I am in a constant struggle with my birth certificate. It continues to claim I was born in 1989, despite my relentless efforts to separate myself from everything in the ’80s that wasn’t Metallica, Depeche Mode or Peter Gabriel. I don’t care what my birth certificate says, I’m a child of the ’90s.

And, oh, how I miss the ’90s. In the ’80s we were handing out Grammys to Tina Turner, Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler. In the ’90s we were giving them to Soundgarden, Alanis Morissette, Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead.

Those artists, and similar ones, were dominating the radio with forward-thinking songs and raw-sounding production, as opposed to the fake sounds of synth-pop and formulaic songwriting of hair metal in the previous decade. Even MTV — when it actually played music videos — was airing videos by these artists on a regular basis. Given, there were still artists like Ace of Base and Mariah Carey on the pop scene, but even that sound was beginning to phase out. People wanted music that sounded real and had some humanity behind it, and they were getting it.

Now, a decade later, we are listening to history repeating itself. Popular musical trends have moved from the real sounds of the ’90s back to the fake sounds of the ’80s. Power ballads by bands like Buckcherry and Hinder are sounding more like hair metal ballads than modern rock songs. Artists like Nickelback, Muse and Yeah Yeah Yeahs went from being grungy and in-your-face to poppy and electronic. Yep, it’s the ’80s all over again.

This isn’t to say there was no good, innovative music in this decade or the ’80s; there was — a lot of it, in fact. The difference is you had to dig for it, because it received little to no popular attention or radio play.

For example, the music magazine Paste recently came out with a list of the 50 Best Albums of the Decade [2000 – 2009]. In the top four spots were albums by Sufjan Stevens, Wilco, The Arcade Fire and Radiohead. All four of these albums are very real-sounding and inspired, were recognized by a very prominent music magazine to be the best of an entire decade, yet they received little to no radio play — at least not in central Iowa.

At first, Radiohead may seem to go against this claim, considering they’ve had radio hits since their first album, in 1993, but not in this case. The album in question, “Kid A,” was Radiohead’s only studio album that didn’t have any singles released from it — it was also the first to feature a substantial amount of electronic sounds and sampling. The difference for “Kid A” lies in the fact that electronic sounds weren’t being used to mimic real instruments in a lazy attempt to create something resembling a band; they were being used to create an atmosphere that could never be described as poppy. The most ambient and electronic-sounding track on the album was made using nothing but electric guitar.

These four artists, along with many others, were making albums that would have fit the bill of popularity in the ’90s, but went widely unnoticed by mainstream radio of the time. All this was going on behind the scenes while genre traitors like Hoobastank, Linkin Park and Green Day managed to get airplay on stations ranging from the metal of Lazer 103.3 to the easy listening of Lite 104.1.

However, rock isn’t the only genre with opportunists willing to sell their sounds for a little more airtime. Many country artists these days simply write rock or pop songs and perform them like country, as though the only requirement to making something a country song is to have a slight twang in the voice and the occasional fiddle or banjo. Taylor Swift even has completely different versions of her songs in an effort to please both the pop and country scenes. In most cases the country versions are actually much better, because — what do you know — she wrote the songs to be in that style. I’m still waiting for a metal version of “Love Story” to come out, but that might be stretching it a bit too much. It should be just as big a stretch as from pop to country, but those genres have been so twisted that they overlap enough to form an area of music that would really give Johnny Cash something to cry about.

However, this cloud does have a silver lining. If history is repeating the bad part of this cycle, it has to repeat the good part too, which means that as we enter the next decade we could see a rise in the popularity of good, real-sounding music. On the rock side of things, artists like Brand New, Silversun Pickups and The Flaming Lips are leading us into a new era of lo-fi production trends similar to those in the ’90s. In the more electronic genres, Daft Punk, Animal Collective and Depeche Mode are still finding ways to create dark moods out of samplers and keyboards without sounding poppy and repetitive.

These are obviously just projections and guesses, but we can only hope that as the music scene continues to grow, we will revert back to the way things used to be. I might be completely wrong, but if I am, it just means I’ll have to keep digging to find the good stuff.

Tom Hummer is a junior in English  from Ames