliferation of hard rock and progressive-rock and their branching into several sub-genres. British musicians gave rock and roll an "intellectual" quality that made it the cultural peer of European cinema and literature. British rock was dragged down by the same stagnation that afflicted American rock. The momentum for innovation was rapidly lost and the new genres created by British musicians either languished or mutated into commercial phenomena. Musical decadence led to decadence-rock, personified by dandies David Bowie and Marc Bolan. Eccentric remnants of progressive-rock such as Robert Fripp and Peter Gabriel started avantgarde careers that were to lead to an expanded notion of rock music. New musicians such as Kate Bush and Mike Oldfield helped liberate rock music from the classification in genres and opened the road to more abstract music. But the single most influential musician was Brian Eno, who first led Roxy Music to innovate progressive-rock and then invented ambient music.

Largely neglected at the time, German rock was probably twenty years ahead of British rock. Kraftwerk, Amon Duul, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Faust, Neu Can made some of the most important albums of the era, and of the entire history of rock music. They laid the foundations for popular electronic music, for modern instrumental rock, even for new age music and for disco-music.

The mid-Seventies were largely a decade of consolidation, rather than innovation, but two phenomena erupted that would have a strong impact: disco-music and punk-rock. Disco-music was the first genre to use electronic instruments for commercial, mass-scale music. The beat of dance music would never be the same again. Orchestral arrangements became as ordinary as a guitar solo. Punk-rock had an even greater impact, because it came with the emancipation of the record industry from the "majors". Thousands of independent record labels promoted underground artists and soon the music scene was dramatically split between mainstream rock (descendant of Presley and Beatles) and alternative rock (descendant of Zappa and Grateful Dead). Punk-rock per se was fast, loud rock and roll music, but it quickly became a moniker for all angry music of the time.

From the ashes of decadent acts such as the New York Dolls, the Ramones made punk-rock more than a sound, they made it a religion.

New York punks were as intellectual as the folksingers of twenty years before. Patti Smith, Television, Suicide and Feelies were the main acts of the "new wave". The new wave was truly a new wave of creativity, that harked back to the mid Sixties, when bands were competing to innovate.

The Sex Pistols led the prolific British school of punk-rock, a more socially and politically conscious kind of rebellious music. Punks were not necessarily angry, anarchic and suicidal: the Clash and the Fall were punks with a brain.

The Pere Ubu, and Devo in Ohio, and the Residents and Chrome in San Francisco led the way for hundreds of bands that Zoogz Rift went beyond the song format and offered music as bizarre and revolutionary as Zappa's and Beefheart's.

Tom Petty, in California, was one of the few musicians of that generation to remain untouched by the experimental frenzy.

The Fleshtones and the Cramps and the Cars led the myriads of bands the rediscovered the Fifties and the Sixties, in the wake of the "american graffiti" movement.

In Britain a generation that toiled in the pub scene got its chance to emerge at national and international level. Elvis Costello, the Police, the Dire Straits were the most prominent musicians to come out of that milieu.

Blondie, Talking Heads and James Chance, and later Madonna, took the idea to the discos of New York.

The number of solitary geniuses grew exponentially and counted on renaissance men such as Bill Laswell out of Boston and demented industrial composers such as Foetus in New York (via Australia).

Rock and roll was born again. Just like in the mid Sixties, each year yielded scores of brilliant musicians that were rewriting the canon of rock music. In Britain first came industrial music, invented by Throbbing Gristle as a hybrid of avantgarde and rock music, and then dark-punk, whose main proponents were Joy Division, Siouxsie Sioux, Public Image Ltd, the Cure, the Killing Joke, the Sisters Of Mercy.

The Pop Group was the most innovative combo of the time, and spawned the careers of Rip Rig and Panic and Mark Stewart, predating the fusion of soul, jazz and hip hop.

---THE AGE OF ALTERNATIVE ROCK---

In the meantime, punk-rock evolved into "hardcore" and myriads of bands terrorized New York (Misfits), Boston (Mission Of Burma, Lemonheads), and above all Washington (Bad Brains, Pussy Galore, Fugazi). The West Coast had its share of hardcore violence, but somehow Los Angeles (Black Flag, X) and San Francisco (Dead Kennedys, Flipper, Camper Van Beethoven) managed to remain more experimental. So much so that Los Angeles saw the emergence of a generation of bands with roots in the "beach-punk" scene but whose sound was far more complex (Minutemen, Saccharine Trust, Universal Congress, fIREHOSE ), a school that culminated in the solo career of Henry Rollins . Australia boasted one of the most intense scenes, from the early days of the Saints and Radio Birdman to the later days of the Lubricated Goat.

The southeast became one of the cradles of a melodic genre that mixed folk-rock and pop (B52's, REM).

The whole national scene benefited from the emergence of independent music recording. Los Angeles nurtured the Paisley Underground and the cow-punk scene: the Dream Syndicate and the Gun Club emerged from that creative revival.

All sorts of neo-rock bands roamed New York, notably the Band Of Susans. Boston gave two of the most influential acts, Dinosaur Jr and the Pixies, that de facto invented "grunge" rock. Seattle saw the revival of hard-rock and the boom of grunge (Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam). Chicago witnessed the birth of Steve Albini's evil genius with the Big Black. Minneapolis was the real catalyst: the Husker Du and the Replacements, and later the Soul Asylum, changed the whole notion of punk-rock and created the premises for a return to the rock song format with a new impetus. Kentucky was another surprising center of action: the Squirrel Bait started a dynasty of convoluted mainly instrumental punk-rock that would continue with the Slint and the Tortoise.

Psychedelia in the age of punks begat the Butthole Surfers in Texas, the Flaming Lips in Oklahoma, the Phish in New England and a whole legion of gurus in New York: Mark Kramer, Dogbowl, Jarboe, Lida Husik, Azalia Snail. And Mercury Rev, the whole band demented enough to compete with the Flaming Lips.

Roots-rock lived on the side, propelled by the occasional success of the Black Crowes, by the distinguished career of the Del-Lords and by the phenomenal energy of lesser known bands such as the Fetchin Bones.

Australia's rock school expanded dramatically and entered the charts, while preserving artistic merit with bands such as the Church.

Most of the impulse for what was happening actually came from tiny and far New Zealand, that had nurtured an independent scene since the days of the Tall Dwarfs, the Clean and the Chills, a school that would peak with Peter Jefferies's and Roy Montgomery's ambitious works.

In the meantime another street phenomenon of the ghettos, hip hop, revolutionized the music scene and bands such as Beastie Boys, Run DMC, Public Enemy crossed over to the rock audience. Producers such as Tackhead were instrumental in redefining the concept of "composition".

Britain followed a different course, almost in the opposite direction, towards simpler and more commercial music. It all started with the modernist sounds of Ultravox, Wire and XTC, and their vaguely robotic melodies. Then Japan and Simple Minds turned that sound into pompous pop songs. And finally Orchestral Manouvres in the Dark and others created synth-pop, that typically was pop played on electronic instruments and sung by a female or gay singer (with a few notable exceptions). The Depeche Mode and the Pet Shop Boys were probably the most artistically successful of the many that climbed the charts. The Irish U2 and the Smiths turned sharply towards melody

Australia gave the 1980s two of the towering figures of rock music: Nick Cave, who bridged Jim Morrison, Tom Waits and gothic rock, and Foetus, who turned industrial music into the future of classical music.

----THE NINETIES----

The Nineties continued to see the expansion of alternative rock, both artistically and commercially. The general trend of the era was towards more and more abstract music, music that has lost its original label of dance/party music.

First and foremost, the Nineties were the decade of singer songwriters who play ever more abstract compositions: female composers such as Robin Holcomb, Tori Amos, Lisa Germano and Juliana Hatfield, male composers such as Matthew Sweet, Magnetic Field, Smog, Beck . Canada had Jane Siberry and Loreena McKennitt, two of the most conceptual musicians of their time, until Alanis Morissette emerged as a leader of the female folksinger movement. Ireland had two of the most unique voices, Sinead O'Connor and Enya, soon joined by Iceland's Bjork. In England, only Polly Jean Harvey ranked with these masters.

"Foxcore" was a brief fad propelled by West Coast all-girl punk bands such as Hole, Babes In Toyland, L7 and Seven Year Bitch.

Industrial music staged a dramatic comeback in Chicago with two of the most visible acts of the decade: Ministry and Nine Inch Nails, inspired by older European bands like KMFDM. New York followed suit with Cop Shoot Cop and Type O Negative, San Francisco with Neurosis, Steel Pole Bath Tub, Thinking Fellers Union. Texas with a florid industrial/psychedelic school that included the Pain Teensm Bedhead, and the Vas Deferens Organization.

Gothic rock came from the sun belt (Lycia, Black Tape For A Blue Girl) and was never as popular as the northern variant of industrial music.

Hard sounds still ruled in the aftermath of grunge, and New York (Unsane, Helmet, Surgery, Monster Magnet) and Los Angeles (Tool, Stone Temple Pilots, Kyuss, Korn) had their share of the pie.

Techno was the new trend in dance music. Invented in the Eighties in Detroit by the triad of disc jockeys Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May, techno crossed the Atlantic and established itself in England and in the continent (Front 242), marching hand in hand with the rave scene. America was left behind (Moby and not much else).

Britain was the place for psychedelic music. It started with the Liverpool revival of Echo And The Bunnymen and Julian Cope, then it picked up speed with dream-pop (Cocteau Twins, the Australian Dead Can Dance, the Norwegian Bel Canto, and later the formidable triad of Slowdive, Bark Psychosis and Tindersticks) and with the Scottish noise-pop bands (Jesus And Mary Chain and Primal Scream ) and finally reached a climax with the shoegazers (My Bloody Valentine, Spacemen 3, Loop, Spiritualized, Catherine Wheel), before folding into a new form of ambient music.

By the end of the decade, Britain was awash in Brit-pop, a media-induced trance of super-melodic pop that spawned countless "next big things", from Verve to Oasis to Blur to Suede to Radiohead, the band that finally disposed of it. But the best in the melodic genre came from humbler groups, led by girls, like Primitives and Heavenly.

The 1990s were also the decade of heavy metal, that peaked in Los Angeles with Metallica, Jane's Addiction, Guns And Roses, and that soon split into a myriad subgenres (doom metal, grind-core, death metal, etc) and funk-metal (Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rage Against The Machine in Los Angeles, Primus and Faith No More in San Francisco). Marilyn Manson was the late phenomenon that recharged the genre.

Punk-pop was born in Los Angeles in the Eighties, but somehow peaked in the Nineties elsewhere (Green Day in San Francisco, Screeching Weasel and Pegboy in Chicago).

The Nineties were the decade of intellectual rock, when no song could be just a melody and a rhythm but had to be all twisted and deranged. New York leaned towards rhythm and blues (Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Soul Coughing, Royal Trux) and psychedelia (Yo La Tengo ), Boston towards psychedelia (Galaxie 500, Morphine) and pop (Breeders, Belly), Seattle towards psychedelia (Sky Cries Mary, Built To Spill), Los Angeles towards psychedelia (Mazzy Star, Red Temple Spirits, Medicine, Grant Lee Buffalo), San Francisco towards folk and country (American Music Club, Red House Painters), Washington towards punk-rock (Unrest, Girls Against Boys), Chicago towards punk-rock (Jesus Lizard) psychedelia (Codeine, Eleventh Dream Day), pop (Green, Smashing Pumpkins) and country (Uncle Tupelo). All of them owed something to the humble school of Kentucky, led by Slint and peaked with Tortoise.

Remnants of punk-rock in Texas (Ed Hall), Minneapolis (Cows), Tennessee (Today Is The Day) kept sending shock-waves around the nation.

San Francisco started the vogue for lo-fi pop with Pavement, which then begat Sebadoh, Guided By Voices, etc.

The Southeastern states came up strong with more and more intelligent sounds (Bitch Magnet, Blind Idiot God, Don Caballero, Grifters) that eventually peaked in the North Carolina school (Polvo, Seam).

Analog synthesizers staged a comeback with Jessamine, Magnog, Labradford.

But new styles kept coming literally from everywhere: Rhode Island (Six Finger Satellite), Arizona ( Calexico), Ohio ( Brainiac), Montana (Silkworm), Michigan (Windy & Carl).

England kept mutating its variant of psychedelia, that now began bordering on dissonant avantgarde (Stereolab, Ozric Tentacles, Pram, Flying Saucer Attack, Porcupine Tree).

The Nineties were the age of electronic music, whether in dance, ambient or noise format. Electronic musicians and ensembles spread to Belgium (Vidna Obmana), France (Air, Deep Forest, Lightwave), Germany (Sven Vath, Mo Boma, Oval, Mouse On Mars, Air Liquide), Canada (Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, Delerium, Vampire Rodents, Trance Mission), Scandinavia, and especially Japan (Zeni Geva, Boredoms, Merzbow, the triad of noise). Britain's revitalized ambient scene yielded Orb, Main, Rapoon, Autechre.

Britain's dance music was far more successful (creatively speaking) than its rock bands: Madchester (Stone Roses), rave (Saint Etienne), transglobal dance (Banco De Gaia, Loop Guru, Transglobal Underground, TUU) ambient house (Orbital, Future Sound Of London, Aphex Twins, Mu-ziq), jungle (Goldie, Squarepusher, Propellerheads), trip-hop (Portishead, Tricky), and plain techno (Meat Beat Manifesto, Prodigy, Chemical Brothers) artists redefined compositional processes and cross-bred countless genres.

Industrial music and grindcore somehow merged and spawned terrifying sounds in the albums of Techno Animal and Godflesh.

The Irish Cranberries and the Scottish Belle And Sebastian are among the revelations of the end of the decade.

Australia still boasts impressive ensembles, and in particular one of the most important instrumental bands, Dirty 3.

The 1990s' boom of singer songwriters will continue throughout the decade. Among the leaders of influential bands, several will continue offering serious music on their own: Natalie Merchant, Kristin Hersh, Bob Mould, Frank Black, Paul Westerberg, Mark Eitzel, Scott Weiland, Chris Cornell, and, greatest of them all, Mark Lanegan.

Freedy Johnston, Vic Chesnutt, Peter Himmelman, My Dad Is Dead, Mountain Goats are among the new voices of the decade, each eccentric in his own way.

And the ranks seemed to increase towards the turn of the century: Jeff Buckley, Sparklehorse, Elliott Smith, Richard Buckner, Ben Harper, Joe Henry, Songs:Ohia, Damien Jurado, Pedro The Lion, etc.

Among female artists, Jarboe, Azalia Snail and Lida Husik were heavily influenced by psychedelia.

Cat Power, Beth Hart, Neko Case, Amy Denio, Heather Duby, Edith Frost, Shannon Wright are among the experimental artists to emerge in the late 1990s.

Liz Phair, Sheryl Crow, Fiona Apple, Lili Haydn represent the commercial aspect of the movement, which peaked with Mariah Carey's innumerable hits.

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