Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Na na na na, yeah

I still don’t know exactly what “A Long December” by Counting Crows was meant to evoke in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, but I can tell you what it did for me: instantly took me back to that window of time in the early-to-mid 1990s when I was working in Atlanta. Spending a lot of time driving around and listening to the radio station 99X, which seemed to have every one of their songs on frequent rotation. Supposedly, 99X was the home of “alternative rock,” but I suspect they said that mostly to let people like me believe we weren’t listening to mainstream radio. I guess technically, it was accurate, since “mainstream” hits at the time were dominated by Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. But it didn’t feel very alternative to be listening to Counting Crows, or Hootie and the Blowfish, or The Dave Matthews Band, all of which would become Starbucks and Borders Books mainstays. Don’t get me wrong; I got all of these albums on CD, and I listened to them incessantly. There was a…