Saturday Night Fever's pivotal spot in the seventies notwithstanding, the nineties was the decade in which soundtrack albums really became as important as the visuals they accompanied. Chuck five seconds of a sellable pop song in a film, dump the entire song on a five-inch plastic disc, and a label just might move a metric ton of CDs. If those five seconds belong to an alternative rock group, you might even sell discs to kids who wouldn't be caught dead watching the visuals in question. No joke: Melrose Place may be stupid, but the Melrose Place soundtrack is unironically awesome!
I'd always wanted to read a book like Pretend We're Dead: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Women in Rock in the '90s. The nineties alternative scene is one that hardly gets as much attention as the British Invasion of the sixties, the hard rock scene of the seventies, or the new wave of the eighties, but for a lot of gen x'ers, it was just as important. But most contemporary discussions of nineties rock would lead you to think it was a scene of one, and that one was Nirvana. I loved and love Nirvana, but grunge was largely a dead end of samey sounding records by guys who couldn't write a pop melody if their favorite flannel was being held for ransom.
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