Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

80. Sixpence None The Richer “Kiss Me”
(Matt Slocum)
Sixpence None The Richer [Squint] • 1997

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There is a sense in which this song is the musical equivalent of a Thomas Kinkade painting: all gauzy artificiality and concentrated, unrelenting prettiness, without the faintest hint of actual life, observed truth, or immediate passion anywhere. There is also a sense in which it is not.

I knew who Sixpence None The Richer were long before they were on the radio. They were part of a mid-90s surge in literate, intelligent Christian rock, with music more indebted to the Smiths and other English miserabilists than to the usual Christian-rock tropes (which are to imitate the sounds of pop radio two years prior), and lyrics which wrestled with faith, morality, and the fragile bonds of human relationships in an introspective, abstract manner that at times approached profundity. Only at times — songwriter Matt Slocum’s most impressive attribute was the length of his reading list, not the depth of his original thought — and their early albums were sketches in search of a sound, as they floundered on an unsupportive Christian indie that didn’t know how to market them.

Their third, self-titled album, on which this song appears, was one of the first releases on a new label, Squint Entertainment, which was 80s church ironist Steve Taylor’s effort at making Christian music relevant to the wider culture (but please don’t blame him for Creed). The second song begins with the words “This is my forty-fifth depressing tune,” and to Sixpence fans, it wasn’t far off: Slocum’s penchant for downbeat lyrics, slow tempos, and minor keys could be oppressive, saved only by Leigh Nash’s winsome voice and shrewd, patient delivery. It’s in the context of the album, set in the middle of mopey reflections on loss, pain, betrayal, community, and a Pablo Neruda poem, that “Kiss Me” deserves to be heard, that its full force is truly evident.

What it is, is hope. Yes, life is dark and depressing and nothing will ever entirely satisfy. But then on the other hand, there’s love. No, L. M. Montgomery’s vision of life isn’t all-encompassing any more than Morrissey’s is; but it’s nice to visit.

And there’s the fact that Matt Slocum, writing as a straight man, doesn’t change the gender signifiers, so if you really want to you can hear Leigh Nash asking someone in a flowered hat to kiss her.



79. Luscious Jackson “Naked Eye”
(Jill Cunniff)
single [Capitol] • 1996

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I resisted placing this song for a long time, partly because I misheard it as a Crystal Watersy trying-too-hard dance song, and partly because it seemed too modest, too reluctant to speak up for itself. (If you don’t hear songs as having personalities — entirely incidental to whatever the lyrics may be saying — I don’t know what to say. I can’t help you.)

But there are two reasons I finally broke down. The less important one is that I wanted a representative of the New York boho-dance scene, the one with roots in the post-punk of the late 70s (Talking Heads to ESG to Was Not Was), which incorporated hip-hop in the late 80s (via the Beastie Boys, no I’m serious) and by the mid-90s had given us Cibo Matto, Spearhead, and the prenominate J., Lusc. The scene would explode post-millennially thanks to the DFA and !!! and LCD Soundsystem and the conflation of uptown disco with downtown dance-punk, and that explosion, ironic and po-faced at the same time, would leave much of the quirk and sincere bohemianism of the 90s behind, so that it’s impossible to hear Luscious Jackson as anything but a period piece now. Just like the rest of their decade.

The other reason I broke down is that I listened to the song over and over again, and it won me over in spite of my resistance. This is not unusual; in fact throughout the compilations of these lists I’ve placed songs that I didn’t know very well, confident that repeated exposure would justify their position. (No, I’m not telling you which ones. A man needs some mystery.) I think what it was was the galloping fills during the “coming down on me” refrain. And the unflustered white-girl rapping. That’s something you never hear anymore, not since rap ascended to undisputed dominion over all pop: white people rapping in their own voice and style, without trying to imitate black styles or being Eminem. No, she ain’t got flow. The Rolling Stones never had the blues, either, but the latter-day tension around white coöption of black music has inevitably left white culture the poorer.

Yeah, yeah, cry you a river.



78. Air “Le Soleil Est Près Du Moi”
(Jean-Benoît Dunckel, Nicolas Godin)
single [Source] • 1997

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The Millennium Began Three Years Early;
Or, How To Redeem The Promise Of European Avant-Pop From The Early 70s.

How do you hear this song? Is it too slow and boring, too one-note, too soft and gauzy and AM-pop? Is it a weird pre-echo of the Daft Punk that became rock stars? Is it just plain Air, mellow and atmospheric and all-around excellent?

I don’t know what goes through your head when you hear this. What goes through mine is roughly:

Longtime French pop chancer Michel Polnareff’s 1971 album Polnareff’s is one of the most perfect pop albums of all time. Building on the carefully-controlled atmospheric innovations of his compatriots Serge Gainsbourg and Jean-Claude Vannier, he added a bit of the electronic manipulation that was just beginning to take root in the global pop scene; less than two years later, Kraftwerk in Germany, Giorgio Moroder in Italy, and Les Rockets in France would start the ball rolling in the long slow lane towards techno. With his smoothly-orchestrated pop songs informed by drones, cocktail lounge, and MIDI technology, Polnareff sounds like nothing more than all the art-pop inclinations of the mid-90s stuffed together into a time capsule, waiting to explode. “Le Soleil Est Près Du Moi” is a collection of all those loungey, spacey experiments, distilled down to a single song.

The synthesized robo-voices owe something to Kraftwerk, but more to Les Rockets, and (as you might have noticed) Daft Punk and Kanye West would steal them for further exploration. Air would go on to release mighty, dreamy albums and garner a critical and popular reputation far more thoroughgoing than their inspirations; but I’m not sure they ever got better than this.



77. Boyz II Men “Motownphilly”
(Nathan Morris, Shawn Stockman, Dallas Austin, Michael Bivins)
Cooleyhighharmony [Motown] • 1991

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New jack swing entered its period of high decadence in the early 90s, just when I began listening. That spring-loaded rhythm, at once clattering with the energy of urban life and bouncy with the goofy carelessness of teen-pop, would be out of fashion within a year or two, but after nearly twenty years it sounds way better than the dense, dark beats that took over in uptempo r&b. (“Better” = I was thirteen.)

Boyz II Men are not nowadays remembered as one of the major groups of the 90s, but when I came of pop age they were everywhere, their smooth, inhuman harmonies one of the key sounds of pop radio. I learned about that classic pop trope, the spoken-word bridge, from them, in examples both pretty okay (“End Of The Road”) and terrible (“On Bended Knee”). But I only knew them as balladeers, unctuous lovermen whose instrumentation echoed with insincere solemnity: their duet with Mariah Carey was both entirely typical and, as far as I was concerned, their swan song. I was beginning to distinguish good music from bad, and rock & roll  from non-rock (which was, ah youth, the same thing). I didn’t think about them for fifteen years.

But you know how it is. You talk yourself into doing an insane thing on your blog where you pick your favorite hundred songs of each decade of the twentieth century, and because you’re afraid your inevitable blind spots will make it too easy for people to make fun of you, you download massive amounts of music from those decades and start listening to them in preparation for making the list. You find a collection called 100 Greatest R&B Songs Of The 1990s (you are not able to find out who compiled the list, but what the hell), and download it and listen to it and you keep coming back to #72 on the list, which surprised and enraptured you. This is Boyz II Men? you think. But this is, like, good!

Indeed. The uptempo beat, which every now and then works itself into a drill formation, is the least of it: BIIM are mythologizing themselves, and mythologizing the Philly r&b scene they came out of, shouting out to Another Bad Creation and Bell Biv Devoe (whose Michael Bivens contributes his own spoken-word part). Their slick harmonies are far more magical in this overheated environment than in the lugubrious ballads that came later, especially when the wall of sound drops away and they sing a pointillist riff: “dm dm dm daddup,” &c. I loved Take 6 way too much in my Christian youth not to respond to that.



76. Suede “The Drowners”
(Bernard Butler, Brett Anderson)
single [Nude] • 1992

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I suppose I can just barely hear how this was a shock to the system of British pop music in the early 90s — guitars were back! Stylish cool and glamorous self-assertion was in! — but Suede has rarely meant more to me than as a gesture towards other, more fully-developed musics. This song is one of the exceptions.

See, Brett Anderson’s strangled, androgynous yelp owed more than a little to David Bowie’s epochal 70s work, and Bernard Butler’s massed riffing guitars were basically nicked from T. Rex ca. “Twentieth Century Boy,” but the hypnotic cyclical rhythm pounded on the toms drew as much from trance and druggy acid house as from Suzi Quatro or Gary Glitter, and it’s the sleek modernization of glam, more than anything unique and particular to Suede themselves, that really grabs me by the throat.

Trashheap chic is of course unoriginal by definition, being built out of scavenged parts, and Suede’s political-cultural ethos — the way its vision of sleazy, androgynous glamour is essentially a palimpsest of more “authentic,” less surgically airbrushed visions — is a large part of their appeal. I can never forget the first Suede song I heard: a cover of Noël Coward’s “Poor Little Rich Girl,” a mocking 1927 study of the Bright Young Things mocked and studied in Evelyn Waugh’s early novels, a generation of wealthy wastrels aching for real lived experience (generally in the form of Negro entertainment) and defensively ironic, unable to allow themselves the vulnerability of emotion. (Also, scabrously funny. Read Waugh, folks.) Privileged, irony-soaked youth driven by lust, drugs and fear are a constant regardless of generation. It’s to Suede’s credit that they inhabit the idea so well.

N.B. This is normally called the first Britpop single. I tend to enjoy Britpop, but I heartily endorse all anti-fans-of-Britpop policies. Especially when they’re Americans. Like me.



75. PJ Harvey “Sheela-Na-Gig”
(Polly Jean Harvey)
Dry [Too Pure] • 1992

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A Sheela na Gig is a decorative carving found on medieval buildings, usually (though not exclusively) in historically Celtic regions. It displays a simplified female form with an exaggerated vulva. The Wikipedia page is fascinating. I’m pretty sure there was a Hellboy story that mentioned the concept. Anyway.

PJ Harvey’s song of the same name can be understood epistemologically as an exercise in feminist anthropology, conflating the historico-architectural fact of the carvings (which are historic0-architecturally uncertain as to their textual meaning (in a quasi-Lacanian sense)) with the horror of female sexuality visible in a wide swath of modern cultural production up to and including the common masculine-feminine relational axis. Interrogative references from the worlds of capitalist pornography, intermammalian biology, colonialist American musical theater of the post-war era, and gay poetics are drawn in to comment on and at times subvert the original radical-feminist thesis of female power and male fear. (Translation: I’m an English lit major.)

Also, it’s a kickass rock song, jarringly funky in the Rodgers & Hammerstein breakdown and darkly funny in its portrait of a relationship made intolerable by one partner’s squeamishness. Polly Jean Harvey grew up on a farm; the false niceties of civilized society are generally not a priority for her.

I’ve talked about my rather uneasy reaction to  PJ Harvey’s music elsewhere. I’m aware (or I think I am) that her longtime listeners tend to dismiss this song as lightweight, but I’m pretty sure it’s made me a fan.



74. Orbital “Halcyon”
(Phil Hartnoll, Paul Hartnoll, Ed Barton)
single [London] • 1993

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Anyone who has paid close attention to these lists over the years (needs to get a life, yes, but also) might be aware that a rule of thumb for them has been No Instrumentals. Partly this is because as a pop fan instrumental songs are harder to peg down than song songs; partly it’s because I don’t have the musical vocabulary with which to discuss composition and theory with any kind of justice; and partly it’s because you’ve got to put boundaries somewhere or the whole enterprise collapses into a viscuous goo of Everything All At Once. Well, kind of. The hardy souls who have braved my 20s and 30s lists know that there are exceptions to this rule. Congratulations on your percipience; and pop followed different rules back then.

Which brings us to this.

First and less importantly, I’m not convinced that this song has no lyrics. It has no words attatched to a syntactic meaning, sure; but there are (looped and patterned) human voices, and if the outro to “Hey Jude” counts as pop, so does this.

Second, assuming that this is an instrumental. Pop followed different rules back then; and it follows different rules now, comparing both periods to pop’s Classical Era (1956-1988, or Elvis to Techno). A good portion of purely electronic music has slowly established itself as a sort of post-bop for the millennial era, a complex and not easily accessible form of quite large compositional, performative, and dynamic freedom. But just as post-bop had its origins in the (pop) jazz of Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke, modern electronic has roots in dancefloor fillers that aimed as much at the head as at the ass.

This is a limited-release 7″ mix of the song, which was originally released as a the ten-minute title track on an EP and then as the original capper to Orbital’s brown album (as “Halcyon+On+On”). Having to conform to the compressed running time of the 45-rpm single did wonders for Orbital’s tendency to meander: “Halcyon” is now a highly concentrated shot of bliss, evocative and aching in all the right places.



73. Stone Temple Pilots “Interstate Love Song”
(Robert DeLeo, Scott Weiland)
Purple [Atlantic] • 1994

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This is probably the place where I talk about grunge.

Except I’d rather drive saguaro needles into my eyelids than participate in anything so deathly boring and grindingly predictable as the usual Internet pissing match about the most overrated/necessary/media-hyped/heroically successful, then tragically betrayed/lively/dull/full of power and meaning/lacking pop’s primal impulse to entertain/what the hell are you talking about have you ever really listened man scene in rock history. Besides, STP aren’t really grunge anyway. If they were, it would have been a more interesting genre.

This song is a Southern Rock song. Yeah, it has the usual post-Seattle signifiers of raging guitars, semi-cryptic lyrics (though not really; Weiland’s a pop songwriter, not goddamn T.S. Eliot), raspingly weary vocals, and plodding tempo, but listen again: those chords are pure Skynyrd, that riff is secondhand Allman, the lyrics not all that far from the Marshall Tucker Band’s “Can’t You See.” In fact, when I first started listening to classic rock, there was a disorienting period of déjà vu: I knew those songs, even though I’d never heard them in my life. (Yes, it’s possible. Grow up fundamentalist, then start listening to the radio in Guatemala. Let me know how it goes.)

Stone Temple Pilots were always, quietly, my band. Nirvana was too mythologized, Pearl Jam too earnest, Alice In Chains too anguished, Soundgarden too grandstanding, Mudhoney and Screaming Trees too unheard. STP was the first of the wave of imitators, and like any good Southern Californians they understood far better than the original Seattle scenesters the imperative towards posing and calculation that pop demands. They couldn’t sell out; they were never authentic. The authentic always eventually fades and rots; the artificial is artificial forever.



72. The Roots “The Next Movement”
(?uestlove, Black Thought, Kamal Gray, Hub, Mercedes Martinez, Tracey Moore)
Things Fall Apart [MCA] • 1999

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The one thing about the Roots that everyone knows — they use real instruments omg — is not entirely true on this track. Yeah, the drums and bass and keyboard are live, but DJ Jazzy Jeff (I’d sigh nostalgically over his beginnings with Fresh Prince, but I missed it at the time and have not been particularly grabbed since) throws a bunch of old-school samples and scratches over the loping, acid-jazz beat set up by ?uestlove and company. Black Thought’s cerebral, wide-ranging wordplay on the verses is set off by a chorus as dumb-awesome as any club banger: “We got the hot hot music, the hot music.”

I’m not sure I buy it. All hot music is cool, but not all cool music is hot, and the organ trills and cooing female backup singers set this firmly in the cool column. Which is unusual for a hip-hop track, frankly, and even more so for hip-hop in the late 90s. Not a dis, except this was the era of Puff Daddy’s commercial dominance, which is a massive dis on the face of the world itself.

But the Roots’ abnormality in their contemporary context is sort of the point. They’ve been a lot of indie kids’ entry into hip-hop (not mine, though; I came to them late), and on this track particularly you can hear why: intelligence, particularity and microscopic grades on the emotional spectrum tend to win over freak, funk and fire in the bedrooms of skinny sweater-wearers. Again, not a dis. Pop vs. indie is a common dichotomy, but entrenched oppositions are inimical to pop, which is ravenously multivalent and has no patience with ideological fervor either for or against. Meaning yeah, my instincts are largely indie too.

Sorry if the culture warring above makes no sense to you. Just click on the song and let the slippery funk slide over you.



71. Sam Phillips “Zero Zero Zero!”
(Sam Phillips)
Omnipop (It’s Only A Flesh Wound Lambchop) [Virgin] • 1996

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Unpursued trains of thought while listening to this song for the several thousandth time:

1) The production sounds like Jon Brion, but it’s actually T-Bone Burnett, who was married to Sam Phillips throughout the 90s. He’s best known (maybe) for the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack and related Americana-soaked authenticity, but he can do anything.

2) The fact that the song piles up every discarded, corny cliché of the easy-listening 60s, from Hawaiian “exotica” and harp glissandos to pillowy Bacharach horns and hammy choirs is a count in its favor, not against.

3) Sam Phillips was one of my earliest musical crushes in the mid-80s, when she was a Christian recording artist under her given name of Leslie; she rocked harder than anyone I’d ever heard before in 1984. Her voice is still toe-curlingly sexy.

4) Something about how the defiantly minor nature of this song makes it an unlikely and even (in some sense) wrong choice for a list like this, except hell and damn, it’s my list and it’s one of my favorite songs ever, forget Of The 1990s.

5) This album is one of the great pop albums, cynical, sweet, sarcastic, wounded, scared, and hopeful all at once. And it’s on sale really cheap at a used record store near you.

90. The Flaming Lips “Bad Days”
(Wayne Coyne, Michael Ivins, Steven Drzod, Ronald Jones)
Clouds Taste Metallic [Warner Bros.] • 1995

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The Flaming Lips have had such a remarkable post-millennial career, in that their longtime fans have grown less and less enthusiastic about each new release even as the band has reached undreamed-of heights of widespread appeal and commercial success, all while remaining true to their fractured, weirded-out vision of guitar pop, that it can be difficult to trace their lineage without choosing sides between the condescending “their early stuff was better” hipsters or the puppyish “omg At War With The Mystics roxxorz my post-9/11 world lulz” newbies.

Both of which are strawmen, and neither of them are necessarily wrong anyway. But my own preference is here, at the precise midpoint between the early freak-scene alt-stardom of “She Don’t Use Jelly” and the ascension to the Everything’s Serious indie-pop pantheon of The Soft Bulletin.  The version I’m streaming is the last track on Clouds Taste Metallic, on the Wikipedia page of which it’s listed as “Bad Days [Aurally Excited Version] [Mix],” to distinguish it from the less gonzo-pop versions which had previously appeared on an EP and a soundtrack which will play host to another song on this list (gentlemen, start your search engines).

Sounding like the strung-out post-Smile Beach Boys with J. Mascis sitting in on guitar is one thing: recommending that the slackers of the world rise up and kill their bosses is another. Yet somehow Wayne Coyne’s still-fragile falsetto manages to unite sun-kissed harmonies with Mansonesque fever-dreams in a way that sounds both elegaic and hopeful. Probably because when it comes to psychedelic pop, lyrics mean less than the sounds of the songs — and the sound of the song is of a slumbrous trip riddled with grace.

That sentence means something to me, apparently; I’m sorry it’s not clearer. Ever since I gave up on music lessons, imagistic language is the only tool I really have at my disposal to talk about this kind of thing.

89. Missy Misdemeanor Elliott “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)”
(Missy Elliott, Timbaland, Don Bryant, Bernard Miller, Ann Peebles)
Supa Dupa Fly [Goldmind] • 1997

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Well hello Timbo.

I’ve said in another context that Timbaland is the Phil Spector of 00’s music; that would place this song as, roughly, “To Know Him Is To Love Him.” Except much better, because Missy Elliott ain’t no fuckin’ Teddy Bear.

The song is anchored, of course, by the unforgettable refrain of Ann Peebles’ 1973 “I Can’t Stand The Rain,” which, when paired with Timbo’s sparse, narcotic beat and a looped sample of crickets, serves as a chorus around which Missy creates her own sparse, narcotics-laced narrative of companionship, good times, and that damn rain bringin’ everyone down.  She’s (as of 2009) the all-time number-one female MC, and on this her debut single she arrives fully-formed, casting herself as the successor to Lauryn Hill and (more surprisingly) Digital Underground — which makes sense, because Missy’s not out to be the black CNN but to give people something to dance to, and to humpty hump to. She’s pulling pop-rap out of the early-90s ghetto created by Hammer and company, dusting off the accreted gangsta signifiers, and, with the help of her producer, turning it into something that can propel pop through the next millennium.

Which is why her relationship with Timbaland is the grand tradition of vital producer-vocalist relationships in pop. Phil and Ronnie, Ike and Tina, Richard and Karen, Nile and Madonna, Max and Britney — they all pushed pop forward in different ways, but here in 1997 you can begin to hear the last gears clicking into place. Hip-hop’s raid-the-past aesthetic provides the template for modern pop: the next step is to begin raiding the present.

88. Moby “Porcelain”
(Moby)
Play [Mute] • 1999

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Strings, piano droplets, a muted beat, the otherwise unheard-of Pilar Basso far away in another room moaning (so says the collective wisdom of the Internet) “hey, woman, it’s all right.” I totally understand if, after reading my exaggerated yawn towards trip-hop at #91, you dismiss me as the rankest nationalistic hypocrite: surely there’s very little music more boring, more frictionless, more coffeeshop than Moby’s.

Well, yeah. Granted. Any defense I could muster would be on the level of having somebody recount their dreams to you; either you’re already on board or you’re not, and since you’re outside my head, why would you be? Here goes anyway:

In 1999 I was probably at my music-listening nadir. Fed up with Third Eye Blind and the Goo Goo Dolls and Everclear and the mediocre sameness of everything on the local “alternative” station, and fatally dismissive of anything else, I was close to forgetting about music and getting on with my life. (I’m, uh, still working on that last bit.) In that environment, “Porcelain,” when I heard it in the car of a friend who bought like a CD a year (and in 1999 Play was the CD that everyone who bought like a CD a year bought), was like growing a new synapse. Music could be this, too! Evocative, pastel-colored, not in any rush to ingratiate itself or shout-smack you into submission, with those minor-key piano figures left hanging like a slow-motion punch in the gut — it was very like being in a waking dream.

And then I found out about Napster and every story has a happy ending. That initial fascination with “Porcelain” never turned into a full-on investigation of (embarrassed cough) electronica, and today I’ll happily make fun of Moby with the best of them, but the song remains in my memory like a hole in the air, and when I listen again I can’t hear the commercials, the self-righteous veganism, or the embarrassing attempts to remain relevant. I just hear a shy dude trying to explain himself in a void. And man, do I understand that.

87. Green Day “When I Come Around”
(Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, Tré Cool)
Dookie [Reprise] • 1994

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Scene: before class, sometime in 1994.

Friend Who Is In A Band: Dude, you know this Green Day band?

Me [cautiously]: I think I heard of them. [I have read a blurb about them in Newsweek, paired with the Smashing Pumpkins, but am not sure if I have yet heard their music.]

FWIIAB: Oh, man, they’re so bad. They only have like, two or three chords per song!

Me [hoping to convey the appropriate level of contempt]: Man. Geeze. [Remain uncertain as to why that should make them bad. I am aware of Georges Perec’s novel A Void, which is 300 pages and never uses the letter E. Constraints can be useful in art. I myself am in the middle of an ambitious retelling of the Arthurian myth in short poems, each of which is a minor catastrophe for English literature.]

Scene: Any time throughout 1995.

Me [listening on my Walkman to a tape I made off the radio]: [Bounce in glee when “When I Come Around” squirts into being after a garbled Spanish-language DJ coming off of the Eagles’ live concert version of “Hotel California,” attempt to sing along with Billie Joe Armstrong’s Californian approximation of adenoidal English punk. Mostly it just sounds like I have a cold.]

“Basket Case,” “Longview,” “She” and “Welcome To Paradise” are everyone else’s favorite songs off Dookie. “When I Come Around” is mine. With the benefit of perspective, I think that’s because the others are closer to the rest of American mall-punk. “When I Come Around,” though, is power pop.

86. Mazzy Star “Fade Into You”
(Dave Roback, Hope Sandoval)
So Tonight That I Might See [Capitol] • 1993

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Apparently this was a hit.

Not in Guatemala, where I was glued to the radio, nor with such force that it was still being played on returning to the States in 1996. I first heard it in 2002 because I was trawling through allmusic.com looking for bands similar to and influenced by the Cocteau Twins. But when I was playing it at work one day, a girl who (as far as I knew) never intentionally listened to anything besides They Might Be Giants stopped and said, “Mazzy Star, right?” So apparently it was a hit on some level.

One of the perils, if you want to call it that, of remix and mashup culture is that later music can sometimes overwhelm the experience of listening to older music. Producer and mashup guru Richard X’s 2003 album Richard X Presents His X-Factor, Vol. 1 (there have been no subsequent volumes) contained a song called “Into You,” in which Jarvis Cocker basically wrote different verses to this song and crooned along with Hope Sandoval, and it became one of my favorite songs for a couple of years there, and now I can’t listen to the original without hearing a ghostly echo of Cocker’s lecherous croak overlaid on top of it.

I can’t decide which is the better song — or rather, I refuse to assign a meaning to the phrase — but on the principle that the samplee deserves to be known in its own right apart from the sampler (which is why I have a whole lot of obscure 70s funk, disco, and Afro-jazz on my hard drive), and because after all I fell in love with the spectral gauziness of the original before Richard X and Jarvis Cocker applied their electronic voudou witchery to it, and also as a sort of apology for the fact that Hope Sandoval’s solo albums weren’t very good, even though I tried very hard to believe otherwise just because I was so besotted with her on this song . . . ladies and gentlemen, “Fade Into You.”

85. Los Lobos “Kiko And The Lavender Moon”
(David Hidalgo, Louie Pérez)
Kiko [Slash] • 1993

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I may have made mention before of the fact that I’m generally not a big fan of albums, preferring the internal consistency and handcrafted miniaturity of great songs. There are of course exceptions.

There are eighteen songs on Los Lobos’ 1993 masterwork Kiko, and not a single one of them is extraneous or unnecessary. I did not think this the first time I listened to the album, nor the second, nor the tenth. And in fact I will continue to insist that the the bloated running time made possible by the CD has on the whole been a Terrible Thing for pop music in general and rock music in particular. The 90s are littered with half-great albums that would have been jewels of perfection in the vinyl age, with more stringent editing and a harsher attitude towards the merely passable. At an earlier time, I would have included Kiko as Exhibit A in this thesis. No longer; I have lived with the album long enough to know its contours, and I can settle into them as into a familiar drive, happily expecting the next song round the bend.

I said all of that to say this: picking just one song from the album was really hard and remains unsatisfactory. But this was the single (it did nothing), and it’s the title song, and it’s a good example of the atmospheric, wide-ranging tunefulness to be found on the album.

Los Lobos are, as every child should learn at its mother’s knee, a rock & roll band from East L.A. whose members are Latino, steeped in the traditions of American and Latin-American vernacular music, and superb musicians, not in that order. With avant-trad producer Mitchell Froom, they made a record which is the musical equivalent of Los Bros Hernandez’ Love & Rockets alt-comix saga, which (not coincidentally?) hit its high notes around the same period: Mexican-American magical realism, with clean lines and unexpected grace notes. The way this song shifts and bleeds from Glenn Milleresque horn lines, to norteño accordion that instead calls to mind Italian trattorias, to an electric sitar rumba, all with muffled, shuffling percussion and a two-step piano line that only gasps into existence every now and again, is only a jewelled setting for David Hidalgo’s lyrics about — well, ask Gabriel García Márquez. I’m too busy dreaming.

84. Underworld “Born Slippy .NUXX”
(Darren Emerson, Rick Smith, Karl Hyde)
single [Junior Boy’s Own] • 1995

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I haven’t seen Trainspotting, and in fact I have a distinct quarrel with the commonly held, though not always widely expressed, notion that if you haven’t seen a movie in which a particular song plays a particular role then you don’t really have a full understanding of the song at all. First, it’s bullshit, and second, it’s obviously bullshit. Pop exists in its own sovereign territory, and colonizing it by means of other media is an act of unwarranted aggression against which guerilla warfare can be justifiably waged. (No, I’m not sure what form this guerilla warfare would take. I only thought of the metaphor a minute ago.) I don’t want to see Reservoir Dogs because I like the associations I already have with “Stuck In The Middle With You” and don’t want them tampered with; ditto “Atlantis” and GoodFellas. I suppose what bothers me most is the existence of an agreed-upon system of pop-culture hierarchies that makes it possible for me to feel like a self-righteous rebel by opposing it. I hate those dudes. Everyone hates those dudes.

Anyway. Apparently Underworld thought they were perpetrating a joke by including laddish stream-of-consciousness lyrics with their thumping, regressive techno. Which might be a cautionary tale about how musical subcultures can disappear so far up their own asses that they’re out of touch with what the larger pop audience requires from their music (you listening, indie rock?), but I’m not committed to the premise and anyway I don’t know enough about electronic music to say either way. (My Anglophilia only extends so far; like most fascinations with Otherness, what I’m primarily interested in is the reflection.) What I do know is that “Born Slippy” is a helluva pop song, even if it’s a swollen, distended one, “Tubthumping” by way of “Marquee Moon.” The extended instrumental outro (a.k.a. the whole reason for the song by club standards) is one of the few times I’ve been able to hear, rather than just intellectually assent to, the usual claims made for techno’s build-and-release dynamism. Clubs, like football terraces, are alien landscapes to me; to make an impact, you’ve gotta be able to play to the earbuds.

83. Deee-Lite “Groove Is In The Heart”
(DJ Dmitry, Lady Miss Kier, Towa Tei, Q-Tip, Herbie Hancock)
World Clique [Elektra] • 1990

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The first time I remember hearing this song (rather than the first time I actually heard it, as it’s always been more or less present in some sort of background manner) is when I failed to guess what song my brother-in-law was humming in a game of Cranium; all he could remember was the title phrase, but his frustration with my cluelessness (particularly after the smack I’d talked) was still magnificent. Once informed of the song’s title, I of course recognized it: I mentally filed it away as a faceless house song. Then I started doing research for this list. And this song kept popping up in all kinds of different places: chart lists, dance lists, Pitchfork lists. So I listened to it. And . . . .

Wait, Q-Tip has a guest verse? Wait, Towa Tei? I like Towa Tei! And Bootsy Collins! And a Herbie Hancock sample! And — is that the drum break from “Pet Sounds”? (Apparently not.) Okay, yeah, the chorus is a little prefab-housey, but the way she drags out and practically gargles the ends of lines is goofily adorable. As is, basically, the rest of the song. It’s cartoon pop, full of bright colors and giddily juxtaposed noises, and why didn’t anyone tell me about this? Answer: because you weren’t interested in the music of the 90s, dumbass.

Man, I’ve got so much catching up to do it’s not even funny. I’m hoping that after this is all over I’ll keep digging into the albums and discographies of the artists I’ve been sorting through, instead of just returning to my comfort zones of 1927-1934, 1956-1974, and 1977-1983. I know me, though.

82. Dr. Dre feat. Snoop Doggy Dogg “Nuthin’ But A ‘G’ Thang”
(Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Frederick Knight, Leon Haywood)
The Chronic [Death Row] • 1992

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Give it up for what I believe is the only instance of gangsta rap [sic] on the list. (There are a couple of arguable cases down the line. We’ll argue about them when we get there.) Nothing makes me feel more like a Fox News commentator than using the phrase “gangsta rap” in 2009, but if I can’t use it to talk about Dr. Dre when can I use it? Okay, yeah, let’s settle on “g-funk,” which is more descriptive anyway. (To those who know. Armstrong’s Paradox.)

It’s labeled as a Dr. Dre joint, and it appears on a — sorry, make that the — Dr. Dre album, but it’s Snoop’s song to lose, and muhfucker runs with it. It’s basically his debut appearance in any kind of wide release, and suddenly rap has changed. After this song, forceful, uncompromising flow like Chuck D’s (and, uh, Dr. Dre’s) is not enough: Snoop’s lazy-voiced, surprisingly nimble flow — the apotheosis of every imagined easy-living pimp incarnate — has changed the game. I can feel the baking California sun, the way dust rises up and clogs the nostrils away from the coast, the high-pitched whine that is g-funk’s signature sound halfway between a siren and a busted brake pad. New York City has lost rap forever, at least as a life partner. From now on it’s going to be a polygamous relationship; and just wait until the South and Midwest start horning in.

I knew none of this at the time. The nagging g-funk whine was catchy; Snoop was, in his expurgated music-video appearances, a likeable comic figure; but guitar music was claiming my attention. I was, after all, a white teenaged American male. Please, no pity.

81. Guided By Voices “I Am A Scientist”
(Robert Pollard)
Bee Thousand [Scat] • 1994

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As may have become clear from a careful perusal of these documents, cassette tapes were an important part of my early relationship with pop. Yet I haven’t listened to a cassette since 2003, and I only did then because the mix I wanted to make was too long for a CD. (Problem long since solved by the Age of iPod.) Audio fidelity has only something to do with it: although revisiting the tapes of my youth left me staggered at how little music I could actually make out underneath the rumbling hiss and grinding of physical wheels, I’m no audiophile, and in some contexts ambient noise produces the same effect anyway.

Still, when I first listened to the album most commonly agreed on as the one Guided By Voices which is required listening for the poor illiterate savages who made it through the nineties the first time without having heard a worthwhile note in ten years (yes I have a conflicted relationship with the rhetoric of indie rock, why do you ask, etc.), I was put off by the audible difference between it and, well, everything else on my iPod, even the stuff that had been mastered from wax cylinder: at least those pops and crackles had had their levels boosted properly. Welcome to lo-fi, I guess.

But as it does with everyone (note: this claim has not been backed up by any kind of quantitative research or analysis), the melodicism, the concision of expression, and yes, the charm of Robert Pollard’s greatest calling card eventually won me over. I can’t say I listen to Bee Thousand all the way through very often — another problem solved by the Age of iPod — but I never skip this one. No matter how many times the Dandy Warhols cover gets plastered over drippy sitcom montages, the muffled buzz of this song (which, tape hiss and all, sounds like Suicide channeling Blossom Toes) retains the electric spark that all pop seekers are chasing, if only they could hear it clearly enough.

Couple of things.

First, of all the music I’ve listened to over the past decade, I’ve listened to the music of the nineties the least. (There are several reasons for this, each duller than the last.) So I’m nobody’s expert here. This list is what was left in my hand when I dipped it into the Nineties Music stream and drew it out again: whether the deposit is composed primarily of gold or silt is a question only to be decided by individual tastes.

Second, the nineties is the first decade I remember all the way through, the first decade I actively listened to music outside the Christian contemporary of my childhood, the first time that my personal history intersects with my interest in music. So this will be even more solipsistic than usual. You have been warned.

Finally, I’ll be taking the opportunity to address, or at least counterbalance, what I think are faulty habits of thought and criticism that I’ve noticed when it comes to the music of the nineties, the decade above all others for which there exists no real critical or cultural consensus. Many of us are embarrassed by it all; we are not yet ready to find the nineties cool again, to admit it into the canon of retro chic. The rest of us, perhaps the majority, are (even worse) still stuck in the 90s, interpreting all later musical activity through the ideological battlegrounds of the Clinton years, unable to accept the world of today on its own terms. For me, returning to the music of the 90s has been both a homecoming of sorts and a realization of just how much time has passed. The decade is dead; long live its music. Especially these songs.

100. C+C Music Factory “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)”
(Robert Clivillés, Freedom Williams)
Gonna Make You Sweat [Epic] • 1990

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’Cause music is my life!

Mythologies require origin stories. There must be an Adam, an Eve, an unmoved mover, an ex nihilo. This is why the theory of evolution is so unsatisfactory, except for the minor point of precisely fitting the evidence. The deeper parts of our minds are still haunted by myth, and need concrete, comprehensible beginnings. For me, “Gonna Make You Sweat” (along with the Remus to its Romulus, Snap!’s “The Power”) is an ur-text, a primordial creation story far more powerful than the more soberly-documented chronicles of electronic music in which 1990 is the fall from grace, the year when Dance became Kitsch. When I first began listening to the radio in the waning months of 1990, furtively and with malice aforethought, “Gonna Make You Sweat” was the beginning of time. Before this, music was null and void and spirits moved over the face of the deep. I knew nothing of Detroit techno, Chicago house, or Manchester rave; I certainly didn’t know that the beat was a jacked-up version of M/A/R/R/S’ “Pump Up The Volume,” that all the samples had already been used by Eric B, or that Freedom Williams’ flow was bad enough to make a suburban white boy cringe. It was simply modern music, the clean dividing line between all that had gone before, the dead weight of the past, and all that would come to be in the Irrepressible Now. Someone dropping leaden rhymes was the price you paid for being alive in 1990 — and anyway, I wasn’t listening for him. I was listening for Martha Wash, for that massive voice that tore the sky asunder, its thundering echo due not to any piddling effects Clivillés and Cole cooked up but because her arena was the world itself and her voice came booming off the distant mountains.

I was twelve years old and “Gonna Make You Sweat” was both threat and seduction, suffused with the promise of illicit rapture and cruelly mocking the virgin’s ideal of intimacy with its jackhammer beats and distancing, cut ’n’ paste vocals. And sometimes a few years later, when we went to the roller-skating rink, it would play, and it would begin to sound old-fashioned already, with its simple, four-note synth riff and wailing house vocal. And now, after two decades of movie trailers, “ironic” get-pumped scenes, slow-moving basketball games, and the near-geologic accumulation of pop-cultural detritus attached to the hook, it can be hard to dig past the accreted kitsch and the very not-dope rhymes and just hear a song.

I’ve found that turning it up always helps.

99. Bikini Kill “Rebel Girl”
(Kathleen Hanna)
single [Kill Rock Stars] • 1993

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I hear Mary Weiss bragging on her boy: “He’s good bad, but he’s not evil.” I see Patti Smith on the cover of Horses, colonizing James Dean cool with her lean junkie’s body. I hear Debbie Harry, catty and spiteful: “She looks like the Sunday comics.” I hear Joan Jett not giving a damn about her bad reputation, the Last Poets reflecting on the interstices between revolution and sex, the strut of Shaft and the neurotic implosions of Alison Bechdel’s characters. All stuffed into a Ramones chassis with an Albini finish.

It’s probably unforgivably patriarchal to hear how the Rebel Girl of the song can trace her lineage to the Bad Boys of girl-group songs of the 1960s. (She hit me, and it felt like a kiss? The way Kathleen Hanna screams about her kiss at least implies a certain level of violence.) But there are no clean breaks with the past; even radical feminism only makes any sense within the humanist framework which is the birthright of post-Christian Europe. And Hanna & Co. aren’t all that radical anyway. Sure, they’re mad about the raw deal women have always gotten and continue to get, but never to the point where they forget that having fun is the primary point of being in a band. (Cough Hole cough.) It makes sense that of all the feminist punk bands of the early 90s, they’d be the ones to evolve into Le Tigre.

I can’t call myself a huge fan of the Riot Grrrl aesthetic; I’m too male, and too much of a dilettante regardless. But I’ll always appreciate a good pop song, and the dreamy, stumbling closing lines of the song are the kind of decorative element that pop was made for.

98. The Spin Doctors “Two Princes”
(Mark White, Eric Schenkman, Chris Barron, Aaron Comess)
Pocket Full Of Kryptonite [Epic] • 1991

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This is the sound of people who grew up watching the Muppets making rock & roll.

I feel like that says it all, actually. The way you respond to it is determined by a) your feelings about the Muppets, b) your feelings about rock & roll, and c) your tolerance for category confusion. Because, obviously, the Muppets aren’t very rock & roll, the Electric Mayhem notwithstanding. Even the kind of rock & roll the Mayhem gesture towards is a deeply unfashionable kind, good-time sub-beatnik hippie bullshit. What redeems it (if it is redeemed) is the fact that the Muppets’ real loyalty is to the unbreakable laws of Show Business, to that combination of hucksterism, hard work, and hell-if-I-know that has managed to produce iconic pop culture for damn near a century. Buster Keaton and Britney Spears aren’t that far apart on this scale: they both know that chasing art is a mug’s game and what really matters is getting a cut of the door.

It’s in that spirit that “Two Princes” is an enduring thing of awesomeness. The Spin Doctors may have been a shaggy jam band, but by cutting the fat out of their instrumentation and playing to the balcony with broad, dopey gestures like describing every dumb romantic comedy decision ever, they managed to squeeze out an honest-to-God pop song, in both the classicist sense (it’s a comic-book-beatnik variation on the standard Greenwich/Barry template) and in the dumbass dictionary sense: it sold a lot of copies and a lot of people still like it even if it isn’t very cool.

And as with the Muppets, there’s the comfortable sense that no one is taking any of this very seriously, and once the song ends the story’s over and it’s on to Statler and Waldorf and, if we’re lucky, Pigs in Space.

97. Ride “Vapour Trail”
(Andy Bell, Laurence Colbert, Mark Gardener, Steve Queralt)
Nowhere [Creation] • 1990

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I spent the 90s hooked on radio; it wasn’t until around the turn of the millennium that I began dimly to realize that there was important, vital, and deeply enjoyable music being made that never got onto the Guatemalan and Arizonan radio stations that were my first education about music outside of the church. But by then there were whole centuries of music to absorb, and a late adopter like myself had to rely on the critical consensus, and learn how to skim. So some scenes and genres — especially relatively recent scenes and genres — ended up getting represented by an album, or a song, while I simultaneously burrowed into 70s reggae and 40s jump blues and 10s ragtime and 60s countrypolitan.

All of this to say, I’m aware that some people think “Vapour Trail” is Ride’s worst song, but it’s the one I know best and I love it a lot.

And it’s an odd song. Its structure is fragmentary (two verses, no chorus, unless you count that wordless warble), its hooks are buried into a hypnotic groove, and the drumming is far more vigorous and even amphetamined than the lysergic, smoke-clouded production would seem to admit. Yet it somehow works, and the string quartet that concludes the song (and, in the original vinyl pressing, the album) is less a flashy Statement of Significance (see “Eleanor Rigby” or “November Rain”) than simply another form of the trancelike repetition that made shoegaze the ideal chillout music for indie rockers. I’ll be talking more about this later, but the way so much British music of the late 80s and early 90s combined noise, dance, and jangle is both alien to my actual experience of the period and deeply comforting to my idea of what the period’s eclecticism should have been.

96. P.M. Dawn “Looking Through Patient Eyes”
(Attrell Cordes, George Michael)
The Bliss Album [Gee Street] • 1993

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To answer the obvious objection: yes, “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss” is probably their greatest song in a quasi-objective sense (i.e. a poll of all relevant listeners would put it on top). But 1) I already have Spandau Ballet’s “True” on my 80s list, and while it’s a great hook, I can’t bring myself to list it twice, and 2) I heard this one first.

Spring, 1993. I was listening to American Top 40 on the English-language station in a suburb of Guatemala City (presented by Shadoe Stevens), and tucked in among the leftover power ballads and Swedish dance-pop was this curiously psychedelic rap song, sampling George Michael’s “Father Figure” (which I wouldn’t recognize until I read about it on Wikipedia) and muttering solemnly about emotional literacy and infinite lights. I was both horrified by the New Age babble of the imagery (Frank Peretti, the fundamentalist Stephen King, was a major presence in my world at that time, and in his cosmology New Age=Satan) and fascinated by the low-key gauziness of the production, which sounded like nothing else on the radio. The totality of my understanding of hip-hop consisted of Hammer, Marky, and Ice (not that one, or that one, but that one), with Wreckx-N-Effect as the street-level spoilers; small wonder P.M. Dawn (and Arrested Development, around the same time) seemed so amazing on first listen.

But then it stuck in my head, because I’d happened to tape that week’s countdown (and in fact rarely ever listened to American Top 40 again), and I listened to that tape over and over, wondering if the line “with total recall as wild as the deuce” was a nod to the Schwarzenegger movie — and, thanks to radio static and tape hiss, thinking the line was “wild as the goose,” which I still think is a better, if obscurer, image. In fact, listening to this song over and over helped me move out of the evangelical fear of philosophical Otherness: Prince Be’s New-Age ruminations were so obviously not demonic that everything I had been told about non-Christian spirituality had to be revised.

Today, I hear it as a Princey ballad with some oddly evocative rapped verses. Which isn’t a bad thing to be either; but I cherish it for the years when, in my head, P.M. Dawn were the highest form of art to which rap could aspire.

95. The Chemical Brothers feat. Noel Gallagher “Setting Sun”
(Ed Simons, Tom Rowlands, Noel Gallagher)
single [Virgin] • 1996

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As further evidence towards the OCD quality of these lists, I would not have included this if “Tomorrow Never Knows” had been on my 60s list (which, it’s played on oldies radio and was never released as a single, so). But then, is “Tomorrow Never Knows” one of my favorite Beatles songs because I’d heard this first, and so Ringo’s smashing, crumbling beat already sounded like a futuristic echo of electronic mayhem?

Apparently the Chemical Brothers wanted to make a “Tomorrow Never Knows” for the 90s. They failed, of course: the impact of the original was the impact of bringing avant-garde compositional elements like tape manipulation, loops, and samples into the mainstream of pop music. (Yes, Joe Meek blah de blah, I said mainstream, not obscure tributaries.) There is a clear dividing line between pre-“Tomorrow Never Knows” pop and post-“Tomorrow Never Knows” pop. (Whether that dividing line is a good thing — a.k.a. the worthwhileness of psychedelia — is another argument. These are just facts.) “Setting Sun,” on the other hand, is only a pretty great big-beat anthem, marrying the energy and ferocity of (say) the Prodigy to a classicist sense of pop idyll. With, of course, a jacked-up Ringo beat.

It’s kind of startling to remember just how deeply the Sixties — or the myth of the Sixties anyway, as parodied by the Simpsons’ “standard Sixties montage” (civil rights, Woodstock, Nixon, Vietnam) — mattered to the Nineties. From a President who “didn’t inhale” and a Supreme Court confirmation hearing that managed to trivialize both the Civil Rights movement and feminism, to the return of celebrated junkie rockstar deaths, the decade managed to play its hand-me-down mythology as a singularly depressing farce. And that’s not even getting into the second Baby Boomer administration ….

But about “Setting Sun.” Noel Gallagher of Oasis contributes some vocals which are vague and pointless even by his standard — but then that’s what makes it pop, innit?

94. Macy Gray “I Try”
(Macy Gray, Jeremy Ruzumna, Jinsoo Lim, David Wilder)
On How Life Is [Epic] • 1999

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I feel like this song hasn’t gotten the respect or place in pop history it deserves. I know that some people hate it — or at least, they hated it nine years ago, when it was inescapable, and most likely haven’t given it much thought since.  It’s the kind of thing that tends to slip through the cracks of history: a throwback record without the reverence for tradition that makes the keepers of the Boomer canon sit up and take notice, not part of some easily identifiable trend (it’s neo-soul, except it’s successful, so it’s not) or any of the important hipster fields. It won a Grammy, but nobody takes those seriously, and in the most respectable circles they’re a strike against. Then too, there’s that voice.

If I have an overriding musical concern, it’s that I’m captivated by and love to immerse myself in a wide range of distinctive voices. I suppose I can just kind of barely understand how someone could hate Macy Gray’s voice so much that this song would drive them up the wall, but that horror of the unusual is so alien to how I process pop that I can’t take it seriously as an actual barrier. The sandpaper texture of her voice is the song’s chief pleasure for me, and it would be vastly diminished as a listening experience if a more conventional singer (say Aaliyah, or even Angie Stone) had given even the same performance, emotionally speaking. And Macy, in the emotional sense, does sing the hell out of it.  Those rasped howls of urgency towards the end, when the song shifts into a higher key, are why I listen to music at all.

Here’s where I say something about the warmth and classicism of the production, but I don’t want to be misunderstood: while I love the sound of old-school soul, I don’t think it’s necessarily any better than new-school programmed beats and synth squelches.  But neither do I think it’s worse: as far as I can tell, opinion is roughly divided between those who overrate this song because it’s “real music instead of all that drum-machine crap” and those who underrate it because it’s “looking back towards the 70s instead of into the future with Timbaland and the Neptunes and blah de blah.” All we have to build the future with is the fragments of the past; I’m glad this was saved from the wreckage.

93. The Magnetic Fields “Take Ecstasy With Me”
(Stephin Merritt)
Holiday [Feel Good All Over] • 1994

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Okay, this is how little I cared about the 90s in the 00s: I first heard this song because !!! covered it in 2005, and I didn’t realize it was a cover until like a year ago. (Yes the Magnetic Fields are one of the pillars of 90s indie rock. No I still haven’t listened to most of their catalogue. I’ve been busy.)

It’s a good song, regardless, and although when I finally got around to hearing the Fields’ version I held a small grudge against it for not being a male-female duet or including the line “I’ve got a stack of records,” I’ve come to appreciate its less expansive pulse. The !!! record is a dance record, meant to anchor a DJ’s set; the original is a shaggier, more ill-at-ease production, the sound of a shy, pale indie kid trying to figure out how this electronic stuff is supposed to work. Which creates the perfect soundscape for Merritt’s shy, pale indie-kid lyrics: the Ecstasy is only there to drown out the awkwardness and self-involvedness of clumsy adolescent relationships.

Clumsy adolescent gay relationships, too, which the song doesn’t push very hard (which is why the male-female duet on !!!’s version works), only glances at in the line “we got beat up just for holding hands.” It only comes as something of a surprise because of the over-the-top ways in which pop music usually represents gaydom — there’s no fierceness or camp here, only troubled, uncertain teenage emotion and a desperate hope that shared experience means love. It’s all anyone’s got.

92. The Mavericks “I’ve Got This Feeling”
(Raul Malo, Jaime Hanna)
Trampoline [MCA] • 1998

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The Mavericks inhabit a weird, ill-defined space between critical acclaim and mainstream country, the Venn diagrams for which only rarely overlap. Too polished and modern to fit under the alt-country umbrella, too dedicated to following their own muses to have a huge CMT presence, the Mavericks — and especially their singer and lead songwriter, Raul Malo — did more than almost anyone to expand the range of radio-ready country in the 90s, bringing Latin balladry, Cajun two-step, and the lush, melodramatic style associated with Roy Orbison into the mix. True, they never got all that far into mainstream radio (topping out at #13 is generally frowned upon in Music Row), but thanks to the more forgiving album-buying audience, they managed to make an impact anyway.

Maybe I’m just dense, but it took Malo’s interpretive genius to get me to understand the connection between Orbison’s pop-operatic singing and the equally melodramatic (and equally indebted to art song) style of vernacular Latin American music known as ranchera. Here, Malo’s soaring tenor and the expert construction of space in the production harkens back not only to Orbison as produced by Phil Spector, and various Iglesiases, but also to the bel canto-trained Italians who ruled American popular music before rock & roll: Frankie Laine, Vic Damone, Al Martino, etc. Those guys often gestured towards country music as well — and Orbison’s coöption by rock & roll has too often obscured how he was seen as a country singer long before he ever crossed over into the pop charts. Turns out Raul Malo is more of a traditionalist than he might have seemed to the ahistorical 90s.

91. Massive Attack “Unfinished Sympathy”
(3D, Mushroom, Daddy G, Shara Nelson, Jonathan Sharp)
single [Virgin] • 1991

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I’ve never been able to fully embrace trip-hop, aside from a song or three here and there, and I’m not entirely sure why. Here are several possibilities:

1) I’m not as familiar with dub, dancehall, and 80s Brit-dance — the roots of trip-hop — as I ought to be.

2) I’m not particularly fond of movies in the first place and music which is frequently compared to soundtracks for nonexistent movies has to work that much harder to hold my interest.

3) I’m American goddammit and we already have real hip-hop and don’t need no postcolonial knockoffs.

I like the last one best.

Anyway. Massive Attack. They too often fall into the “soundtracks for nonexistent movies” category for me — and based on the music they’d be movies I’d have little interest in seeing anyway. (Postindustrial cyber-noir? Yawn.) But this, their original calling card and a superb single, works its way out of that sleepily narcotic subgenre into a full-fledged pop song, if an oblique one. Shara Nelson’s vocal performance is, of course, what makes the song — only the knuckled piano break gives her any competition for my attention — and the nerve-jangling, tin-drum beat (or rather, layered beats) gives the whole thing more of an edge than might otherwise be expected.

Still, there’s a facelessness to Nelson’s vocal, an impersonality that rubs American me the wrong way. I’m aware, or I think I am, that one of the points of European dance (in which trip-hop is undeniably complicit) is to create music almost entirely free of personality, a frictionless glide that could keep robots dancing for millennia. (Call it the Kraftwerk mandate). I can appreciate the vision, I suppose, but I think it’s wrongheaded: to be human is to sweat, to creak, to die, and I can’t see the point of music without humanity.  I never really liked science fiction either.

As I did last year, I’ve compiled a listening mix of notable deaths in music over the past year. It was a lot harder to whittle it down to two CDs’ worth of music this time, and there are so many amazing composers, singers, and instrumentalists left off the list that I barely feel I’m doing the year justice, but these are (my pick of) the most noteworthy musicians and so forth who died in 2008.

CD1

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1. O.G. Style, “Catch ’Em Slippin” (1991)
2. Andy Palacio & The Garifuna Collective, “Watina” (2007)
3. John Stewart, “California Bloodlines” (1969)
4. Henri Salvador, “Dans Mon Île” (1959)
5. Joe Gibbs & The Professionals, “Fashion One” (1979)
6. Larry Norman, “Reader’s Digest” (1972)
7. Buddy Miles, “Them Changes” (1971)
8. Mikey Dread, “Barber Saloon” (1979)
9. Neu! [drummer Klaus Dinger], “Super” (1973)
10. Louis & Bebe Barron [Bebe Barron], “Theme from Forbidden Planet” (1956)
11. Jimmy Giuffre, “Yggdrasil” (1962)
12. Humphrey Lyttelton, “Bad Penny Blues” (1956)
13. Eddy Arnold, “Make The World Go Away” (1965)
14. Alexander Courage, “Theme From Star Trek” (1966)
15. Utah Phillips, “All Used Up” (1979)
16. Jimmy McGriff, “Step 1” (1968)
17. Earle Hagen, “The Fishin’ Hole (Theme From The Andy Griffith Show)” (1960)
18. Bo Diddley, “Bo Diddley” (1955)
19. Jamelão, “Ela Disse-Me Assim” (1972)
20. The Dixie Hummingbirds [vocalist Ira Tucker], “I Looked Down The Line” (1939)
21. George Carlin, “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television” (1972)
22. Jo Stafford, “It’s Almost Tomorrow” (1955)
23. Joe Beck with Sabicas, “Joe’s Tune” (1968)
24. Wendo Kosoloy, “Marie Louise” (1948)
25. Isaac Hayes, “Theme from Shaft” (1971)

CD2

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1. Donald Erb, “Autumnmusic” (1973)
2. Jerry Reed, “Guitar Man” (1966)
3. Pink Floyd [keyboard player Rick Wright], “The Great Gig In The Sky” (1973)
4. Nappy Brown, “Don’t Be Angry” (1955)
5. Paul Newman, “Plastic Jesus” (1967)
6. Alton Ellis, “Cry Tough” (1966)
7. Neal Hefti, “Theme From Batman” (1966)
8. The Four Tops [vocalist Levi Stubbs], “Bernadette”(1967)
9. Dee Dee Warwick, “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” (1966)
10. Rudy Ray Moore, “Shine And The Great Titanic” (1970)
11. Studs Terkel, “Oh, Sacred World” (1998)
12. Yma Sumac, “Ataypura” (1950)
13. Byron Lee & The Dragonaires, “Frankenstein Ska” (1964)
14. Miriam Makeba, “Pata Pata” (1967)
15. MC Breed, “Ain’t No Future In Your Frontin’” (1991)
16. Odetta, “Spiritual Trilogy” (1956)
17. Classics IV [vocalist Dennis Yost], “Stormy” (1969)
18. Davy Graham, “Angi” (1963)
19. The Count Five [vocalist John Byrne], “Psychotic Reaction” (1966)
20. Eartha Kitt, “I Want To Be Evil” (1953)
21. Delaney & Bonnie [Delaney Bramlett], “Never Ending Song Of Love” (1971)
22. Freddie Hubbard, “Coral Keys” (1970)