Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

35. Common Sense “I Used To Love H.E.R.”
(Common)
Resurrection [Ruthless] • 1994

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

“’Cause who I’m talkin’ ’bout y’all is hip-hop.”

One of the great pop narrative reversals of all time, up there with the identity of Sweet Marie in Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee” and the status of He in George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”

Also, though, a pretty condescending tone for Common (as we know him now) to take, dismissing all 90s rap up to his moment as commercialized gangsta trash. Which kind of goes with the conscious territory; but you can feel the subterranean plates shift slightly, as camps begin to form down non-regional lines in the world of hip-hop. This is, among other things, the birth of backpacker, the moment when a segment of hip-hop turns its back on the commercial game and chooses to plow its own field, knowing that it will be playing to a smaller, less financially rewarding audience from now on.

Which from one perspective can be read as a betrayal of the pop ideal: to change the world because the world is listening (not necessarily because of your ideals or any of that post-U2 horseshit, but because you are the future, you are to coin a phrase bigger than Jesus, and the world reshapes itself around you). Backpackers have been called everything from cowards to race traitors to snooty elitists with their heads up their collective asses, and on one level retreating from the chart hustle is exactly that: a retreat, an admission of defeat on the battlefield.

But from another perspective it’s simply the natural evolution of pop, and (not coincidentally) of empire. After conquering the world, you divide it into protectorates: gangsta for the masses, conscious for the intelligensia. The same thing happened in the late 60s when progressive rock and bubblegum flowered at exactly the same time; and in the 1940s, when aggressively futuristic bebop and retrogressive, nostalgic Dixieland captured entirely different audiences. If you last long enough, you get a synthesis of the two strains: jazz got cool, while rock turned punk. Hip-hop . . . but that would be telling. This is a list about the 90s.

But back to the actual song. If the line was coming from someone less skilled in either rhyming or structuring a narrative, it would be more easily dismissed. But Common was at the height of his powers here: his second album and the full flowering of his conscious, inclusive persona. In some tellings, he never got better. But he also never got bad, and even his failed experiments are worth hearing if only for the ambition behind them. Success came late, with ads for Gaps and iPods; but there aren’t many hip-hop lifers who deserved it more.

34. Portishead “Sour Times”
(Geoff Barrow, Adrian Utley, Beth Orton, Lalo Schifrin, Henry Brooks, Otis Turner)
Dummy [Go!] • 1994

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Things this song makes me think of, in order of how much I care about said things:

1) The Lalo Schifrin sample (of “Danube Incident,” a track he composed for the Mission:Impossible show), all jangled wires and crossways strums, makes me think of the music of eccentric composer and instrument-inventor Harry Partch, especially the similarly wiry “And On The Seventh Day Petals Fell In Petaluma.” The exoticism of Schifrin’s Eastern-European cimbalom sounds a lot like Partch’s invented instruments, and the way Geoff Barrow rearranges it and patterns it over the trip-hop rhythm sounds a lot like Partch’s microtonal, off-kilter melodic sense.

2) Beth Orton’s creamy croon here (one of several voices she has at her disposal, and to my mind one of the less remarkable ones) sounds a great deal like Leigh Nash’s similarly haunted vocals on the non-“Kiss Me” songs on Sixpence None The Richer, which build in similarly dramatic ways, even if they use traditional rock-band instrumentation. As you may have guessed, I was a Sixpence fan long before I’d ever heard of Portishead. (Apparently they did well in the U.S. Couldn’t prove it by me.)

3) It is ultimately a torch song — an arch, postmodern torch song, yes, film noir as filtered through the stylized lens of the French New Wave (you can almost hear the projector’s whirr) and with a thorough grasp of Foucault and Derrida. But nevertheless it’s the essence of torch: a dramatic, high-contrast backing for a woman to stand alone, spotlit, at a microphone, and pour her heart theatrically out. “Nobody loves me” is the elemental torch cri de coeur; “not like you do” is the English Orton puts on the ball. It’s a song about lost love, as they all are, but more tragically still, love in denial.

4) Man, I love the crackle of vinyl under a needle. It’s something you hear a lot more in 90s music, as samples were lifted straight off of turntables, and almost never hear today.

33. Foo Fighters “Everlong”
(Dave Grohl)
The Colour And The Shape [Capitol] • 1997

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Ten years ago, it would have been dancing with blasphemy to rank a Foo Fighters song above a Nirvana one. Now, it’s bordering on obvious. Not only have Foo Fighters been a consistent, major presence in rock music for twice as many years as Nirvana existed, but they’ve weathered major shifts in fashion, cultural consumption, and politics with the kind of workingman’s brio one simply can’t imagine on Kurt Cobain. As grunge recedes into distant media hype and a fashion for alternate tunings, the Foos’ straight-up loud pop sounds better and better; as the critical consensus turns away from lacerating, anguished lyrics in hard rock, Grohl’s oblique-savant constructions, existing almost entirely for the sake of the rhyme, are frankly a relief. The cautionary lecture on constructing canons too early can be taken as read.

“Everlong” is, for my money, the song where Grohl finally moved out of the shadow of his former band. The initial singles sounded too much like every other alt-rock song of the mid-90s, Stone Temple Pilots roar or Gin Blossoms jangle, and “Monkey Wrench” sounded like too many ideas going too many different directions. “Everlong,” by contrast, is a streamlined, even Art Deco rock song: the initial flickering chug of the rhythm guitar is the engine that drives the whole song, a propulsive forward thrust that rises into an electric stomp with dense harmonics and explodes into melodic crescendos at the chorus. If the metaphor seems subliminally sexual, you’ve caught on; this strikes me as Grohl’s most romantic song, at least until the acoustic disc of “In Your Honor.” (Even if the romance is obsessive, even stalkerish. But like I said, oblique-savant.) It’s the rhythm track, as usual with Grohl’s drumming, that provides the swerve to the song; rather than timekeeping, those crashing bangs are practically the song’s true solo instrument. When Dave finally hired a real drummer, rock lost a superb narrative voice.

My favorite Foo Fighters album is 1999’s There Is Nothing Left To Lose (the one with “Learn To Fly” and “Breakout”), one of the the great pop albums of the decade; it’s song after song of airy melodies, banging guitars, and Grohl’s smooth, faintly sweet vocal style. I never really got on board with his inclination post-millennium towards screaming his choruses — his scream is pedestrian (unlike Kurt’s), while his singing voice is one of the pleasantest pop sounds of the late 90s. And I do think of Foo Fighters as a pop band instead of a hard rock one — or rather, as one of the few modern hard rock bands to earn a place in the elite pantheon of great pop acts. The loudness of their guitars has nothing to do with it: Poison (“Unskinny Bop”), Cheap Trick (“Surrender”) and T. Rex (“20th Century Boy”) were pop bands too, and the Foos carry on that proud tradition.

32. Mary J. Blige “Be Happy”
(Mary J. Blige, Arlene DelValle, J.C. Olivier, Sean Combs)
My Life [MCA] • 1994

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

It’s hard to deny the heavy strain of 70s nostalgia that flows through almost all the music of the 1990s; I was certainly aware of it at the time, even if I didn’t remember the 70s myself. The vogue in bell bottoms, flannel, and hippie skirts was only the most noticeable rejection of the plastic-and-neon 1980s: crunchy guitar heroics, spacey funk rhythms, and the triumph of pot over cocaine as the drug of choice for rockers and rappers alike — a triumph which has become so mainstream that potheads are now the everyman of choice for Hollywood comedies, while cokeheads are eternally villains and losers — all bespoke an affection for the latchkey childhoods of alternativo-types everywhere, childhoods where Shaft, Kung Fu, Black Sabbath, and roller disco all shared the same space, where wood-panelled dens faded away to meaninglessness when confronted with Jim Starlin starscapes, bright-red shootouts, and Diana Rigg (or your starlet of choice) in hot pants. Or so I’ve been given to understand; my experience of the 70s is second- or third-hand, although growing up in the 90s made me more affectionately disposed towards them than I otherwise might be.

Even so, I came to Philly Soul late. Or rather, to the sumptuously orchestrated proto-disco that Philly Soul tends to stand in for, whether perpetrated by Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff in Philadelphia, Isaac Hayes in Memphis, Curtis Mayfield in Chicago, Norman Whitfield in Detroit, or Barry White in Los Angeles. Blame the immediately apparent virtues of Stax/Volt for making me think that soul’s highest expression was in southern-fried funk, blame the lingering “disco sucks” mentality that’s made two generations of white guys suspiscious of strings and smooth voices, blame the fact that I had a hard time distinguishing between types of ballads as a youth (confusing Chris Isaak with Richard Marx still stings) — anyway, it wasn’t until Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly and Isaac Hayes’ Hot Buttered Soul took me by the collar and shook me that I was able to enter into the minutely detailed worlds constructed by the legendary producers of the 70s, worlds of pain and betrayal and joy and sex and everything that soul has meant for fifty years.

Worlds that Mary J. Blige inhabits with the effortlessness of the great singers of past generations; she’s only the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul because Aretha Franklin would pitch a hissy fit if the “Hip-Hop” were dropped. (Just ask Beyoncé or Tina Turner.) In fact, you have to go back to Nina Simone or even Billie Holiday to find a singer as able to convey worlds of lived pain and experience in the microscopic shadings of her voice.

Which is why despite it all, despite the piggybacking on Biggie’s success, despite the travesty of “I’ll Be Missing You,” despite the name changes and the self-aggrandizement and the bankruptcy of actual ideas for fifteen years of shitty chart dominance, I can’t hate Sean Combs. He recognized Blige’s talent and produced My Life, the greatest soul record of its generation, for once sublimating his talent for ripping others off into actual conversations between Blige’s immediate presence and similar cries from the past. Curtis Mayfield’s “You’re Too Good To Me” is the lynchpin for this sweet drift of a song, but it is neither overwhelming to Chucky Thompson’s live instrumentation nor disrespected by a trite lyric or unconvincing performance: Blige’s reserved, dignified plea to the (reputedly) abusive K-Ci is among her finest readings in a career full of them. The entire album is worth soaking in — like the great Philly Soul albums of the 1970s — but it’s this generously-sized closing hymn that makes it.

31. Spiritualized “All Of My Thoughts”
(J. Spaceman)
Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space [Dedicated] • 1997

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

There has been an impulse in post-indie British rock towards spaciousness: grand anthems, soaring choruses, massive building guitars. This impulse is neither good nor bad except as it’s put into practice; it’s a feature, not a bug. U2 is probably the primary model here (with forebears in Queen and Led Zeppelin in their more expansive moods), but it was Radiohead who showed the way under “modern” (i.e. 90s) conditions. Coldplay, Muse, Keane, name your poison: they all want to make The Bends. It’s unfortunate, then, that the other great 90s example of hugeness in Brit-rock has been neglected as a model, as modern (i.e. actually modern) bands could do far worse than follow their lead.

Or rather his lead: J. Spaceman a.k.a. Jason Pierce has more or less been a one-man show since the Floydy, shoegaze-affiliated Spacemen 3 gave up the ghost in the early 90s. And while shoegaze’s massed walls of guitars became one of the signature sounds of 90s British rock, he followed a more idiosyncratic path, drifting towards Reichian minimalist repetition and drone, then overlaying it with giant ensembles reminiscent of Electric Light Orchestra or — more to the point — Roy Wood. Wizzard’s massive 70s singles are the obvious forebear here: you can even hear traces of Glenn Miller horn sections behind all the noise. But let’s back up.

Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space is a depressive album (something else that British post-indie has excelled in, viz. Blur’s 13, the Verve’s Urban Hymns, and Pulp’s This Is Hardcore, not to mention Radiohead’s 1997 opus, about which more later), and a post-breakup album to boot; and to a startling degree Spaceman* manages to sonically recreate the disorienting experience of extreme post-romantic depression, living claustrophobically in one’s own head, subject to sudden seizures of almost physical pain, everything meaning much more than it normally does, meaning so much that it hurts. “All Of My Thoughts” was not released as a single, which is understandable: those massive breakdowns, in which thinly squalling guitars are spackled over by a hysterical, out-of-control harmonica, would be terrifying on radio. Also, uninterpretable: do yourself a favor and listen to this with headphones on. (Even then, the 128kbps piece of crap I’m streaming won’t do it justice; seek out the album.)

The lyric is so basic that it’s nearly autistic; the instrumentation is symphonic without ever being assuring. Church organs and horn sections aren’t triumphant, only barely hanging on: and the tinkertoy piano, the arrhythmic heartbeat of the song, could never be confused with something Chris Martin would play. Which, come to think of it, never mind. Keep ripping of Radiohead, folks; anyone who would dare to try to imitate Spiritualized should probably be shot.

* It is, I’m pretty sure, a good thing that I can’t call Pierce by his alter ego without thinking of Chris Parnell’s character on 30 Rock. They’re both associated with illicit drugs, for one thing.

Note: I’m cutting the installments shorter as we get to the end, in order to help me get them out more frequently, and also (in a pathetic attempt) to gin up interest as we near the end. What will make the top spots? Stay tuned! *TV announcer’s rictus grin*

40. Aaliyah “Are You That Somebody?”
(Static Major, Timbaland)
Dr. Dolittle Original Motion Pitcture Soundtrack [Atlantic] • 1998

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Sometimes I regret having the experience of the 90s that I did: ruled by radio, wrapped in rock, blinkered by evangelical Christianity and hobbled by the aesthetic snobbery endemic to bookworms. There are two things that can trigger this regret. A couple of years ago, it was reading other music nerds talk about their experience of the 90s, soaked in indie and alternative rock, excited virtually every other week about a new band, a new scene, a new sound. But after listening to a lot of what they found exciting, I found much of it merely opaque and undistinguished at a remove of a decade or more: it’s tied to its era in a way that I’ll never be able to fully inhabit.

The other thing that triggers that regret is a song like this one. I completely missed it the first time round, subject to the subconscious racism that refuses to hear anything valuable in modern black music. (Black music of the past is okay, being safely ensconced in the past; but that stuff they make now? Too alien, too uninterpretable, too opposed to my ideas of what music should be.) It’s a mindset not much talked about in public, and even if Sasha Frere-Jones was ham-handed, he should be recognized for making the attempt to wrestle with the phenomenon. I basically had to be educated in the entire history of black music before I could learn to love modern hip-hop, and while my experience is no doubt unreplicatable — I’m not kidding myself that anyone much is as willing to sift through crackly old 78rpm records as I am — it does have its rewards. I came to this song entirely unaware (in the visceral sense) of its status as a major pop hit of 1998 (when I had the radio plugged firmly to the “alternative” station and was just beginning to venture into the oldies and classic rock stations), which may allow me to hear it better as the amazing shift in beat-building and sonic architecture it was.

It’s a Timbaland track; that much would be unmistakable even if his voice wasn’t the first thing you heard on the song, saying “Dirty South.” (First time that phrase hit the pop charts? It’s associated more with the rise of crunk some five years later, no?) But that slippery, unstable bass kick and the way he builds the beat out of off-kilter sonic elements — in this song, airless beatboxing and a baby’s gurgle — is classic Timbo, presaging not only his own later chart hits with (e.g.) Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake, but even the sonic experimentalism of avant-electronic acts like Matmos or Herbert, who take found-sound fetishism to such an extreme that it can be difficult to hear their melodies for all the pointillist scraps of sound.

Timbaland’s constantly self-reinventive personality comes through so forcefully that Aaliyah is very nearly reduced to being a guest on her own track, but she basically invents the role of the 00s hip-hop singer here: since the beat is so all over the place, she has to become a master of timing, working in call-and-response patterns, rushing to fill a line, and suspending in air as the beat drops from under her. Unlike the lugubrious r&b of the past decade, the beat won’t wait for her, and she has to master its intricacies in a kind of vocal dance. The stronger-voiced and more disciplined Beyoncé would perfect this art over the next decade, but a part of me wonders what Aali might not have come up with if she hadn’t died in 2001. Of course, pop history is littered with r&b-queen has-beens (what are Brandy, Monica, and Adina Howard up to these days?), but very few of them were ever this futuristic. When I caught it on the radio a couple of weeks ago, it took me until the baby gurgle to place it as a ten-year-old song: this is modern pop.

39. The Orb “Little Fluffy Clouds”
(Dr. Alex Paterson, Youth)
The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld [Big Life] • 1991

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This, meanwhile, isn’t modern pop, though it might have seemed like it at the time. But the further away from the epochal electronic records we get, the less epochal they seem: they too are tied to their era, though more in the sense that they help to define it than in the sense that they’re unreachable after the fact.

Cut ’n’ paste vocal samples over an electronic backing was hardly an original thought by 1990, when the single version of this song was released (but my preference is for the one that opens the Orb’s greatest album), with everyone from Pop Will Eat Itself to the KLF to Negativland getting in on the act, but this track had two things that none of its competitors had: Rickie Lee Jones waxing throatily nostalgic, and the Orb’s microscopic sense of timing. (And LeVar Burton asking, with a straight face and for no apparent reason: “What were the skies like when you were young?” If you’re too young, too old, or too non-American to remember Reading Rainbow, you will never understand how awesome that is. Yeah, yeah, Roots, Star Trek, whatever. Take a look, it’s in a book, bitches.) Rickie Lee’s meandering thoughts are sliced and sculpted into a perfect, high-wire narrative; when she finally admits that “you might still see it in the desert,” it’s like being let out of a closet.

But there’s a tension in the song beyond the strictly narrative, though again it may only be apparent to someone like me, who also grew up in Arizona and doesn’t experience Jones’ description as an exercise in exoticism or Hollywood reverie, but as humdrum reality. (For one thing, those clouds are rarer than she remembers, especially in summer. Which, ahem, has just begun.) The cool, burbling electronic noises are the exotic element for me, conjuring up places where water is plentiful and heat is grateful rather than punishing. I’m left wondering what the British response to this song is — after all, Brits made it, and it was a minor hit there, not here, where I only heard it because of the dedicated Anglophilia of American music nerds. Does it evoke Ibiza, which could be thought of as the meteorological halfway point between London and Phoenix? Does that opening sample about the “traditional sounds of the English summer” ring ironic or, post-rave culture, true? And isn’t the “layering different sounds” sample just belaboring the point? We can hear the process fine without its help.

But perhaps I’m nitpicking, or (more likely) looking for conflicts that don’t exist for most people. After all, the point of the song isn’t what it says, but how it sounds. (One of the charter beliefs of pop.) And it sounds, well, a lot like floating among clouds: not the big, dark, dangerous cumulonimbus, but the high, lazily drifting altocumulus. The ones that are little, and fluffy, and catch the colors everywhere.

38. The Beastie Boys “Sabotage”
(Mike D, MCA, Ad-Rock)
Ill Communication [Grand Royal] • 1994

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

As the history of American pop over the last thirty years begins to settle and solidify into a coherent narrative, it’s increasingly probable that the Beastie Boys will play a prominent role in most tellings. As the gateway drug to hip-hop for a large plurality of white kids, as the inventors of a rap-rock fusion more admirable and more enduring than the nu-metal of the fin de siècle, and as one of the key elements moving pop culture towards the “alternative” paisley-punk aesthetic of the early 90s, they played multiple roles with the confident assurance of legitimate pop stars without ever forsaking the brash comic voice that brought them to attention in the first place. Even more seductively for minds like mine, the Beasties were able to incorporate loud rock sounds into their soul-jazz/hip-hop mélange without falling prey to the belligerent miserablism of the era’s hard rock: the distorted guitar here plays the same role that the buzzsaw guitars do in early punk: fulfilling the sacred (and Jewish) injunctions of Psalm 100 to “make a joyful noise.”

“Sabotage” is gloriously grimy gutter-funk playing unexpectedly on a wide screen, and the video’s tribute to the seedy, flare-lapelled cop shows of the 1970s is the perfect visual representation of the Beasties’ omnivorous, retro-minded, and tough-guy-posturing aesthetic, which nevertheless refuses to take itself too seriously. Although Ad-Rock’s verses spit fire and even anger, there are none of the darker undercurrents of malice or despair that marred so much of the era’s most influential hard rock: the most distorted instrument is the bass, and its slipping, sliding groove is the engine behind the song, unable to disobey hip-hop’s prime directive: to get asses moving.

And yet, despite its massive popularity and embrace by the broader pop community, it’s another of those songs that I never heard until much later, as much historical document as living text: it didn’t get played on Guatemalan radio, I never saw MTV, and even the “alternative” radio stations I knew in the late 90s, which played Nirvana and Jane’s Addiction like they were new, never saw fit to remind their listeners of the Beasties. It wasn’t until I made a conscious effort to investigate what existed of a canon in 1999 (in the heyday of Napster and end-of-the-century lists) that I downloaded “Sabotage” — and it became one of the four or five songs I thought of as definitive 90s rock songs.

With a bit more experience (and a bit more girth) under my belt, I can hear how this engages with the way alt-rock incorporated hip-hop in the mid-90s. It was the heyday of Cypress Hill, Beck’s “Loser,” and, a bit later, Sublime. The Beasties, who were actually around for the Golden Age of hip-hop, are true to their old-school roots, but unafraid to step into the post-grunge arena. It’s exactly that kind of genre-straddling that has made them legends to all but the most hardline of musical ideologues, whether on the rock side or the rap.

37. R.E.M. “Drive”
(Peter Buck, Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, Bill Berry)
Automatic For The People [Warner Bros.] • 1992

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I didn’t realize until just now, revisiting it on Youtube, how powerful an impact David Essex’s 1973 “Rock On” had on 90s pop. Listen to it again, then listen to Arthur Russell’s “This Is How We Walk On The Moon” (conveniently at #64 on this very list) and watch whole genealogical trees get filled in as if by magic. Compared to that production/orchestration coup, R.E.M’s borrowing a lyric, a tempo, and a general sense of sexy dread from Essex seems piddling.

This may have been the first R.E.M. song I ever heard, but if so it was quickly overwhelmed by “Losing My Religion,” which was then in the first flowering of its complete dominance of the first half of the 1990s. I still can’t listen properly to “Losing My Religion” — it’s long been leached of any meaning or significance by dint of its sheer ubiquity (and yes, this from a man who can re-embrace Nirvana and Rob Thomas without irony) — and there is a sense in which its shiny blandness has extended itself over all of R.E.M.’s contemporary catalogue. “Man On The Moon,” “Everybody Hurts,” and the late-80s hits are similarly drained for me. Only the insignificant fun of Monster (the last record I have any interest in) and the relative obscurity of the 80s college-rock years have anything left to say to me. (Well, so far. All categorical statements I make should be read as provisional. To be human is to change one’s mind.) And this.

I was surprised to find that “Drive” isn’t held in particular high esteem by a lot of R.E.M. fans (among which I wouldn’t count myself: I came along too late and too uninvested in alt-rock mythology), with Allmusic going so far as to call it an inauspicious opening to Automatic For The People. But I still remember coming across it on the radio while lying in bed at thirteen years old, and mentally shivering at its spare, bleak mood. “Hey, kids, rock and roll” sounded like the sardonic laughter of a demon who had snared an unsuspecting hedonist with promises of fame and glory. Peter Buck’s seductive, brittle acoustic riff sounded like the sinking, gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach when I thought about sex; Michael Stipe’s hollow, chambered voice sounded like someone who knew too much. And yes, in retrospect I can see how much I brought to the song — or rather, how much my uninformed, Christian-mythologized mind filled in — but its slow, swampy build, the wet drums, and Stipe’s obliquely apocalyptic lyrics still strike me as evocative, if no longer as full of terrible meaning as they once did.

But if the song sounded like a darkly seductive come-on to me, what really made the blood pound behind my ears was that I kept listening. Hey, kids, rock and roll.

Rock on.

36. Len “Steal My Sunshine”
(Marc Costanzo, Gregg Diamond)
You Can’t Stop The Bum Rush [Work] • 1999

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I’m not expecting much of anyone to agree with me on this one; even mutant-disco heads who can appreciate the Andrea True Connection sample (from the bridge to “More, More, More”) would most likely be off-put by the two ridiculous conversations (“well . . . does he like butter tarts?” “Karen! I love you!”) that lead off the verses. (And don’t watch the video unless you want to be worked into a rage at late-90s backwards-ballcap-wearing douchebags.)

But that sample counts for a lot: bubbly, bouncy, and stompy as hell, it sets up the cartoon camp universe in which this song exists: a Canadian-universalist utopia of hip-hop beats and breathy girly vocals, where adolescent emotional outbursts are both cast as high drama by the structure of the song and undercut as vapid and frivolous by the giggly pop backing. And this is a very Canadian song, make no mistake: hip-hop posturing turns to whitebread navel-gazing, goofiness is mistaken for actual humor (cf. Barenaked Ladies), and everything is as white as the Northwest Territories.

And those dorky guys having a gossipy conversation, once understood as good-hearted Canadians genuinely concerned for Marc, who looks pretty, uh, down, and Sharon, who’s never looked so bad (other than once before, but this is pretty bad), are more like campy Degrassi High students than like the catty, douchebaggy potheads they sound like at first blush. Although, uh, what is with the switching of names? Sharon Costanzo is the girl who actually sings the song; Karen is, presumably, someone else entirely.

Sharon is the sister of Marc, who wrote the song and sings the guy’s part and whose band Len more or less was, inasmuch as it was a band rather than just a bunch of friends who put out one album, reaped the rewards, and moved on to Canadian A&R. (Trivia time: Buck 65 worked on an album track.) Her vocal makes the song: if it was just Marc’s throaty sprechgesang (I refuse to dignify it by calling it rapping) for three minutes, no one would want to hear it twice, but her chirpy, wispy repitition of the hook is enough to make it a pop classic, if a slightly awkward, well, Canadian one.

Like most Americans, I have a hard time taking Canada seriously as a country. Which is probably why their least-serious export is part of my vision of great 90s pop: if all of Canada is as silly as Len, it is a utopia.

50. Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
(Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic)
Nevermind [DGC] • 1991

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The song that changed everything. But not in the way you think.

Before “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” anguished self-absorption mixed uncomfortably with overwrought, unparticularized rage was limited to a small audience of underground punk-metal enthusiasts; after “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” it became the lingua franca of teenage white suburbia, the quickest way to self-identify as sensitive and artistic, and incidentally superior to all the ballcap-wearing morons who embraced hip-hop and outnumbered you. Except, turns out all the ballcap-wearing morons also love Nirvana (as “In Bloom” noted in characteristically pissed-off fashion), but they’re hearing it differently: it’s music for moshing, for partying like an asshole to, for getting drunk to, for hitting girlfriends to. Nirvana unleashed something ugly and self-defeating into mainstream music, the poisonous flowers of which bloomed toward the end of the decade, in acts as differently awful as Marilyn Manson and Creed, the subliterate platitudes of Bush and the nerd-rage of Tool.

All of which makes it sound like I don’t like Nirvana. The truth is that I’m exhausted by Nirvana. I got all I can get out of them about a decade ago, and can no longer listen to them except by random chance, when hearing them cheek-by-jowl with very different kinds of songs tells me more about their strengths and limitations than any further close studies of Nevermind and In Utero can do.

Those strengths?

Dave Grohl’s drumming, for one; “Smells Like Teen Spirit” could never have been the pop hit it was without his clipped, near-breakbeat sense of rhythm, and it’s his charismatic, unpretentious sense of humor that levels out and gives context to Cobain’s navel-gazing and unfocused despair. Would we ever have been able to recognize Grohl’s contributions without knowing Foo Fighters? Probably not; every goofy drummer should form a side project that eventually eclipses the original self-serious band.

Kurt Cobain’s sense of melody and secret classic-rock fetish, for another. It may be commonplace by now to note the rhythm guitar’s lift from Boston’s “More Than A Feeling” (or the main guitar figure from “Come As You Are” from the Killing Joke’s “Eighties”), but that’s doesn’t make the result any less thrillingly pop. Even while sharing the grungy, anti-everything underground’s mania for detuned minor keys and inscrutable (but probably unpleasant) lyrics, Cobain had a real gift (which he despised) for a sweet-and-sour melody, the biggest reason that Nirvana broke huge and remained huge.

And there’s the production, probably the biggest reason anyone listened in the first place. The song follows Berry Gordy’s dictum of grabbing from the first seconds: that whipping rhythm guitar, then Grohl’s mighty drums, then BAM that wall of sound which still makes me want to jump around like a sixteen-year-old headbanger. It’s the perfect marriage of alt fire and pop sheen, and the only thing wrong with it is that it’s overfamiliar. Spend enough time away from it, though, and it’ll grab you by the throat next time you hear it.

And then there’s Krist Novoselic. He doesn’t get in the way.

49. Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories “Stay”
(Lisa Loeb)
Reality Bites Original Motion Picture Soundtrack [RCA] • 1994

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I spent the summer of 1994 on the road, visiting relatives and friends in an aluminum-can minivan until I totaled it between some Nebraska cornfields (landing upside-down in a ditch, my life saved only by the hard-shell carrier on top of the minivan), then in a brown-and-tan Suburban which would be the vehicle of my junior and senior years. It was the summer that “Stay” began to be played on the radio, on the back of a supposedly generation-defining movie I’ve never been motivated to see. That movie, of course, was Forrest Gump. At least those are the twined tendrils in my memory; I read about Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis in Newsweek, then went into the room I was sleeping in — a ten-year-old girl’s room; the family was on vacation and letting a Guatemalan missionary family stay in their house for a couple of weeks — turned on the radio, and heard Lisa Loeb’s sweet, innocent voice cycle through hurt, recrimination, despondency, philosophical inquiry, uncertainty, self-doubt, and quiet, sarcastic triumph.

I think that was the first time I heard the song; I know that I didn’t suss out all the lyrics until the fall, back in Guatemala, listening to the song as the suburban trundled over the cobblestones of Antigua, by which time it had become my favorite pop song by far, so much so that when I finally had any spending money to speak of a couple years later some of my first purchases were Lisa Loeb’s first two CDs, which I listened to frequently enough to drive my first college roommates insane.

The crush didn’t last: too much exposure to Loeb’s lesser works (and more exposure to a wider variety of great work) made me aware of how facile and production-dependent much of her songwriting was, not to mention how rarely she achieved the off-the-cuff magnificence of her first hit, more commonly recognized for the rather undistinguished distinction of being the first number-one hit by an unsigned artist (bless, Ethan Hawke) than for its qualities of fragile beauty and breathless assurance. (And the subtly funky drums. That crisp snare sound punctuating Loeb’s reverie is the song’s main sonic pleasure.)

It’s also one of the great pop records about the indescribably healing verities of pop: “lover’s in love and the other’s run away/lover is crying ’cause the other won’t stay” is as old as the blues, which is to say as old as time. It’s only after turning the radio on, turning the radio up that the singer gains the confidence not to stay.

48. A Tribe Called Quest “Scenario”
(Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Phife Dawg, Charlie Brown, Dinco D, Q-Tip, Busta Rhymes)
The Low End Theory [Jive] • 1991

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The second most heartbreaking thing about doing these lists is having to leave songs off. A hundred songs seems like a lot, but it turns out not to be, especially if you’re making a concerted effort to include as wide a variety of genres as the period demands. (And even then you end up shortchanging something. No dancehall or Brazilian pop here, which is a damn shame.) My hip-hop count, in particular, is anemic; and this is just as I’m rediscovering (or, just as often, discovering) the brilliance of 90s hip-hop. No Wu-Tang, Kool G Rap, Dr. Octagon, Ice Cube, Mobb Deep, or Scarface would automatically invalidate this list in the eyes of many — and that’s a point of view I’m highly sympathetic to. But I don’t want to let my new enthusiasms crowd out the fact of my longtime relationship with 90s’ rock; twenty-year-old me deserves to be heard too.

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to the fact that songs like this are perfect having-it-both-ways solutions to such problems. I get to check both Tribe and Busta Rhymes off my mental list — and while I’ve loved Tribe’s conscious aestheticism a lot longer, my newfound love for Busta’s ragga-inflected enthusiasm is more important to me at the moment. So while this song has only a little of what I fell in love with A Tribe Called Quest for — the jazz samples, the consciousness-expanding lyrics, Q-Tip’s narcotic, dense flow — and is basically a boastin’ an’ braggin’ concession to radio simplification, the sheer fun and lightning-fast interplay between the two members of Tribe and the three members of Leaders Of The New School is more than enough to make up for the lack of NPRy tastefulness.

That, and I get yet one more reference that Barenaked Ladies were making in “One Week.” Sigh.

(Oh, and the first most heartbreaking thing about doing these lists is discovering songs that belong on the lists after finishing them. I may have to do a roundup in a year.)

47. Collective Soul “December”
(Ed Roland)
Collective Soul [Atlantic] • 1995

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I doubt there’s anything I can say that can convince the imaginary reader in my head that Collective Soul are anything but lame corporate rock, writing checks for faux-profundity that their actual songs can’t cash. And the thing is, I don’t necessarily disagree with any of that. But then so was Journey, and “Don’t Stop Believing” is still (or has become) a monument of heartfelt earnestness, due in large part to the shared history that 80s kids invested it with. “December” may only have significance for my own history, but then this is my list.

The downtuned pointillist guitar figure that opens the song sets the scene: it is winter, cold but clean, snowless, gray, with streaks of washed-out maroon standing for buildings in the city. (?) (!) Ed Roland’s voice, double-tracked but not really harmonizing, just singing an octave above himself, is an unsettling presence, not spectral really, but inhuman somehow. (The early 90s rush to sign “new Nirvanas” allowed a lot of odd-voiced singers in the commercial door: Roland’s vocals are stylized in ways that even Randy and Paula would laugh off the stage today, but back then he just sounded like someone who really meant it, man.) The lyrics he’s actually singing, meanwhile . . . .

I parsed those lyrics as concentratedly and devotedly as any Talmudic scholar. My friends and I were almost certain that Collective Soul were a sub rosa Christian band, and we pored over their lyrics, finding Biblical allusions in lines that now strike me as a breakup with a dental hygienist (“turn your head baby now spit me out,” cf. Rev. 3:16) or mere ham-handed double entendre (“your cup runneth over again,” cf. Ps. 23:5). But we couldn’t be sure, and it was the tension between piety and doubt that made Collective Soul worth returning to again and again, until I had heard the songs so often that I couldn’t even think about them anymore: they just slid by my brain, tractionless and meaningless.

And yet, even though none if it any longer gives me the depth charge that possible blasphemy did (“tilt my sun towards your domain,” cf. Is. 14:12), what stays with me is the early encounter with doubt. It’s not an experience I expect anyone in the world to share; the majority of music geeks never had any faith to lose, which is why they embraced music geekery: it’s a coherent set of doctrines all its own, with innumerable narratives of fall and redemption, of early persecution leading to eventual triumphalism, of multiplying One True Ways all in complex competition with one another. My own impulses towards pop ecumenism mirror my approach to my Christian heritage; and I can no more disown the Church than I can disown lame rock & roll, no matter how broad my later experience has become.

46. Johnny Cash “Rusty Cage”
(Chris Cornell)
Unchained [American] • 1996

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This is as close as this list will get to having Soundgarden on it. I loved “Black Hole Sun” in high school, but despite what I wrote above, I’m no longer in high school, and Audioslave has retroactively made Chris Cornell’s phlegmy yowl unlistenable.

Johnny Cash’s dust-dry voice, however, remained listenable to the end of his life. Actually, that’s damning it with far too faint praise: rather, it was an unearned, miraculous privilege that our ears were allowed to hear that voice.

So far, so obvious: what is it, then, that makes this song more valuable than the roughly two dozen songs Cash released in the 1990s, not to mention worthy to stand with his classic cuts from the 50s, 60s, and 00s? Is it as simple and straightforward as the swamp-funky power-crunch that Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers put behind the final verse, the single time in recorded history when Johnny Cash’s actual singing self met the pounding hard-rock fury his Man in Black persona had done much to inspire? (Probably.) Is it Cornell’s evocative-for-once-in-a-way lyrics, given an extra layer of meaning by one of the all-time great mythic Americans infusing them with the sense of shattered history and apocalyptic outrage he seems to carry in his bones? Johnny Cash so frequently carried himself like a character from a Cormac McCarthy novel that sometimes he seemed to belong not to the age of VCRs and strip malls but to the age of slavery and Indian wars, a past that he carries forth into the present simply by being himself, burning dinosaur bones and all.

This song is Huck Finn lighting out for the territories, slaves making for the Mason-Dixon, Hemingway on his way to war, Kerouac on his motorcycle and every hobo myth there is, the irrepressible, inextinguishable American desire to Get The Hell Out. All society is a cage, and every red-blooded American is born a Houdini. If you can see the smoke from your neighbor’s fire, he’s too close.

45. Tricky “Aftermath (Version One)”
(Tricky)
Aftermath EP [4th & Broadway] • 1994

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Speaking of Cormac McCarthy.

I believe I mentioned, in reference to Massive Attack’s usual modus operandi, that postindustrial cyber-noir was unlikely to hold my interest. Since Tricky was associated with the Attack early in both their careers, it might follow that his version of sci-fi soundscaping would be equally snooze-worthy. A couple of crucial adjectives need to be changed, though. This song is postapocalyptic tribal-noir. The closest narrative equivalent I can think of is McCarthy’s The Road, or maybe the first half of I Am Legend: an unnamed, unexplained event has left a man alone, haunted by fragments of a woman’s voice, half-submerged in the shifting, inexplicable, hostile environment, buffeted by remnants of a disappeared world: clips of David Cassidy’s version of “How Can I Be Sure,” a surf-rock riff rising from nothing and falling away again, a flute fluttering like ashes on the breeze. And a constant three-note pulse underneath everything: the decomposition of radioactive waste? the broken-down and wheezing knell of doom? Dub never sounded so sinister before.

It’s more than that, of course. Tricky’s aesthetic of blurring boundaries and dissolving genres is reinforced by the teenaged Martina Topley-Bird getting just as much voice time as the supposed star: Tricky is as much woman as man, as much lover as beloved, as much absent as present, as much sonically manipulated as sonic manipulator. This is a vision of trip-hop as unrecognizable to the venerable Portishead as to the hacky Dido, more dream than waking life, threats and promises equally unfulfilled, entirely suspended in air, in tension, unresolved.

44. Cornershop “Brimful Of Asha”
(Tjinder Singh)
When I Was Born For The 7th Time [Wiiija] • 1997

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

British pop inevitably comes to me secondhand (just as American pop comes to Brits, nevermind what they may think about it), and in some sense my response to it is a learned response, set at an intellectual distance, processed through experience that isn’t mine or part of my heritage. Perhaps that’s why Americans tend to think of British pop as more literary than their own strains: because engaging it requires the same faculties as engaging literature does for us.

Every time I hear a British person use the word “Asian,” I have to translate it in my head: they almost always mean South Asian. Americans almost always mean East Asian; our standard usage for the British meaning is “dot, not feather.” (Yes, that’s reductive, and kind of a cheap joke. But acknowledging sensitivities allows me to outrage them, right?) Which is a metonymic way of saying that as an American I have less context for Cornershop than I have for Cibo Matto. (But only one of them made the list. Standard-issue colonial inferiority complex, or something more dastardly?)

Asha Bhosle is, I am reliably informed, Bollywood’s all-time greatest playback singer. I know more or less what that means, but I’ve never been able to sit through a Bollywood production and am frankly a little scared to try to tackle a discography that massive (she is also the most-recorded human being ever). Which is one advantage the 90s had over today: musical knowledge was necessarily limited by sheer physical contraints. Picking up an Asha Bhosle 45 in a secondhand shop is vastly preferable to downloading her entire discography in a couple of hours: for one thing you actually have time to fall in love with the 45.

And that, despite the cultural difference and lack of context, is what I love about this song: at root, it’s about a guy who loves a record. (Or a bunch of records, really, as the early outro lets us know.) It’s about processing pop, even pop from widely disparate cultures of which you have no direct experience, and giving it space in your interior canon, recontextualizing it and converting it to your own use, turning Asha Bhosle’s name into the Hindi word for “hope” and then, because your East London dialect is non-rhotic, pronouncing it “asher” and making puns about ashes. It’s about a stoned raga-rock groove, with guitar phasing borrowed from George Harrison’s ashram years, surging and enveloping everything in a haze that’s impossible to hate. Jacques Dutronc and Trojan Records, together at last.

And my own cautious secondhand approach to British pop is swallowed up in the totalizing bliss of loving pop, all pop, everywhere and all at once. You might even call it grace.

43. Stereolab “Ping Pong”
(Tim Gane, Laetitia Sadier)
Mars Audiac Quintet [Duophonic] • 1994

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

If Stereolab didn’t exist, someone would have had to invent them. You could say that’s what happened, actually: few bands are so conceptually driven. 60s sunshine pop, 70s Krautrock, and straight-up 1850s Marxist dogma shouldn’t, by all that is holy, work together so well, but here we are.

This particular song is perhaps not the band’s best foot forward: droning, buzzy masterpieces like “Jenny Ondioline” or the experiments with early-synthesizers might give a greater charge to the experimental-music wonks among us (including me, in some moods), but the (ironically?) bright, Anita Kerr Singers-type orchestration and cheery melody are infectious, so much so that you almost miss Laetitia Sadier’s lyrics until that naggingly catchy chorus beats them into your head: “bigger slump and bigger wars and a smaller recovery/huger slump and greater wars and a shallower recovery” isn’t exactly love poetry.

Maybe it’s the fact that the lyrics are in English for once (generally they’re in French), maybe it’s that you can hear her voice clearly for once (usually there’s too much noise), but most likely it’s that the song keeps recurring in my head every time I glance at the financial news. As Jon Stewart likes to put it, we’re fucked, and while it no longer takes hardline socialism to be able to see the indicators, it does take a bit of the edge off to have the news delivered in such cheerful, upbeat tones. When Sadier breaks out into the wordless hum towards the end, it has the same effect for me as all those “Smile, Darn Ya, Smile” songs from the Depression. Surely things can’t ever get so bad that pop can’t help.

42. Victoria Williams “I Can’t Cry Hard Enough”
(Marvin Etzioni, David Williams)
Swing The Statue! [Mammoth] • 1990

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Google tells me that this song was used to memorable effect in an episode of Beverly Hills 90120; perhaps I caught either a reference or a parody at some point, because when I (far too late in the game) went looking for Victoria Williams material, I recognized it as familiar. (Was it used in a movie? Some TV show that I would have seen? Little help?)

I’ve known who Victoria Williams was for a long time; she had a track on the first CD I ever bought (on which more later), and her early-90s milieu of faith-haunted folksingers was perfectly familiar to me for about a decade before I got past her decidedly singular vocal style to want to investigate further. Pearl Jam had covered her; she had been close to several of my youthful favorites; and my tolerance for unusual voices has expanded to the point where I actively seek them out, disgusted with the boredom inherent in tonal purity and multi-octave ranges. But when I saw the writing credits for this, I blinked.

Marvin Etzioni recorded one of the most wrenching, raw performances I’ve ever heard when he appeared on a tribute album to Christian skeptic singer-songwriter Mark Heard: apparently drunk and openly weeping, he shout-sings lyrics from all over Heard’s oeuvre, tying them together with the refrain “your love never fails to pierce through me/hammer and nails” (another Heard song). The experience is total, emotionally shattering and impossible to forget; be glad I chose instead Etzioni’s earlier anthem of loss and heartbreak. Both he and co-writer David Williams recorded versions of “I Can’t Cry Hard Enough” (Williams with his band the Williams Brothers), but Vanessa Williams (no relation) was the first one to get it on disc, and her wobbly, throaty moan gives the song an extra emotional punch that even the high-country male harmonizing can’t quite pull off.

It’s a secular hymn, a gospel song without a resurrection, and the other day, as I listened to it while walking to Borders, was one of the few times I’ve actually teared up while listening to music. When the next song on the list came up, I had to pause it while I sorted myself out. I don’t know about this transition, man.

41. Santana feat. Rob Thomas “Smooth”
(Itaal Shur, Rob Thomas)
Supernatural [Arista] • 1999

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

First, fuck you, it is a good song. Second, I apologize, you probably didn’t deserve that much attitude.

But I understand where the theoretical hipster sneer at this entry comes from. About a year after this song first hit the charts, I was ready to tear out my car’s radio if it came on again. One of the great things about being a grownup, though, is never having to listen to music you don’t choose to listen to, and when I returned to this song eight years later I fell in love with it, if not all over again, then with a new appreciation for its sterling qualities.

Matchbox 20 sucked, I think it’s pretty safe to say. A good portion of that suckage came from Rob Thomas, the frontman and only recognizable member of the band: his throaty whine and pretentious lyrics, backed by the most hermetically generic modern-rock instrumentation possible, made rock radio in the late 90s a decided wasteland. And Carlos Santana hadn’t done much worthy of note from the pop arena since, oh, 1975. (Sure, if your tastes run to soporifically tasteful latin-rock-fusion, he’s never not been perfectly fine. But then you would’ve hated this.) So there was no reason to believe that this song would be any good, and for a lot of people it never went beyond glancing at the tin and recoiling. It was that asshole Rob Thomas with that burnout Santana; it couldn’t be any good.

But it could. The first key ingredient is the rhythm: classic salsa, boiled in post-disco New York heat for a couple of decades and seasoned with Santana (the band)’s classic fusion-drums sound. Santana sucked for so long because no one ever kicked the tempo up to anything danceable; but with Palmieriesque piano drops and a rhythm section with some Fania in its past, he steps up with a fluid, lazy shred that can get the whitest classic rocker on board.

And then there’s Rob. The best choice anyone made in recording this song was to tweak his vox: not only does he sound like a dry run at Julian Casablancas’ early Strokes records, but the diminished dynamic range keeps his annoying vocal tics to a minimum, flattening his voice and giving it an ironically human expressionlessness. And his lyrics are, for once in a way, not embarrassing, except in the way that any white dude macking on a hot Latina is always going to be. (Seriously, guys. I don’t care if you’re Brad Pitt; she’s always out of your league.) Again, it’s a song about the urgency of pop, but only in the old, comforting way that dance music has always been about dancing and the other, less vertical activities that dancing represents.

I was just starting to get into the history of pop when this song was on the radio; it occurred to me one day sitting in traffic that, quality aside, it was just about the perfect song to end the twentieth century on. It’s rock and soul, Latin jazz and hip-hop (listen for the scratching), with rhythmic roots stretching back to rumbas and tarantellas and foxtrots. It’s campy, miscegenated, and idiotic. It’s twentieth-century music. Amen.

60. Gang Starr “Jazz Thing”
(DJ Premier, Guru, Branford Marsalis, Terence Blanchard)
single [Sony] • 1990

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

One of my inspirations for much of what I do here (and the specific inspiration for including playable tracks) was Noel Murray’s Popless at the Onion’s A.V. Club. Noel’s much more of a rockist than I am; in fact, he confesses that almost everyone in his jazz collection was sampled only because Guru namechecked them in “Jazz Thing.” (Funnily enough, he’s not a big hip-hop guy, either.) I’d be tempted to point and laugh, but we all have our zigzag histories, and just because I came of musical age in the omnivorous post-Napster era doesn’t mean I don’t have unfortunate gaps either. (As witness much of this list.)

In the early 1990s Gang Starr was one of the great New York hip-hop outfits with a complex discography that spoke to every aspect of the black experience, including both criminality and consciousness — but it’s characteristic of me that the tune I latch onto is merely a big-up to a genre of music for which no gangsta, real or wannabe, had any time. I always think of a scene I happened upon from some late-90s teen movie on cable, in which a white girl is shyly getting to know the cool black guy from across the tracks. They’re looking at someone else’s record collection: “Do you like jazz?” she asks tentatively, and he shakes his head, making a face. She laughs, relieved. They are young and beautiful: of course they don’t like jazz. That has always seemed to me to perfectly sum up my generation, so it’s always with relief that I find someone like Guru willing to go to the mat for Ornette, Thelonious, and Dizzy.

His history may be a bit lacking — I’m thinking of the unnecessary dis to white impresario Paul Whiteman, who’s been somewhat rehabilitated in recent years (i.e. he wasn’t a jazzman, but he did almost more than anyone to popularize jazz and give it the cultural clout it enjoyed for the next four decades) — and his prediction that “the nineties will be the decade of a jazz thing” could only be true for listeners who found in Gilles Peterson all they could ever want in life, but his and Premier’s obvious affection for, deep knowledge of, and commitment to the music of their fathers is the kind of thing that keeps me interested in music. Even if a lot of people aren’t comfortable with that kind of historical telescoping.

Aesthetic theorists call it “essentialism,” the idea that every genre or form has a “pure” or “perfect” expression, and that to crossbreed or blur the boundaries is to put your work beyond the pale. Me, I’m with cartoonist Eddie Campbell: “We should not quibble [as to categories or conventions]. We should only ask whether it increases the sum total of human wisdom.” Gang Starr does.

59. Smashing Pumpkins “Today”
(Billy Corgan)
Siamese Dream [Virgin] • 1993

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

1. One of my best friends in high school only half-jokingly said that this would be the perfect song to play as the entroit to his graduation ceremony. Although I have been out of high school for over a decade, I still see no reason to disagree.

2. It’s such an inexpressible joy to hear Billy Corgan’s voice so low in the mix that it flutters and distorts along with the rest of the sonic washes. I’ve repeatedly made the mistake of attempting to listen to his post-millennial material.

3. The infamous quiet-loud-quiet-loud pattern supposedly pioneered by Pixies and definitely popularized by Nirvana was never, in my view, effected with greater economy or force than in this song.

4. The Pumpkins had a pretty neat signature sound at their peak, a sort of Bauhaus-as-produced-by-Tom-Scholz-of-Boston dark stadium glam that was pretty effective for a while there, although like many things about this decade, it can be hard to hear for the overfamiliarity of it all.

5. That signature sound was pretty handicapped by Corgan’s screeching whine, though. Except, as noted, when it was mixed low enough, and he just sounded like a crazy person trying to be heard through all the noise in his head, rather than a crazy person screaming at you and blaring noise at you on the street.

6. I really don’t have any good reasons for numbering these comments, except I only had these small, disconnected thoughts and didn’t want to put in the effort to build coherent paragraphs out of them.

7. Christian numerology says seven is the number of perfection. Ergo, this is a perfect write-up. And I wasted it on the Smashing Pumpkins.

58. Seal “Kiss From A Rose”
(Seal)
Seal [Sire] • 1994

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

You may have noticed that I have a thing for layered harmonies, particularly of black voices. (PM Dawn, Boyz II Men, some more upcoming). And sure, the sheer unearthly beauty of Seal’s voice as he winds through this rather stately melody is the kind of thing that makes a man glad he has ears, but that’s almost the least of this song’s charms.

But before we get into that, let me address a phrase that some — including myself in some moods — could use to dismiss this song or songs like it. “Adult contemporary.” (Involuntary shudders all round.) And yes; this is exactly the kind of inoffensive song that gets played in supermarkets along with solo Sting, the collected works of Celine Dion, and the unholy trinity of Bolton, Marx and G. But it can also comfortably share a playlist with Sadé or Bryan Ferry, who inhabit space at the more critically-legitimate end of the silky-ballad spectrum. As always, genre labels are not big enough sticks to beat songs with: register a real complaint.

On the heels of the Batman Forever soundtrack (that was a weird moment, by the way, when a middling soundtrack to an abysmal superhero movie produced two major chart hits), this song was all over Guatemalan airspace around the same time as a more justly-forgotten blowsy ballad, Martin Page’s “In The House Of Stone And Light.” The two are connected in my head — and, rather more embarrassingly, anchored to my soul — in a way that’s hard to explain, but I think can best be understood in light of the fact that I spent my high school years half in the waking world and half in Narnia, Middle-Earth, and Arthurian Logres. Fantasy imagery, particularly medieval imagery, was always going to catch my attention, at least until I grew sick of the fumbling, generic attempts to live up to those childhood mythoi.

But while Page’s song could merely provide the soundtrack to Ramandu’s Island (you cannot outnerd me on the works of C.S. Lewis), Seal’s “Kiss From A Rose” became, in my somewhat overheated imagination, the pop equivalent to the medieval dream-allegory The Romance Of The Rose, or Charles Williams’ densely poetic reworking of the story of Launcelot and Guenivere (itself deeply indebted to medieval courtly-love allegories) in Taliessin Through Logres. I think it’s mostly down to the repeating oboe figure: it’s a very high-medieval sound.

Like most people, I generally use pop for different ends now, but I suppose soundtracking a complex and intensely-felt mythopoetic symbology is as valid a use as any other.

57. No Doubt “Don’t Speak”
(Gwen Stefani, Eric Stefani)
Tragic Kingdom [Trauma] • 1995

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I remember precisely where I was when it first dawned on me that this was a great pop song, rather than just a song that exists on the radio and becomes part of the sonic wallpaper to a period in your life. I was sitting in my car, driving down Palm in central Phoenix, watching the giant stalks of the palm trees flick past. The flamenco guitar solo hit, then the pulsating muted trumpet just before Stefani takes the bridge, and I realized that my early, easy disdain for No Doubt (let’s just say I had a younger brother who was way too into third-wave ska) had melted away. Sure, the guitar pulse of the song is basically Aerosmith’s “Dream On” applied to a heavy-lidded SoCal sensibility, and the overpolished sheen of the thing is everything a right-thinking person should hate about 90s alt-rock, but — but flamenco! and a muted trumpet!

In retrospect, of course, this is where Gwen Stefani The Grand Mistress Of Junkyard Pop was born. Their early new-wavy ska-punk material was fine for what it was, but pitched far too minor, and without a major, genre-defying move like this, they would have disappeared around the time her pink hair dye faded. The song — and certainly the video — is about Gwen becoming bigger than the band, but it’s the fact that the song is, melodically and structurally, a tejano ballad, the sort of emotionally-lavish, melodramatic thing that Selena could have really gotten her teeth into, that really points the way to the future for me. That future would contain duets with electronica wimp Moby and r&b hotcha Eve, experiments with dancehall and reggaeton, and finally a solo career that led the way in mashing up global pop forms and topping the charts (again, globally) at the same time. By edging herself out of the pop-ska ghetto, Stefani takes the first steps down the road that would eventually produce “Hollaback Girl,” and anyone who can’t see what’s brilliant about “Hollaback Girl” ain’t no friend of mine.

But it’s as a song in its own right, rather than as a symbolic marker of some future aesthetic, that “Don’t Speak” is on this list, so I’ll just note that beyond the genre mashups, my favorite moment is the out-of-nowhere “I know you’re good, I know you’re real good” at the outro.

56. Whiskeytown “Houses On The Hill”
(Ryan Adams, Caitlin Cary)
Strangers Almanac [Outpost] • 1997

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Here’s the thing: even though it’s obvious from a latter-day perspective that Ryan Adams only started out in alt-country because it was easier to get noticed there, and that his real interest was in doing everything as quickly as possible — even though with every passing year it gets easier to tell that Whiskeytown was as much a put-on and a persona as anything else he’s ever done — it’s still the best he’s ever been.

And I say that not as a function of nostalgia for any collegiate innocence; I only came to Whiskeytown after knowing Ryan Adams the rock star, and was taken by surprise. These songs were not the facile genre-by-numbers exercises I’d come to expect from Adams: they had deep roots, and branched out into unexpected grace notes, strung together with the lean complexity of literary fiction. In Whiskeytown, Adams lived outside his own head in a way he has only rarely attempted doing since. Maybe it was the being-in-a-band thing, maybe it was the influence of fiddler and harmonizer Caitlin Cary (whose own latter-day solo material has been equally thoughtful if never as immediate), maybe it was sheer youthful hunger and not knowing what he was doing.

But on songs like this one, Adams picked up the mantle of Hank Williams and George Jones and ran with it, investing the rich tapestry of American country with the mythic significance usually reserved for rock, and as Cary played Emmylou to his Gram, he painted a portrait of one of millions of forgotten lives that has made up all of democratic history. I’ll take that over more rock & roll self-mythologizing any day.

55. The Sundays “Here’s Where The Story Ends”
(David Gavurin, Harriet Wheeler)
Reading, Writing And Arithmetic [DGC] • 1990

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Some people might say that, having always intended to include the Sundays on my list, there was no need to have included Sixpence None The Richer or the Cranberries, who are just watered-down versions of the Sundays in the first place. I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with that, but it overlooks a valuable point: melodic guitar pop featuring gossamer female voices is one of my very favorite kinds of music, as well as being a field in which the 90s excelled to an almost embarrassing degree.

“Here’s Where The Story Ends” is one of the great, unimpeachable singles of British indie, combining the winsome jangle of, oh, any number of 80s bands (we’ll start with Modern English and end with Lloyd Cole) with the lush soundscaping of dream-pop (Cocteau Twins, yes, sure, but there’s even a family resemblance with My Bloody Valentine in the drums). But it’s Harriet Wheeler’s performance, clear and creamy with a subcutaneous bite, a distance that seems at once intellectual and fragile, that elevates the song into a pantheon dominated mostly by young men in varying shades of off-key.

One of the key moments in the song is the word “cynically” repeated twice. But the glorious surge in Wheeler’s voice, the space that drops out for her to soar, sparrowlike, in the next few lines to the open-ended conclusion of the bridge — the girlish, pop giddiness of it all — puts the lie to the adjective. Cynicism has nothing at all to do this song, whether you take it as a giddy pop sugar rush or as the cheeriest, least traumatic breakup note of all time.

54. Morphine “Cure For Pain”
(Mark Sandman)
Cure For Pain [Rykodisc] • 1993

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Morphine inhabits kind of an odd space in the cultural memory of the 1990s. I can’t think of too many bands beloved both by my best friend, who’s favorite music is jam bands and jazz and progressive metal — basically anything that takes a lot of skill to play — and the indie rock massive. Actually, I’m not real clear on that massive — maybe it’s just the people who were into indie rock in the 90s who still like Morphine. They’re not the furthest thing from Primus, which is, I’m pretty sure, anathema to the Pitchforkier among us. Morphine are more or less forgotten (as much as anything that recent can be), but nobody dislikes them — if only because disliking Mark Sandman would be such a dick move. The man died of a heart attack on stage, and had a pretty rough childhood as well.

Not that the climate of opinion about them matters that much — at least not when the music starts. A unique lineup of two-string bass guitar, bluesy saxophone, and percussion gave them their signature “low rock” sound, and their prediliction for jazzy chords and odd time signatures makes them more rewarding to return to than many of their more era-confined peers.

This, the title cut off their breakthrough album, is unlike the majority of their more popular singles: breezing at a low tempo, not attempting any weird urban-rock posturing, and riding the sax hook rather than being dominated by the bass (which sounds not unlike a guitar in spots). And then there’s those lyrics. I’ve encountered some grief after calling lyrics “gravy” earlier in this list, and while I stand by my contention that good lyrics and bad music makes a bad pop song, while bad lyrics and good music can still make a good song (incorporating far more than mere composition under the umbrella of “music”), I will also note that consistency is the hobgoblin of something something. Anyway, my point was that Mark Sandman sounds exactly like Nick Lowe on this song, both lyrically and vocally, and that is about as high praise as I can give.

53. Jay-Z “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)”
(Jay-Z, The 45 King, Charles Strouse, Martin Charmin)
Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life [Roc-A-Fella] • 1998

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

How do you prove you’re the new king of hip-hop, the man who must be taken into account, the heir to the power centers represented by Biggie and Nas — and even more than that, because you won’t die like Biggie or drift into commercial irrelevance like Nas, but you’ll stay on top for another decade at least? One way is to slowly build up a head of critical and cultural clout by making your debut album an unassailable document of aspirational hustling that would set the benchmark for the next ten years of hip-hop mythology, incorporating the violent glamour of mafia mythology into your sharp-edged, clear-eyed street reportage.

Another is to stomp all pretenders and aspirants by releasing a song built around the orphans’ chant in the 1977 musical Annie, which was a corny throwback even then and unworthy of the gritty, populist realism of Harold Gray’s era-defining comic strip. If power, as Steven Spielberg claimed via Oskar Schindler, lies in refraining from murder when you can get away with it, then the way to complete hip-hop domination is in aligning yourself with music and culture so recherché that lesser rappers wouldn’t have the balls to be associated with it for fear of undermining their cred. When you can dismantle your own credibility and be rewarded with commercial dividends undreamed of in Horatio’s philosophy, your credibility is unassailable.

But why choose? Jay-Z, of course, did both, and more: visionary entrepreneur, sucessful businessman, and canny self-marketer (his feud with Nas would be as elegantly orchestrated as his duets with Beyoncé), he beat the odds in the notoriously fickle world of hip-hop to have a long-term career predicated as much on what he had the balls to do as on his (very real) talent. No one else could make popularizing bhangra, dueting with Linkin fucking Park, retiring, marrying Beyoncé, not retiring after all, and singing “Wonderwall” at Glastonbury as a fuck-you to Oasis all seem incidental to a career producing top-flight hip-hop both as a rapper and as a businessman.

Also, the degree to which this song works really, really well is underrated. The oompah chug of the original song is sped up only slightly to match a springy funk beat, over which Jay-Z raps like a man unaware of the cognitive dissonance between adorable theater urchins and hard-faced, cred-is-everything New York hip-hop. Except that the dissonance only exists for those of us with Bernadette Peters-loving aunties: hip-hop is as theatrical as Broadway, and a future of increasingly oddball experiments on the charts is established.

52. Kahimi Karie “Good Morning World”
(Kahimi Karie, Momus)
single [Trattoria] • 1995

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Japanese girl singer. Not a J-pop star as understood by those who watch the credits to anime, but rather a major figure in the shibuya-kei movement of mid-90s Japan, a cultural-mashup scene that took inspiration from the breezier side of 60s’ pop, whether that meant Burt Bacharach, Swinging London, French yé-yé, or Brazilian bossa nova, filtered through a postmodern samples ’n’ electronics sensibility. Pizzicatto Five, Cornelius, Fantastic Plastic Machine, and Flipper’s Guitar were other key figures in the scene, but (aside from Cornelius) only Kahimi has continued to evolve and branch out into less comfortable pop forms; her recent records are about as avant-garde as anyone with such a whispery, “cute” voice can get.

I said she wasn’t a J-pop star, but that’s kind of misleading. She’s not a plastic post-soul diva with ornate electronic orchestration, true, but this song did go to number one in Japan. Which is one of the most pleasant ironies I can think of: it quotes the Fall’s “How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’”, samples Soft Machine (that wheeling psychedelic figure), and undercuts the sugar-sweet “it’s so nice to be a beautiful girl” refrain with sarcasm and a healthy sense of proportion.

Thank Momus, the song’s co-writer and producer. He’s a half-mad Scottish pop aesthete who first came to light in the late 80s on Mike Alway’s experimental/easylistening label él. A decent portion of 90s British indie can trace its roots to his unafraid pop songs; but he really came into his own when he moved to Japan and helped kick-start the shibuya-kei movement into high gear.

So there’s that.

51. Pet Shop Boys “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind Of Thing”
(Chris Lowe, Neil Tennant)
Very [Capitol] • 1993

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This song was my introduction to the Pet Shop Boys as a youth in Guatemala, a splurt of joy bouncing out of the radio one spring and intoxicating me with its bonhomie. I interpreted the Guate disc-jocky’s “peyshoboys” correctly, and started asking around. (This was pre-internet.) A friend who had spent most of her life in Zaire acknowledged that yeah, they were pretty good, “but you know they’re gay, right?”

As I’ve said before, the Pet Shop Boys made being gay sound like the coolest thing in the world, leaving those of us who had the misfortune to be attracted to the opposite sex out in a glamourless, witless, danceless cold, having to make do with Bon Jovi. (And not the good Bon Jovi either.) To be gay was to exist in a world of brighter colors and materials that responded to your touch; to live for the moment because you never knew what was going to happen; to always have the right thing to say and to say it at the right time; to have exquisite taste, and yet to allow tastelessness into the canon under the banner of camp; to be interested in everything, but never to give your heart fully because honey things just don’t work out that way.

With a bit more experience under my belt I can see that I was merely idealizing and fantasizing an Other, no different from the Magic Negro fantasy of earthy wisdom. Still, the Pet Shop Boys’ vision of acerbic hedonism is a powerful one, and never more so than on this vibrant, trembling streak of joy painted across an album of much darker complexity, one which grapples with AIDS and psychosexual relations and social problems and the Village People, with a sound that was equal parts day-glo synthpop and post-techno impressionism. But that bouncy, rabbity beat starts pounding, and I’d also like to dance naked to the Rite Of Spring. When you’re always cynical, going mushy for the space of a song is sweet rebellion.

70. Black Star ft. Common “Respiration”
(Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Hi-Tek, Common)
Black Star [Rawkus] • 1998

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I can feel the city breathing/chest heaving against the flesh of the evening/sigh before we die like the last train leaving

That’s poetry, that is: modernist poetry of a particularly American school, Carl Sandburg and early T. S. Eliot by way of Langston Hughes and Toni Morrison, “my soul has grown old with the rivers” for a new urban, technocratic generation. All that, together with the muted smooth-jazz backing and the Spanish-language whispering, might have resulted in one of those dire orgies of tastefulness that can too often occur when well-intended bourgies (of any race) try to make High Art out of vernacular forms: tedious ethnic mélange fit only for turtlenecked NPR heads.

But that’s not what the song is.

It’s no gangsta rap, for sure — its vision is too expansive, too interested, too complex for that. At stake is nothing less than a comprehensive statement of what it’s like to be young, black, smart, and passionate in New York on the eve of the millennium. Even Talib Kweli, the most-praised underachiever in conscious hip-hop, brings as much of an a-game as it’s possible for him to. Brother’s got worse flow than a Minnesota dairy farmer, but his writing is sharp and on-point, living up to Mos Def’s standard-setting opening verse and even managing a couple of indelible images. Hell, you know it’s a great track when one of Common’s best verses is merely gravy, adding to the vision without being necessary to it.

By the end, even the smooth-jazz guitar is plucking the strings of an aching, too-full heart.

69. Gin Blossoms “Hey Jealousy”
(Doug Hopkins)
New Miserable Experience [A&M] • 1992

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Collegiate jangle-pop meets the muscle and gloss of corporate rock. Divide by Tom Pettyish scene-setting, throw in a bit of Southwestern-fried twang and tabasco, and one of the great dumb-literate lyrics of early-90s radio rock. (A scene overflowing with dumb-literate lyrics.)

I have no specific memory of this song at the time: it was one of four or five Gin Blossoms songs that seemed to have sprouted on the radio all at once, each one as jangly, fizzy, and depressive as the last. Revisiting them, it’s the drums that stand out: the guitar lines are as shapeless and predictable as anything ever, but the drums, which hit hard and, by accenting the beat in interesting ways, shape the songs into coherent narratives, are what stick in the mind and make the return fresh every time.

Or whatever. Honestly, if you don’t have time for the Gin Blossoms I don’t know what to say. I’ll never own an album, but I’ll never not be ready for the three minutes and change it takes to go down their particular road, one song at a time.

68. Aphex Twin “Windowlicker”
(Richard D. James)
single [Warp] • 1999

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Hey, remember back when rock was dead and electronica, or intelligent dance music, or whatever stupid name people had for it was going to be the music of the future? Real music would be nothing but a sea of faceless, lyricless songs created on computers and full of complicated beats and bizarre sonorities. Thank God the Strokes came along and saved us from a fate worse than death.

I’m kidding. It was Outkast who saved us.

Still, there was a moment there; the moment when Richard D. James was, briefly, one of the most important musicians in the world. Important in the real sense, not the music-journalist sense, in that he got real people excited about listening to music obsessively, trying to figure it out, parse it, understand where it came from. It was, as they say, gonna be a thing.

(His penchant for creepy videos certainly helped, back in those dim, distant days when you had to turn on a television to see music videos so indelible images made an impact, instead of just playing on Youtube while you do something else in another tab.)

There are still a few techno die-hards left (mostly in Europe, as far as I can tell), but the lack of banner carriers has left it a dedicated niche genre. Or, more positively, almost all of its major ideas have been incorporated into the mainstream of pop by now. Timbaland, the Neptunes, and Britney alone.

Still, there was a moment, a moment when a glitchy, cut-n-paste thing of fractured beats and processed voices that sound like nothing so much as Monty Python’s brain-damaged Gumbys trying to hum a tune, a thing without any lyrics (except for one sample of a woman speaking French), a thing that at the right volumes and frequencies is the most irritating thing on earth, could be a kind-of sort-of hit, if you knew the right people.

I almost never listen to Aphex Twin. But I’m glad to have it in my back pocket, just in case I ever need to remember that the sonic world is much larger than I usually give it credit for being.

67. Harvey Danger “Flagpole Sitta”
(Sean Nelson, Jeff J. Lin, Aaron Huffman, Evan Sult)
Where Have All The Merrymakers Gone? [Arena Rock] • 1997

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

In the summer of 1998, I came back to Phoenix from a year spent in Illinois. I won’t bore you with the details, except to say I hated the world, myself in particular, and as it became increasingly clear that I wasn’t going to return to Illinois but was stuck in this flesh-cracking, dry-baking hellhole of a city, I found that the radio matched my foul mood.

Or rather, that what was on the radio was so shitty as to turn my mood even fouler, matching the bleakness of my interior life with a sonic and lyrical bleakness that was also matched by the ungodly, life-destroying heat wafting from every cement, asphalt, and glass surface in the arid, tire-streaked city. (This would be “alternative” radio. I was still in thrall to the dumbass guitars=good belief system.) This was the apotheosis of Third Eye Blind and the Goo Goo Dolls and Everclear and Eve 6 and on and on and it was all so terrible and my life was folding in on itself like an imploding universe.

I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong. “Flagpole Sitta” was not a breath of fresh air in that stale, airless climate: it was simply more of the same, only in extremis. The cheap cynicism in the lyrics, the relentlessly cheery punk-pop swing to the beat, the pounding guitars so perfectly embodied the sensation of being suffocated in blistering vapidity that it drove its way into my skull and now is simply part of my psyche.

Whenever I think someone’s being paranoid, I sing the third verse to myself. I can’t help it. (It’s better than singing Garbage, or even Black Sabbath. And you’d be surprised how often the whole thing applies.) It’s simply part of my lexicon now. And listening to it again, I discovered that not only is it part of me, but now that I am so little what I was then, that I actually have affection for the song. I particularly like the spacey, psychedelic “kill my mind” bridge before the song comes roaring back into that aforementioned third verse.

Some of these songs are on the list because I loved them when I was young. Some of them are on the list because I learned to love them later. This is the only one that’s on the list because I hated it.

66. Breeders “Cannonball”
(Kim Deal)
Last Splash [4AD] • 1993

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Yep, you thought this was going to be on the list. You were right. Just make a note of its position and let’s move on.

No, seriously, I’m finding this song curiously resistant to having anything said about it. It’s a perfect alt-pop song, only it’s shaped all wrong and wearing very weird colors, and it’s practically avant-garde in the way its elements are all stacked up against each other any which way, as though it didn’t matter what way they were thrown together. It’s only rescued by the fact that each of those elements is a perfect pop moment, from Kim Deal’s sugary vocals to the stuttering guitar distortion to the wholesale theft of the chant from the March of the Winkies in The Wizard Of Oz. And that rubbery, slippery bassline, which gives the song its spidery backbone.

Apparently the song was a hit in the U.S.; it wasn’t in Guatemala, and I only heard it because of later investigations into the Pixies and so forth. Unlike every goddamn other music nerd of my generation (it feels like) I don’t have any special relationship with the Pixies or the Breeders; all I know is what I hear. I like it a lot, it was just never transformative or definitive in a way it seems to have been for a lot of people.

So there you go. I found something to say about it.

65. Mariah Carey “Dreamlover”
(Mariah Carey, Dave Hall, David Porter)
Music Box [Sony] • 1993

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I’m not sure I can explain this one. The reader I have in my head (which probably has no relation to anyone who’s actually reading this) needs no explanation for “Cannonball” — it’s probably already part of their personal canon. Confronted with this, though, they go “what the hell?”

And I understand that, believe me. For a long time I held the position that Mariah Carey had, if not single-handedly, then at least with a minimum of accomplices (Whitney Houston and let’s say Janet Jackson) destroyed r & b for any purposes other than hearing an overdone melisma and no feeling whatever. And sure, the massive ballads that made her name are still more or less unlistenable. What she did to Harry Nilsson’s “Without You” is unconscionable. (Yes, Harry Nilsson’s, not Badfinger’s. What are you, an animal?) But I’ve been coming around.

I think what did it for me, honestly, was hearing her new stuff. She no longer has the supernatural range that she had in this song, when that falsettissimo was unaided by computer trickery; but she’s grown into a sexy-older-woman role, slightly less crazy than the subsequent generation (Britney, Beyoncé, et. al.), but still crazy enough to try weird experiments and have them work at the top of the Billboard charts. “Touch My Body” is a Laurie Anderson song with sex; “I’ll Be Lovin’ U Long Time” is a Gamble & Huff song with a T.I. verse.

And “Dreamlover”? Let’s just say that when I was fifteen, man did I want to be the guy this was sung to. Over the rest, a veil is discreetly drawn.

64. Arthur Russell “This Is How We Walk On The Moon”
(Arthur Russell)
Another Thought [Point] • 1994

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Part of me wants to say, just play it and you’ll see. But I suppose some context is in order.

Arthur Russell was an avant-garde disco producer in the late 70s and early 80s. Associated with the hedonism of the gay disco scene (Larry Levan, Nicky Siano), the rigor of New York’s downtown avant-music scene (Sonic Youth, Phillip Glass, Rhys Chatham), and the fragile, mutated pop he created on his own time (World Of Echo is one of the great albums of the 80s), he was diagnosed as HIV-positive in the mid-80s and died in 1992. Another Thought, a collection of experiments, demos, and unfinished thoughts, was released two years later.

Which explains why this song sounds so ghostly. What it doesn’t explain is the sense of joy. “Every step is movin’ me up” — it’s a curious phrase that can recall both Angels in America and The Jeffersons. As the spare, fluttering cello that opens the song is joined by beats, secondary voices, and then — magically, life-affirmingly — horns, the song bursts out of its cocoon as a dance song. Then the bottom drops out as the title is chanted by robots.

Maybe you have to hear it at the right time, or in the right way. But it’s one of the very greatest songs that almost nobody has ever heard.

63. The Cranberries “Linger”
(Dolores O’Riordan, Noel Hogan)
Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? [Island] • 1993

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

We all have embarrassing pasts, and the Cranberries are mine.

It’s not that I’m embarrassed for liking them: my usual attitude towards the critical consensus is “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me,” to quote an act who (sadly) won’t be making an appearance on this list. I’m embarrassed for them, rather, or specifically for Dolores O’Riordan, and even more specifically for her cringeworthy lyrical choices. You kind of have to admire somebody so convinced of the purity of their emotional expression that they’re unaware that “you’ve got me wrapped around your finger/do you have to let it linger” is a howler on an epic scale.

Which, if I listened to pop the way I read poetry (or even prose), would consign the Cranberries to perdition forever, without a second thought. (The books I’ve left unread after a single infelicitous sentence on the second page!) But I don’t listen to pop that way. Lyrics are required, but they’re also more or less gravy. It’s the emotion of the song I’m after, and that’s all about the composition and instrumentation and production and performance. The lyrics run a distant fourth or fifth in the construction of a song’s emotion. (Exceptions include, say, the Mountain Goats or Leonard Cohen, where they leave the songs so unadorned that the lyrics have to be the central focus.)

Even so, I can understand people for whom this kind of thing is too lugubrious, lyrics aside. And quite frankly if I was hearing it for the first time today I probably wouldn’t care for it either. But when I was fifteen my favorite hard rock song was “Zombie” and “Ode To My Family” made me cry. I can no more disown the Cranberries than I can disown my own adolescence. Much as I’d like to, in hindsight.

62. Manic Street Preachers “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next”
(James Dean Bradfield, Sean Moore, Nicky Wire)
This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours [Epic] • 1998

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Wikipedia tells me this song is about the Spanish Civil War, inspired by George Orwell’s Homage To Catalonia and by the Clash’s “Spanish Bombs.” Huh.

I always heard it as a simple call to arms (or rather, non-arms) for all people of good intent. There are so many intolerable things in the world, and catastrophe always rests on a knife edge. Or at least that is the world conjured up by the song, a world of limpid moral clarity in which fascism walks abroad and rising against it is incumbent on all of us. There is a significant strain of such black-and-white do-or-die heroics in many of my favorite works of art, from the Lord Of The Rings to The Code Of The Woosters. (No, really.) Which is odd, because on a philosophical level I tend towards murk and delicately nuanced shades. But for the space of a novel — or of a song — it’s a nice world to live in.

61. Blind Melon “No Rain”
(Shannon Hoon, Christopher Thorn, Rogers Stevens, Brad Smith, Glen Graham)
Blind Melon [Capitol] • 1992

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

On some level I’m a little annoyed that, having grown up in the 90s, so much of it feels so consummately normal to me. Take this song. I have no idea when I first heard it: it was just there. But listening to it now, with headphones, with full concentration, I find it difficult to believe that I — that everyone — just accepted it as normal in 1992. It’s an acid-fried song, a phase-shifted, color-bleeding ballad that could have come out of Syd Barrett as played by Jefferson Airplane in 1969.

I don’t generally have a kind word to say for hippies, but acid-damaged freaks are something else. Shanoon Hoon’s spacey, otherworldly vocal — as well as his faintly pathetic, drug-shortened life — touch the romantic in me. I can understand the impulse to want to shift everything, to bleed the colors from red to yellow, to live in a heightened state of reality. And I’m impressed that he was able to get it down so perfectly on tape, on this song. Singing like an Axl Rose who never lost his innocence over an electric hootenanny with just enough slippage to make the unwary wonder if they’re still in the right universe, Hoon conjures up a mood that only the legendary German psych-rock band Faust has ever matched, in my experience. (“It’s A Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl.” Check it.)

This installment has been heavy on the familiar; perhaps, to some people, overfamiliar. That was part of my intent with this project: to reclaim worthwhile and memorable pop from the dustbin of fashion. While I was preparing for this project, I read The Pitchfork 500, a list of 500 important songs from 1977 to 2007 according to the dudes at Pitchfork. It struck me that while their selections from the 70s, 80s, and 00s seemed about right, their 90s tended to be skewed in strange ways. Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and Madonna’s “Holiday” made the 80s list, but nothing remotely that commercial made an appearance in the 90s. We’re too embarrassed by our own youths. If we can reclaim the kitsch of other generations, we can reclaim our own. Onward.