Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

10. Beck “Devils Haircut”
(Beck, The Dust Brothers)
Odelay [DGC] • 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.

I’ve noted before that I hate when a piece of music is colonized by a film or TV show in the shared pop-culture imagination, so that no one can bring up, say, “Atlantis” without having to sit through a point-counterpoint on GoodFellas. But the opposite can happen too: the pilot episode of Reaper tried to stock up on cheap, unearned cred by using “Devils Haircut” in an opening scene. The snippet of Beck was the best thing about the show, at least as far as I was concerned; I haven’t watched an episode since.

But my choosing to open with this not-even-anecdote raises the question: what’s so great about the song — or maybe about Beck — that a forumlaic supernatural comedy on the CW would find clinging to its coattails valuable?

Saying something like “Beck is the most important musical figure to emerge in the 1990s” doesn’t really help: I mean, it’s true, but why? Here’s my best shot: Beck is valuable not because he’s an an innovator in any deep sense — everything he did had been done before — but because he’s a synthesist operating at a very high level. In that way, he’s comparable to Bob Dylan, who synthesized American folk traditions with rock & roll, or to Lennon/McCartney, who synthesized rock & roll with the skilled craftsmanship of classical pre-rock pop. Beck teased out the hip-hop strain embedded deep within the DNA of blues, country, folk, and rock, and brought that strain — talking blues, patter songs, off-kilter rhythms, bone-dry repetition — into the modern world of samples, electronics, distortion, and lambent meaning.

Not that he did any of this intentionally: one of the great things about such synthesists is that frequently they don’t even perceive the boundaries they’re crossing. Beck’s Los Angeles art-hippie upbringing reads like a dream of the 70s, and anyone with a more concrete grasp on the rest of the world would, it seems, have been unable to throw themselves so wholly into making every kind of music at once, rapping as though it wasn’t different from singing, singing as though it wasn’t any different from thinking, writing lyrics that say nothing in a literal sense but create worlds of associations, patterns, and dreamtime shifts that echo the way music itself operates.

“Devils Haircut” is the opening song to Beck’s most critically-acclaimed album — and Odelay is that rare album, an instant classic which has never sustained a meaningful backlash — and it’s a sort of showcase for the album itself, throwing garage rock riffs, funk breaks, 60s soul bass lines, modernist feedback, early electronic soundmaking, post-punk solos, a black man’s voice, and warm vinyl crackle into a blender and then slacker-drawling postindustrial SoCal mythopoeia over top of it all. Sometimes nonsense may say best what’s to be said. Everyone in our shellshock-and-concrete, rootless modern world knows what the briefcase blues are, even if no one can really explain it.

9. White Town “Your Woman”
(Jyoti Mishra)
Abort, Retry, Fail? EP [Chrysalis] • 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.

Version 1: The Triumph Of Poptimist Democracy Over Indie Orthodoxy.

Jyoti Mishra began his pop career in the late 80s with a shambolic indie band called White Town, playing twee, chuggy songs in the C86 tradition, with lo-fi production and lyrics which alternated between the emotionally self-indulgent and the politically radical. Guitars and confrontational miserabilism have a long and respected tradition in British indie; but Mishra wasn’t a particularly notable practitioner of the increasingly rigid and strictly defined limits of leftwing indie, and his embrace of the electronic dance forms of his youth was the move that enabled him to make the most effective pop of his career, with a thumping beat that sounds as good in the club as in the headphones.

Version 2: The Triumph Of The Personal Over The Political.

For a while in the 1980s, Mishra was a full-fledged Marxist — more specifically, a Trotskyite — and while he later abandoned the rigors of left-wing ideology for a more idiosyncratic blend of feminist, psychoanalytic, political, aesthetic, and economic theories (White Town’s first album included a fourteen-page polemic with academic citations), he never stopped being dissatisfied with the status quo. Casting that dissatisfaction in romantic terms gave “Your Woman” the kind of subterranean shock effect that sneaks political truth onto the dancefloor. I could never be your woman, any more than I could be your colonial, your proletariat, or your patriarchal construct.

Version 3: The Triumph Of Ambiguity Over Identity.

Mishra is an Indian-born heterosexual man singing as a woman (or a gay man) in the whitest form of music there is, indie dance. The permutations of possibile interpreations are, if not quite endless, at least much larger than the average pop song permits. His own intention, he says, was to make a song that could be read in any number of ways, including as a disaffected Marxist, as a straight man singing to a gay woman, as a gay man singing to a straight man, or as a woman singing to … Jyoti Mishra. The lack of key identifiers (neither the narrative voice nor the “you” are ever fully gendered), as well as of more subtle racial signifiers lets each listener choose what it is they hear. Or, like perhaps most listeners, you can choose not to choose, and revel in pure multivalency.

Version 4: The Triumph Of History Over The Tyranny Of The Present.

Googling around, I found that more than a handful of listeners were convinced that the iconic trumpet sample which opens the song and returns as a motif in the chorus was nicked from Star Wars, either from the Mos Eisley cantina scene or as a sped-up version of Darth Vader’s theme. Some people are very, very stupid. The sample actually comes from bandleader Lew Stone’s 1932 cover of Bing Crosby’s “My Woman” (to which “Your Woman” can be heard as a theoretical answer record), with a vocal by Al Bowlly and trumpet by Nat Gonella. And it is the crackly, nagging three-note riff that gives the song its peculiarly haunting quality: without it, “Your Woman” would be just another mopey bedroom-electro song. But with it, all the stored-up energy of ancient, forgotten 78s sitting and waiting in the counting-room of history, long ignored and worse than derided, unknown, bursts through, and time itself is dislocated.

Version 5: The Triumph Of Triumph.

But nagging riffs and thumping beats are not enough. Those are the stuff of one-hit wonders: what makes a song last is the mood it creates. The greatest songs are those which evoke a frame of mind so precisely and comprehensively that nothing else will do. In this sense, “Your Woman” is an “I Will Survive” for the literate and undemonstrative, a reclaiming of the self from a grasping, devouring Other. We will not be played that way. We will never be your woman.

8. Björk “Hyperballad”
(Björk)
Post [Elektra] • 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’m a Yoko Ono fan. Not because I’m an enormous feminist, or because I have any intense interest in banshee caterwauling, or even (all that much) because I enjoy going against the received wisdom of 98% of music nerddom; but because every now and then, in the spaces between the shrieking harpy epics and the unhelpful sloganeering about Woman, she reminds me of Björk.

It’s unfortunate that Björk is only really thought of in two ways in the popular imagination: as The Woman Who Wore A Swan To Some Awards Show Or Other That One Time, or as the one-time indie-dance pixie who’s gone increasingly off the rails into unlistenable screeching, unwatchable films, and art music tedium. Both of those images capture something of the truth (I don’t think I’ve ever really enjoyed a post-millennial Björk album), but there’s more there than the summary judgment of an inattentive populace can really hear.

Or maybe I’m just too far up the ass of the experimental-music party to understand the Man On The Street’s point of view. (Counterpoint: Fuck the man on the street. We’re talking music nerdery here.) I am, after all, someone who listens to and enjoys György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki, Olivier Messiaen, Terry Riley, Morton Feldman, and Rhys Chatham; I am, in other words, part of the elitist, condescending elbow-patched arugula-eating problem. Real people can see through all that bullshit, including Björk and her weird-ass art-song tendencies.

“Yes, I know Björk,” a professor of finance at the University of Iceland says in reply to my question, in a weary tone. “She can’t sing, and I know her mother from childhood, and they were both crazy. That she is so well known outside of Iceland tells me more about the world than it does about Björk.”

Conversely, that statement tells me more about a certain U of I professor of finance than it does about Björk; so let’s stop talking about what people say about her and start talking about her.

Björk’s signal contribution to global pop was to hold it down and forcibly inject it with a viral transfusion of contemporary art music, much as Laurie Anderson had done in the 80s and John Cale had done in the 60s. The strange thing is that in the mid-90s art music was only a couple of feet away from the dancefloor anyway; the most-revered art-music figure in the world at the moment was Aphex Twin, and electronic manipulation had been standard in academic circles for a generation. So you might as well say that Björk introduced pop to art music — her extravagant theatricalism, her ear for sonic pleasure (as distinct from sonic originality), and her inimitable sense of pop dynamics, of build and release, for a brief shining moment made her the most interesting and important pop star/art-music composer in the world.

“Hyperballad” is actually one of her less profoundly explosive pieces; like the title says, it’s a ballad taken to logical extremes, which means that although it does eventually erupt into percussive splendor, it’s glacially paced and requires patience on the part of the listener. For some, that required patience extends to the ornate metaphor of the lyrics, in which dreams of loss serve to reinforce present happiness (a strange topic for a ballad, which are usually concerned with heartbreak neat, no ice). There are Sibelian strings, glitchy electronic beats, and (finally, transfiguratively) pounding dancefloor ecstasy.

In some ways this is the North-Hemisphere twin to Shakira’s “Ojos Así” — both Björk and Shakira are global pop stars who incorporate a lot more thought and compositional variety into their music than they’re generally given credit for, but only one of them has honor in her own country.

7. OutKast “Rosa Parks”
(Andre 3000, Big Boi)
Aquemini [La Face] • 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.

Ah hah, hush that fuss. I know there are people who hear this song as Outkast’s sell-out moment, when they abandoned their loosely-structured P-funk alien gangster hardcore hip-hop and went for the screaming teenybopper audience that haunts the nightmares of every strict constructionist music fan, as the early tremor that presages “B. O. B.,” “Mrs. Jackson,” and (shudder) “Hey Ya.” But as you’re sick of hearing me say by now, whenever pop is defined in opposition to anything, I’m on the side of pop.

In point of fact, “Rosa Parks” is the halfway point between the overstuffed, shaggy, and fitfully intelligible material Dre and Boi made their name on, and the increasingly direct, engaging, and elegant music they’ve made since blowing up. With a killer, even prophetic hook (“We the type of people make the club get crunk”), a BPM that encourages dancing more than getting high, and a busy arrangement that finds room for a nonsense Andre vocal (“lackalackalacka lackalacka”), an all-but-inaudible Curtis Mayfield sample, and a honking harmonica breakdown, it’s the perfect marriage of pop simplicity and the idea orgy that made (and continues to make) Outkast Outkast.

A word on the title. The late Mrs. Parks sued Outkast for misuse of her name in a song which had apparently nothing to do with her; lawyers got greedy, record labels got involved, and it all came more or less to nothing. But it highlights a breach which tends to be invisible to white people (just as white class identifiers can puzzle black folk) — the first black generation gap, usually described in terms of the Civil Rights generation vs. the hip-hop generation.  In a way, it’s a measure of progress that black Americans can finally afford to not maintain solidarity; the very struggle over what it means to be black means that the question is, for the first time ever, open — that is, not imposed from the outside. (Which ain’t sayin’ racism is over, kid; I ain’t that dumb.) Anyway, Dre and Boi used Rosa Parks’ name in order to symbolize a historic turning point: they will now begin leaving all their peers in the dust. Which, yes, that’s what they proceeded to do, but still, man, that’s kind of a reductive thing to do to the woman.

Because it’s not like they can boast of an ignorance of history. The fellas’ increasing obsession with black musical history, reaching past the funk breaks which basically constituted hip-hop, can be seen as starting here, too. Idlewild, the movie and the album, are heavily flawed, but there’s a peculiar energy to it that can be found nowhere else in modern hip-hop, the way country blues, second-line marches, and the holy 40s triptych of swing, boogie-woogie, and jive are overhauled and rebuilt for the twenty-first century. The harmonica solo here is only a glimmer of that time-traveling future, but it performs the same function: field-holler stomps, Little Walter in Chicago, and the spirit of Mr. DeFord Bailey (both the first harmonica-playing recording star and the first performer on the Grand Ole Opry, and he was black) shimmer into being while Organized Noize (right?) lays down the kind of juke stomp that makes you want to fuss and fight and, er, carry on. Bump and shlump, baby, bump and shlump.

6. Blur “For Tomorrow”
(Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James, Dave Rowntree)
Modern Life Is Rubbish [Food] • 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.

Few impulse purchases have had such a lasting impact on me as the moment when I picked up a used copy of The Best Of Blur in the summer of 2000 on the strength of the cartoony cover art and the fact that I recognized them as the ones who did “Song 2,” which I thought of as just about the perfect hard-rock song at the time. (While reading around in preparation for writing this, I came across the following description of what appealed to me about it: “The song is practically over once it’s begun, something that just never happened with lethargic grunge.” It took the jump-up-and-down dynamics of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and removed the boring old angst; it was awesome.)

Let’s set the scene. It’s 2000; I have been slowly getting into music history for about a year, thanks to Napster, end-of-millennium best-of lists, and copious free time. I have found something of a spiritual home in the 1960s British Invasion: the Beatles yes of course, but also the Stones, the Zombies, the Kinks, the Who, the Animals, the Troggs, the Moody Blues, the Creation, the Hollies, the Yardbirds, the Small Faces, etc. etc. This music, and classic rock in the Jimi-Zep-Floyd mold, and also a bit 80s synthpop, is filling a need in me that the stuff I hear on the radio increasingly isn’t. (Because I’m listening to the wrong stations; but that’s another essay.)

I don’t actually remember the experience of listening to The Best Of Blur for the first time. I know where I probably was; I know what I was probably doing; I just listened to it so often that it became part of my mental furniture, ready to pack up and move along with me to the next stage in life at a moment’s notice. Every time I listen to a Blur album, there’s (still) a twinge of “hang on now” when the goosey club track “Girls And Boys” isn’t followed by the Kinksian knees-up “Charmless Man,” or the Eurosophisticate sigh of “To The End” isn’t succeeded by the modernist electro-buzz of “On Your Own.”

But the effect was electric. There were people making music in my own time that compared with the pop rush, guitar buzz, and (let’s be honest) exotic Englishness of the Sixties music I loved! A magical few years would follow, when vista after vista would open up to me, punk and new wave and glam and soul and country-rock and post-punk and shoegaze and somehow Blur would always still be waiting for me there, waving a friendly hand and saying, “see, this is where we nicked it from.” I burned CD after CD, trying to express through the medium of compilation what I felt to be true, the truth to which Blur introduced me: that pop has no one master, that it’s really all just music, that hooks and harmonies and rhythms and wit are all one ever needs. How did Blondie and the Jam and 4 Non Blondes and Radiohead sound next to Blur? Great; how did the Clash and Wilco and Joan Jett and Madness sound? Still great. In fact, just about the only people who didn’t sound great next to Blur were Oasis.

“For Tomorrow” became my default Blur track, for reasons I can’t really remember. (Parklife, predictably, became my favorite Blur album, but Modern Life Is Rubbish was my first.) I’m pretty sure “For Tomorrow” got me into soul music, thanks to the horns. More explicitly, I understood horns as an awesome sound in themselves for the first time on “For Tomorrow,” which enabled me to hear past the lack of (what I recognized as) guitar on classic soul records. It still strikes me as unanalyzable, like the most basic element of pop. I know it isn’t; in fact, I know the record’s got flaws, because I can think of some. But I can’t hear them.

Last thing, and then I’ll shut up. This very nearly wasn’t the Blur song on the list. One of the things I did last December to prepare for compiling this thing was to sit down and listen to all of the 90s songs from The Pitchfork 500. I saw “For Tomorrow,” furrowed my brow and muttered, “which one’s that one again?” and then when I heard it almost physically recoiled. No. No. Too deeply ingrained; too personal; too too. It was like having the poetry you scribbled in the back of your notebook read aloud to the class; poetry you’d forgotten you’d written, and were now ashamed of, not because it was bad poetry (necessarily), but because you were no longer that person.

I was going to be firm. I was going to put “This Is A Low,” or maybe “To The End” on here. But then I listened again, and sigh. La la, la la la, la la la la la la lalala.

15. Shakira “Ojos Así”
(Shakira, Pablo Flores, Javier Garza)
¿Dónde Están Los Ladrones? [Sony International] • 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 knew who she was about six months before she conquered the English-speaking world, thanks to a turn-of-the-millennium crush on a Mexican-born girl who idolized her. (Ancient history. Wish the pulse that jumps every time I see remotely similar shoulders would figure that out.) I was intrigued as much by Gabriel García Márquez’s not-entirely-attributable-to-senile-decay-or-dirty-old-manhood panegyric as by the growling imitation the crush performed at an open mic. Turns out Shakira was at least as good as García Márquez and unrequited love.

Shakira’s particular genius was mixing and matching global pop forms a good decade before M.I.A. came along (there’s something to go into there about the dominance of British pop journalism meaning that ex-British colonies are privileged above corny old Latin America in most music nerds’ interest, but skip it), but on “Ojos Así” she’s not so much combining disparate forms as simply presenting her own heritage, uncut. Shakira is equal parts Colombian  and Lebanese, and the song is as thoroughgoing a mixture of cumbia and Arab pop as a demanding intellect, performative genius, and some of the most highly-skilled producers in the world can make it.

All of which would be of academic interest if it weren’t also one of the greatest dance songs of the past quarter-century, banging with all the furious heat that “Latin passion” and “Eastern voluptuousness” can conjour up in the shared pulp imagination of the West, with Shakira’s sinuous hips finding the shared focal point between salsa and belly dance. (Less difficult to find than you might think; the veins of Spanish culture still run half-Moorish even today.) Those self-same  hips would drive her biggest global hit some eight years later (thx reggaeton), but the Spanish-speaking world was taken by storm here, and modern Latin pop was transfigured into something more global, whipsmart, and futuristic than it had dared to dream of being before. Not that there aren’t still plenty of trad Latin genres doing extremely well among the viejos and campesinos, but try listening to a youth-oriented Latin station today and keep from being blown away by the rhythmic complexity and shameless patchwork variety.

It’s a tad ironic, bee tee dub, that I had to return to the United States and crush on a Mexican (the sworn enemies of the Guatemaltecos) before I really understood and appreciated Latin pop. I could have included a number of songs I knew from my time in Guatemala — Gloria Trevi’s “Pelo Suelto,” El General’s “Muévelo,” Selena’s “Amor Prohibido,” — but none of them have stuck with me and given me the kind of long-term satisfaction that Shakira’s first mega-hit (however unknown it may be to you, O reader of English) has.

For those who don’t know Spanish and stubbornly refuse to enjoy pop they don’t understand, she did record an English-language version when she launched her assault on the Anglophone pop market in 2001. It’s not quite as good. Not because her translation is lacking, but because 2001 was not 1998, and the rest of the world had already begun to catch up to her.

Haters who still sneer and make Alanis Morrissette remarks have lost the thread: that crazy old cadaniense pales in comparison to the quicksilver Colombian goddess whose sandals she is not worthy to loosen. (The reference is made advisedly.) The two of them have similar backgrounds: both had minor, regionally successful teen-pop careers before breaking out with major artistic statements. Difference is, ¿Dónde Están Los Ladrones? was only the overture of one career; Jagged Little Pill will always stand as the pinnacle of another, no matter how many more records Alanis makes.

14. Nas ft. Lauryn Hill “If I Ruled The World (Imagine That)”
(Nas, Jean-Claude Olivier, Samuel Barnes, Kurtis Blow)
It Was Written [Columbia] • 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.

Some people would say the same thing (pinnacle of the career, no matter how many more records made) about Nas and Illmatic.  Those people belong to that special class of music nerds, those who love something so much that they hate everything that isn’t it. (They are to be distinguished from those people who hate everything on principle, a far more coherent if still utterly insane life philosophy.) Illmatic is one of the high-water marks of late twentieth-century music, there can be no doubt.  But it’s not like Nas stopped being brilliant, he just channeled his brilliance in directions that many of those who embraced Illmatic can’t accept.

The nails-hard street poet who centered a life’s worth of small-time hustling in the long shadow of black consciousness and the ineffable power of hip-hop to transform reality — the dude who made Illmatic — would never have duetted with that lame J. Crew hippy Lauryn Hill, let alone allowed early synth-pop sonics to sweeten his dry-as-bone, thundering beats. (Or so it is said.) This is because Hip-Hop and Pop are irreconcilably opposed, as far apart as Truth and Lies, as Integrity and Selling Out, as Art and Trash. Which only goes to show that strict constructionist hip-hop heads are just as intolerant and ignorant as their indie-rock counterparts discussed in #23. Pop is not an ever-fixéd mark: it swallows up new forms and absorbs new ideas as soon as they enter the common discourse, transmuting into something else in the process. Illmatic is great because it’s a pop record: concise, single-voiced, wholly committed, as much of a piece as the great Beatles, ABBA, and Prince records that defined pop in their generations.

The only change Nas made afterwards was to embrace that pop tradition. “If I Ruled The World” quotes both Kurtis Blow and the Delfonics, gives the hook and the bridge to a woman best known for singing  a song exactly like Roberta Flack except not as well, and was, inevitably, his first mainstream hit. Its sentiments are obvious, widely embraceable and positive, the production rolls, spreads, and flourishes like a well-groomed pop song, with easily distinguishable acts and a climax (the only swear words in the song, which is to say the only street urgency) right at the end where it belongs. And he sings: the ultimate betrayal of hip-hop orthodoxy, the reason why both Andre 3000 and Kanye West will never again be fully accepted by their former fans no matter how big they get outside hip-hop’s narrow borders.

Or so my interpretation goes, and I’m clearly biased. The first hip-hop record I ever owned was The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill, that’s how white I am. And Lauryn’s sultry-sweet vocals, still fresh from the surprise Caribe-funk of the Fugees and not yet giving a glimpse of how self-involved and clueless she could be, make the song. Which isn’t to say Nas isn’t still brilliant throughout — his verses double back on themselves, commenting wryly on the paranoia, the idealism, the grandiosity inherent in the song’s conceit. He’s still the best rapper to come out of New York in the 90s; the fact that he’s no longer making Illmatic is no more relevant than the fact that Bob Dylan isn’t making Blood On The Tracks. They’re still the best at being them that anyone’s ever been.

13. Pulp “Common People”
(Nick Banks, Jarvis Cocker, Candida Doyle, Steve Mackey, Russell Senior)
Different Class [Island] • 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.

Sometimes there’s a lot to say, and sometimes there isn’t. This time there isn’t, really.

Sometimes that’s because the song explains itself better than I can do, and people for whom it is new would be better off just listening to the song; sometimes it’s because the song has already been pored over, poked, prodded, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, and numbered so much already that anything I could say would be old news to the masses who already love it. In this case, both are true. Just listen to the song (again).

Okay, I will say that the older I get the less I sympathize with the working-class hero whose voice Jarvis Cocker sings in (which is fine; very few Cocker narrators are wholly sympathetic). Not that I feel sorry for the rich bitch he’s lambasting, either: these two deserve each other, the one oblivious and condescending, the other sneering and venemous, locked in each other’s uncomprehending embrace for as long as it takes for her to call her dad and stop it all — when he will be proven right, and she will not have to put up with him any more. They’re both losers; and so they both win.

But this may be an impassable cultural divide. American and British people mean very different things by middle class and working class (in the U.S., they’re frequently used synonymously), and the supercilious overtones of “common people” simply don’t register here: we think instead of ordinary people, few of whom feel trapped or as though dancing, drinking and screwing is all that’s left to them. Don’t misunderstand me: lots of Americans are trapped, and do dance, drink and screw because there’s nothing else to do; we just don’t see it that way. Our luck’s always about to turn: every American is always spending his first million in his head, no matter what his bank balance is. This is the Land of Opportunity, where the streets are paved with cheese, and there’s always room at the top.

Well, that’s the theory, anyway. Perhaps my real problem with the song is that the anger is directed at the idiot child of privilege rather than at the Greek capitalist whose foot on the neck of the working poor has given her such a limited understanding of life. Inasmuch as I have a problem with the song: the point of it isn’t Cocker’s talent for flamboyant venom, it’s the circus-synth pulse of the band, creating a rinkydink epic out of the forsaken tools of a discarded pop era. If Britpop was the first “guitars are back” sigh of relief for rockists, Pulp’s apotheosis was the moment when even guitars failed to hold back the masses. That, in the end, is the real difference between the British and American working class. In Britain, they dance.

12. The Cardigans “Lovefool”
(Peter Svensson, Nina Persson)
First Band On The Moon [Stockholm] • 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.

The one thing I always hear people say about the Cardigans is how like their fellow Swedish geniuses ABBA, they reflect the beautiful and glamorous world of pop back to us in fractured, ungiddy, stealth-adult songs about loss, heartbreak, and unhealthy relationships. What I never hear is how they follow directly on the heels of fellow Swedish pop stars Ace of Base and Yaki-Da. There’s a direct musical lineage from “The Sign” to “I Saw You Dancing” to “Lovefool,” although it might only be apparent to those who ever heard Yaki-Da, the missing link between those lame-o’s Ace of Base and those sensitive intellectuals the Cardigans. Thanks to Guatemalan radio, I heard nearly as much Europop as American pop in the first half of the 90s, so when I first heard “Lovefool” it was hard to listen past the sun-drenched half-step flamenco rhythm (it’s there,  beyond the four-on-the-floor techno stomp) and into the breezily-delivered lyrics about co-dependency, irrational obsession, and self-deceit.

But then a few years ago, I heard it once unexpectedly on my car radio at the end of a long day (as one does), and Nina Persson’s sweetly angelic vocals, the bubbly stomp of the music, and the impressive craft on display in the changes from verse to chorus to bridge and back again took me aback, and I muttered to myself, “Wait, this is good.” Pathetically, I had to look up who sang it; when I did, I recognized the Cardigans as being one of the Good Pop Bands that even rock dudes grudgingly endorse (before that, I’d always gotten them confused with the Corrs), and another canonical entry was lodged in my mental Hall of Fame. (Srsly guys, I’ve been planning this list for a while now.) I still can never quite get Yaki-Da out of the back of my head when I hear it; but I’m no longer embarrassed by that.

Like much of rock-music nerddom, I was deeply excited by the Scandinavian invasion in the early oughts — the Hives! the Concretes! the Sounds! the Shout Out Louds! Mando Diao! Kings of Convenience! Sondre Lerche! Annie! Serena Maneesh! the Raveonettes! Mew! the Soundtrack of Our Lives! the Knife! the Hellacopters! Sahara Hotnights! Erlend Øye! — and even if today I’d whittle that list down to the the Concretes! the Raveonettes! Annie! the Knife!, I still have a lot of affection for the era, and a lot more for the idea of Sweden and the surrounding territories as some kind of experimental breeding ground for awesome pop (I even like Roxette . . . okay, I like “The Look”). The Cardigans are one of the great pro arguments for that (admittedly silly) idea: the fact that they beat the rush by a whole half-decade only makes them even more special.

“Lovefool” is their best-known song; I’m not sure that makes it their best song. But it’s their song I know best; so it’s here.

11. Weezer “Buddy Holly”
(Rivers Cuomo)
Weezer [DGC] • 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 opposed to this. I know all of Weezer well, like any good rock dork, and “Buddy Holly” is absolutely their best song, and I will fight anyone who says anything from Pinkerton is better.

. . . .

Overexposed, schmoverexposed. That’s always the lazy go-to from people who don’t have the aesthetic stamina to keep on liking something after they’ve gotten used to it. Fuck ’em. Which isn’t to say that the opposite problem doesn’t exist — people who can’t like anything they haven’t heard before (we all know those people) — but those people aren’t part of the discussion. We’re all music nerds here.

If it’s not good after you’ve heard it for the thousandth time, it wasn’t good to begin with.

. . . .

Well, it really all depends on what we want in our pop music, doesn’t it?

And for the record, yes, Weezer is a pop band, as if everything Rivers Cuomo has done since 2000 somehow didn’t count. If you insist on making the distinction between a rock band and a pop band (a distinction I don’t really recognize), then you have to face the fact that Weezer is a pretty shitty rock band but a really great pop band.

But I digress. If we want serious, literate treatment of the complexities of human interaction, then yeah, “Buddy Holly” isn’t going to cut it. But if we want something to jump up and down to while playing air guitar and singing along with the ooh-wee-oohs, then it’s hard to think of a better candidate.

. . . .

Well, the latter experience is more obviously pop, innit? Of course I’m not saying that serious, literate treatment of the complexities of human interaction is outside the bounds of great pop; I just listed the Cardigans. I’m saying that serious, literate treatment of the complexities of human interaction is outside the abilities of Rivers Cuomo, while bashing around like a nerdy, amped-up kid who’s listened to too much Cheap Trick and The Cars is right in his wheelhouse. “Buddy Holly” was and remains the perfect antidote to rock that takes itself too seriously.

And dude, watch the Dick Van Dyke Show sometime: Mary Tyler Moore is hot.

20. Supergrass “Alright”
(Gaz Coombes, Danny Goffey, Mick Quinn)
I Should Coco [Parlophone] • 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.

Supergrass might be the best of the second wave of Britpop, emerging a couple of years after Blur, Suede, and Oasis (in that order) defined the “return of guitars” genre, and with it the next decade and a half of British music-journalism hype. Most of their second-wave peers — Menswear, anyone? — sound labored and derivative, but where Supergrass is derivative, they’re also so enthusiastic as to knock words like “retread,” “unoriginal,” and “pale shadow of” right out of the critical response. Their classic rock/glam/pop-punk hybrid should be the last word in tired hagiography, but somehow no one ever thought to combine the Buzzcocks and T. Rex quite like this before.

Or something AMG-ish like that. My own experience is a bit narrower. I came to Supergrass in a period of my life when I was listening to nothing but new releases, with the release of the perfectly-okay 2002 record Life On Other Planets. The single “Grace” became part of my everyday life, and when I dug into their catalogue, the only thing that sounded comparable was “Alright.” All this to say: I know that their first single “Caught By The Fuzz” is traditionally considered their greatest song (or so readership polls in British music magazines would indicate), but I only hear lazy bombast in it, not the bouncy 70s pop that made me love them in the first place.

Rob Coombes’ keyboards are the first thing you hear, and they’re the sound that makes this record, rolling and bounding like a primitivist Art Neville, while the rhythm section slips and slides to keep up. The lyrics are a 90s lad-culture update on the Monkees’ equally toothless “We’re the new generation/And we’ve got something to say,” the guitar solo is straight out of the late-60s George Harrison playbook. But it’s those pounding, glammy keyboards (cf. Suzi Quatro, Aladdin Sane, and “The Low Spark Of High-Heeled Boys”) that give the song its floppy-eared puppyish energy, and, in their unrelenting drive, make it sound less like a relentlessly chipper yoof anthem and more like a manic, unhinged threat.

Supergrass know their pop history: “Keep our teeth nice and clean” is (probably) a Blossom Toes reference, and in addition to the Monkees/Beatles/glam references above, the recurrent “Are we like you?” bridge is as 60s pop-psych standard, smearing into gently unsettled minor keys. That they pull themselves out of the dead end of retro homage is as much a tribute to their sharp ear for modern patterns of repetition and modulation as to the unfocused, decentered nature of 90s (and later) pop: everything, past and present, is grist for the mill.

19. Shanice “I Love Your Smile”
(Narada Michael Walden)
Inner Child [Motown] • 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.

One of the effects of having the kind of pop education I did (that is, none at all for the first twelve years of my life) is that I heard most of the songs that everyone else my age associates with childhood, fun, early romantic relationships, etc., at an age when they were nothing more than historical curiosities. Another effect is that when I did start listening to pop around age thirteen, I responded it to it like a much younger child at around the time when everyone else my age was beginning to form a critical sense and hate the stuff that didn’t meet their evolving needs.

All of which is to say, I’ve never heard of anyone else loving this song, or even thinking about it after about 1993. But one of my earliest pop memories is furtively scanning the radio for songs that made me think about sex (I was thirteen, and this was a golden age of sleaze-pop, with “I Want Your Sex,” “Me So Horny,” “I Wanna Sex You Up,” “Let’s Talk About Sex,” “People Are Still Having Sex,” “Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg,” “Baby Got Back,” and “Erotica” all in the recent past or near future) and being slapped across the face by the virginal cheerfulness of this song’s flute hook, a sound I still can’t hear without being transported across the decades to the first room I ever had to myself, on the second floor of our house in San Cristobal, lying on the bed staring at my radio, and realizing for the first time that pop could be guilt-free. Because of my sheltered upbringing, I was operating on the unconscious assumption that all non-Christian music was more or less pornography, and the fact that somebody could be so carefree and almost giddily joyful on the radio was analogous to the discovery that I didn’t have to be afraid of hell.

Which isn’t to say that sex isn’t an important part of pop, but it’s hardly the only important part, and the strain of puppy love which Shanice evoked so well (joining a long line of her labelmates dating back to “Baby Love” and “My Girl” in 1964) is as important as the “really love your peaches let me shake your tree” strain in pop.

Shanice Wilson is a pop journeywoman who has been a child actor, backup singer, r&b wunderkind, Broadway performer, and voice actress; this was her truest shot at immortality, a light, breezy confection which is just underproduced enough that the actual strength of her voice, a far more adult and versatile instrument than the teenybop new jack swing of the song required, nearly overwhelms it. (She’s one of the few people to nail a perfectly faithful cover of Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You.”) But that irrepressible hook, with the doo-doos layered over the flute, as well as her superb evocation of giddy mallrat girlhood — those giggles, the plinking vibe notes, that totally delighted “psych!” — is one of the key sounds of 90s pop, without which I cannot do.

Wikipedia says the radio and video versions of the song don’t include the rapped interlude on the album version, but I’m almost certain I remember hearing it back when, so that’s what I’m streaming. Besides, it’s important structurally to the production, as the Nickelodeon version of darkness enters in the “fessin’/state of depression” lines, all sound effect rumbles and minor keys, and then cartoon sunshine bursts through, and Branford Marsalis plays a sax solo. The “you” of the title whose smile Shanice loves is so barely present — the song is all about her, lyrics as well as production — that she might as well be singing to the mirror, practicing for her first serious crush. Which is how the song works: as a pop gift to thirteen-year-olds ambivalent about growing up everwhere.

18. Denim “Summer Smash”
(Lawrence Hayward)
unreleased single [EMI] • 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.

I came to the Belle & Sebastian party late, with the Life Pursuit album, and as per my usual m.o., in trying to figure out why I loved them so much, I read a lot of stuff about them online. One of the things I read was that Stuart Murdoch is more or less obsessed with Felt, a minor British indie band from the 80s, whose leader, Lawrence Hayward, married Television’s sparkling, angular guitars to a miserabilist sensibility which would become a hallmark of British rock. (I included a Felt song on my 80s list; I’m not sure I would today.) Felt came to an end with the close of the 80s, and Hayward’s next project was Denim, whose first album in 1992 included a song called “I’m Against The Eighties,” and whose biggest single, “Middle Of The Road,”  took (tongue-in-cheek?) potshots at every Rolling Stone-approved rockist icon from Muddy Waters to Bob Dylan over a Bo Diddley/T. Rex beat. Denim was 70s junk-pop revivalism, with an enigmatic sense of humor and an intentionally prickly demeanor.

In some ways, Hayward anticipated the backwards-looking, dad-rock elements of Britpop to come; in others, he was in complete opposition to anything that smacked of widespread populism, a cult act to the bitter end. Or so it seems: it can be difficult to distinguish cause from effect here, as every instance of non-success seemed to drive him further into his self-created world of glitter guitars, primitive electronics, and boogie rhythms. The final straw was “Summer Smash.”

It was to be released September 1st, 1997, as the first single off Denim’s third album. With tinkertoy electronic percolation and a pumping 4/4 beat, it (ironically? wistfully? self-absorbedly?) proclaimed the chart-conquering success of the song itself, and stands as Hayward’s finest pop moment, all giddy burbles and stiff vocalizing, a Bay City Rollers version of glamstomp, wooshing sound effects, and a plaintive lyric finally drawing Hayward’s own line in the sand: he’s an indie poptimist who cares as deeply about the state of the charts as about the delicate shadings of his band’s own sound. The final effect is of a 90s version of T. Rex’s final single, “Celebrate Summer,” similarly glorious and which went similarly nowhere.

“Celebrate Summer” went nowhere, however, because Marc Bolan died in a car crash a month after it came out. “Summer Smash” went nowhere because Diana, Princess of Wales, died, a bit more famously, the day before its scheduled release. The record label, paranoid about the perceived propriety of a song which used the word smash so many times (as if it would have done anything anyway), pulled it, and the forthcoming album was also shelved. A few stray pre-release copies escaped the embargo, and it’s one of the rarest singles in Britpop history. (And thanks to file-sharing, anyone can hear it regardless.  All hail the internet.)

Hayward unceremoniously abandoned the Denim project; he now records and tours under a Springsteen/Manfred Mann reference, Go-Kart Mozart, which I haven’t got round to hearing. But this unreleased single is one of my favorite pieces of flotsam from the wreck of the 90s, which crashed just as silently and just as irretrievably on the shoals of January 1, 2000, leaving all its treasure to scavengers of history like me.

17. Uncle Tupelo “Wait Up”
(Jeff Tweedy, Jay Farrar)
March 16-20, 1992 [Rockville] • 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.

Something something alt-country.

Frankly, I’m not the person to be talking about this. My alt-country knowledge is an inch deep and only a couple more inches wide. I know more on a visceral level about mainstream country in the 90s (I sat and seethed like the rockist dork I was while a Mormon co-worker blasted Brooks & Dunn, Faith Hill, and Tim McGraw on repeat throughout the summer of my first job), although clearly I haven’t come around on it enough to include any in this list. (“This Kiss” and “We Danced Anyway” almost made the cut, though. A couple of weeks later and at least one of them would have.)

I don’t even have that firm a grasp on Uncle Tupelo’s career; I’ve read more about them than I’ve listened to them. Part of that is an irrational antipathy to Jay Farrar’s too-manly voice (I said irrational), part of it is simply that everyone’s got their weak spots, and never more so than in the running-to-stand-still, perpetually catching-up field of modern music nerddom, where the sheer availability of everything makes it impossible to ever feel like you have a complete handle on it. Still.

This pretty, possibly inconsequential flutter of a song is my favorite Jeff Tweedy moment pre-Wilco. The sudden tempoless violin-and-feedback smears between the jaunty banjo-plucked verses even anticipate the sonic experimentalism of my favorite Wilco material (yes, I came on board as predictably as possible, with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot just like the rest of post-9/11 America). It’s lovelorn, enigmatically concise, and despite the instrumentation, it sounds nothing like the old-time country music (bluegrass, honky tonk, western swing) that alt-country was supposed to be a refreshing return to, as opposed to the glossy, arena-ready music on country radio. It’s an indie rock ballad dressed up in Grandpa’s old farmhand clothes, escaping the sneering charge of inauthenticity only by a hair’s-breadth by the strength of the composition. (And not for everyone: for some, particularly it seems in Britain, banjos and fiddles after ca. 1960 are a priori inauthentic. I’ll just say that’s a pity and leave it there.)

There is a case to be made against including a song like this in a list of pop songs, but I’m not the person to make the case, both because my vision of pop is way too expansive to exclude anything much, and because I don’t hear it as working in any meaningfully different way from “I Love Your Smile” or “Summer Smash.” It’s a ballad, is the only real difference; everything else, even artistic integrity, is window dressing.

16. Sugar “Helpless”
(Bob Mould)
Copper Blue [Rykodisc] • 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.

Sugar is aptly named from a pop perspective. I toyed with placing “If I Can’t Change Your Mind” here, but it’s a little too candyfloss; I have enough of that winsome jangle-pop elsewhere on the list, and without Bob Mould’s signature sheets of noise, there’s little to separate it from the, um, Rembrandts.

One of the unpredictable side effects of listening and re-listening to music in order to batter this list into shape was that it could become unclear whether I was familiar with the music beforehand. While listening to “Helpless” for the first time, I could have sworn I had never heard it before. But every time I’ve listened to it since, I’ve become more and more certain that I did hear it back in the 90s, and had just forgotten. Perhaps that’s a testament to Mould’s way with a hook — not only is it memorable, but it actually colonizes the listener’s memory — or perhaps I’m going faintly mad after so much immersion in new-to-me-but-still-dreadfully-familiar material. But it was apparently at least a minor hit (come on Wikipedia! give me more information than you currently do!), so I could have heard it without knowing.

But the song’s popularity and my early exposure to it are equally irrelevant: the question is, what do I think of it now?

Actually, that’s irrelevant too, smashed into a million pieces by the opening drum drill and crushed into fine powder by the raging guitar wash that follows. It hardly matters what follows: this song opens so massively that it swamps the listener’s ratiocinative faculties and takes over the lizard-brain. Which is good, since the lyrics are standard-issue alterna-rock vagueness, a series of phrases connected only in Bob Mould’s head if at all, and the melody simply circles around itself a few times before descending into a similarly circular bridge, then repeats that move. It’s not all that different from what Mould was doing with Hüsker Dü in the previous decade, only with gleaming pop production and less of a sense of guarded Zen mystery.

This installment has been heavy on obvious, everyone-would-call-them Pop Songs; as we get towards the end, these will become slightly rarer. Partly this is leftover rockism on my part; in order to be true to myself, I have to give space to my immature tastes. And partly it’s because I do gravitate towards the difficult, or perhaps the faux-difficult (another rockist impulse) — more critically acclaimed art-rock and -pop will fill in the gaps. Still, there’ll be plenty of room for people to despise my taste. So no worries.

25. Saint Etienne “Like A Motorway”
(Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs, Traditional)
single [Heavenly] • 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.

Towards the end of the 90s, I became gradually aware that electroacoustic music with non-dancefloor tempos and pretty vocals had become one of the established signifiers of good taste common to all, and therefore meaningless to (almost) all. Like achromatic colors, densely-patterned fabrics, and darkly-shaded electronics, it filled upscale commercials and shops, a symbol of leisure and education tied to no culture in particular and satisfying only the surface of emotional desire. And because of this very ubiquity, it meant less and less with every appearance as a signifier of cool. Cool, after all, trades in exclusivity: and while electrofolk was (theoretically) a cerebral alternative to the lowbrow rock and hip-hop of the masses, the ease with which it was made, and imitated, and used as wallpaper made it as ubiquitous as any party jam, except its very rootlessness kept it from meaning as much to anyone as even Petey Pablo meant to North Carolinans.

That’s one interpretation, anyway: in a world of six point six million, no two of which have the exact same experience, definitive readings are impossible. I lived through the millennial years watching television and standing around in shops; and when I first listened to Saint Etienne, I felt a familiar revulsion against tastefulness without taste, generic instrumentation and melody that takes no stand and induces no passion for or against.

But Sarah Cracknell’s voice caught me in mid-shudder, and I listened closer, and heard the witty meta-pop commentary. Pastoral melodies with club instrumentation; the two Summers of Love (’67 and ’88) melded into a single unified vision of pop; and lyrics which struck a smart balance between elegaic and ecstatic, like ABBA if Benny and Bjorn had taken postgraduate degrees — Saint Etienne make music that exists for more than the sake of the sound: they make these sounds because they love them, and their music is driven by a particular taste, rather than a generic “good” taste.

This song is a remake of the pastoral folk song “Silver Dagger” (check Joan Baez’s definitive reading) with new lyrics that draws together strands from Appalachian doomsaying, Sixties teen death ballads, and a near-Chekhovian glimpse of the awful banality of human misunderstanding. Or you could ignore the lyrics, as if it were wallpaper music, and let the insistent sequencer, punctuated by dance breaks and the mournful sigh “he’s gone,” take you on a Kraftwerkian journey across a desolate landscape, dull, grey and long.

24. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony “Tha Crossroads”
(Krayzie Bone, Layzie Bone, Bizzy Bone, Wish Bone)
E 1999 Eternal [Ruthless] • 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.

Black dudes singing harmony. This goes back to the Spinners and the Stylistics — no, wait, the Four Tops and the Temptations — no, wait, the Coasters and the Penguins — no, wait, the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers — no, wait, the Unique Quartette, the first black group on record — in 18 motherfucking 90 — and the Dinwiddie Quartette, the most popular black recording group of the pre-jazz era. A stone century of brothas getting together and vocalizing, and what have we got to show for it? Lament. Lament, and stereotype elevated to iconography by force of charisma.

The Unique Quartette recorded “Mamma’s Black Baby Boy” in 1893, an a capella song about a kid who gets into trouble — including getting liquored up — and causes his mother grief. The Dinwiddie Quartette recorded the spiritual “Poor Mourner” in 1903, a jaunty, rapidfire performance which grieves both for the dead and for those who, left behind, must also grieve for the dead. I’ll leave it to you to work out the relevance.

Bone Thugs presided over the most singular blend of sweet, radio-friendly r&b and street-life hip-hop to emerge in the 90s. Taking the dense, layered harmonies of vocal groups past and present (Boyz II Men; I’m just sayin’), but then overlapping them in quicksilver, complex rhythmic patterns, mimicking the effect of hip-hop’s fractured, compulsive beats. Which makes it sound like harder work than it is: this song was a (deservedly) massive hit, a eulogy for every possible loss (to violence, to prison, to AIDS), and it was because of the simplicity of the overriding idea that the layer upon layer of melody, chant, sing-song, rap was able to wind its way so persuasively, so deeply, to the million aching hearts who turned it into a standard.

Excellent use of an Isley Brothers sample, too.

23. Neutral Milk Hotel “Holland, 1945”
(Jeff Mangum, Scott Spillane)
In The Aeroplane Over The Sea [Merge] • 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 think this is where I talk about indie rock.

There are several things that could be meant by that phrase, and I’ll freely admit to using it inconsistently in the past and (probably) in the future. But one of the better interpretations of pop history I’ve seen is that indie rock is what happened once alternative rock stopped being alternative. (This applies pretty exclusively to American rock, by the way: British indie is something different with a more coherent tradition, and is only occasionally on speaking terms with American indie.) Just as a defining aesthetic of punk was to leach the blues out of hard rock, indie leached the metal out of alt-rock, retaining distortion (sometimes) but abandoning the macho aggression it symbolized.

The online magazine Pitchfork, which started up in 1996, would become a flagship for indie’s post-alernative aesthetic. Along with the rest of its post-GenX cohort, Pitchfork rewrote the 90s alt-rock narrative, finding a center in Pavement rather than Nirvana, and implicitly defining post-grunge as the mainstream to which indie was opposed. At the same time, indie rock became more insular and less interested in engaging the larger culture, surrendering the pop fight for hearts and minds to hip-hop and nu-metal, entrenching itself behind “singular” sounds which were mostly variations on detuned guitars and flat drums, and limiting the conversation to those who were listening.

The Elephant 6 collective , born around the same time as Pitchfork, embraced these limitations to such a perverse degree that they turned inside out and became strengths. The Apples in Stereo’s bright noise-pop, the Olivia Tremor Control’s psychedelic marching-band, and Neutral Milk Hotel’s folk-shaman art-punk only rarely reached anyone outside the obsessive indie-rock subculture, but the demented glee with which they approached their individual visions, as if they had never even heard that any other kind of music existed and they were producing their own versions of chartpop, was enough to create an alternate reality in which it was the only music that mattered.

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is probably the greatest indie-rock record of indie rock’s heyday (roughly 1993-2005, or Pavement to Arcade Fire), at least when defined in the constrictive way I’ve done above. (And again, I make no promises to abide by such a definition in the future.) And “Holland, 1945” is the closest thing the record has to an obvious single: sharp, concise, urgent, packing all the album’s themes — death, reincarnation, bodily dysmorphism, Anne Frank — into a blistering, fuzzed-out rave where dry, ascetic folk-punk is relieved by the ecstasy of mariachi, and Jeff Mangum’s limited yowl has its own peculiar logic.

This is supposed to be a list of pop songs, and I know some people don’t like my conflating indie rock with pop — both those who think indie is supposed to burn with a pure flame unsoiled by commercial considerations, and those who don’t like its noise and amateurishness intruding on their pristine pop world — but indie rock is a pop genre like any other, and being able to measure indie songs by pop yardsticks does much to inform both. At least for me.

22. Disco Inferno “Footprints In Snow”
(Ian Crause, Paul Wilmott, Rob Whatley)
D.I. Go Pop [Bar/None] • 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.

But after that elaborate defense/explanation, I have no real desire to try to situate Disco Inferno in any genre, movement, or scene. Partly this is because I don’t know much about them or the avant-rock scene they came out of — D.I. Go Pop was on allmusic’s front page for some reason about five years ago, I clicked through, read up on it, and (after failing to find it in any local shops) ordered it from Amazon, and it’s been part of the fabric of my listening ever since — and partly it’s because in order to do so I would have to draw a distinction between pop and art that this song ignores — or at least that my understanding of the song ignores, which comes to the same thing, as songs only ever have any existence in a particular set of ears.

That pop/art distinction is an old and not very useful one (it’s behind the indie-rock snob’s traditional loathing/ignorance of chart music). Traditionally, vitality, charm and immediacy are the province of pop, while complexity, ambition and nuance belong to art. But of course pop without nuance is impossible to enjoy more than once, and art without vitality is pointless. The real distinction is between music that appeals to a wide variety of people, and music that appeals to a self-selected minority. Which is of course the least objective standard possible: everyone is a minority depending on how we define the majority; and given enough time and cultural change, all music becomes minority music.

Still, Disco Inferno is harder to read as pop than most musics, even though they used standard rock instrumentation: guitar, bass, drums. But the guitar, rather than playing notes or chords, was set up to play samples of found sound, musical excerpts, or original pieces, while the bass and buried vocals took care of the melodic hooks and the drums kept everything upright. Most of this album — their finest — takes several listens to get your head around: the repetitive fragments (or “hooks”) are so layered that it can be hard to distinguish them. But this, the final track on the album, is the most accessible.

D.I. would go on to create spare, shimmering pop without the found-sound aesthetic as a prickly hedge against the unwary listener, but for my money, “Footprints In Snow” is their peak, incorporating washes of sound and using the titular footprints as a rhythmic element without ever getting too fractured for mass consumption. I think of the song as a post-rock extension of Yoko Ono’s beautiful and mostly unheard (I first knew of it because of the Galaxie 500 cover) 1970 pop song “Listen, The Snow Is Falling,” which opens with the sound of footprints in snow and winter wind before fading into stately organs and John Lennon’s orchestration. Yoko’s naïve lyrics about global harmony are replaced by Ian Crause mumbling low in the mix about something that sounds quite urgent if only you could understand him, while the storm whips up around the listener and chiming, Glassian music wafts in underwater billows. It’s the kind of music that requires no knowledge of genre, movement, scene, or even band beyond what comes through the headphones. The more I listen to, the more that becomes my favorite kind of music.

21. Chagall Guevara “Treasure Of The Broken Land”
(Mark Heard)
Strong Hand Of Love: A Tribute To Mark Heard [Fingerprint] • 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.

In the summer of 1990, my family moved from Arizona to Guatemala to begin working as missionaries. In the house where we stayed briefly before going on to language school and the houses where I would more or less grow up, I remember reading a brief article in CCM Magazine (that would be Contemporary Christian Music) about a new band. I knew vaguely who Steve Taylor, the lead singer and songwriter for the band, was — he had been making waves and unsettling the faithful for nearly a decade with his acerbic, new wave-informed Christian pop. Most recently, he had seen controversy over the ironically cheerful “I Blew Up The Clinic Real Good,” a satirical portrait of an anti-abortion activist who has lost his moral focus. Satire has never been evangelical Christianity’s strong suit, and Taylor was forced from his label by a combination of those who thought he was advocating the blowing-up of abortion clinics and those who believed he was making light of the evils of abortion.

But he was back, CCM crowed, with a new band — and they had signed to MCA Records (an honest-to-gosh real label!) — which, as Taylor explained, sought to mary the religious aestheticism of the modernist painter Marc Chagall and the revolutionary fervor of Che Guevara. Their first album would be out soon. I wanted to hear it so bad, you guys. You have no idea.

This obsession I have with collecting, selecting, and organizing pop is not exactly new. As a child, I kept a list (mostly in my head, but sometimes written down) of the best songs on every Christian tape my parents, my older cousin, and later I myself owned, planning an elaborate playlist which would someday, I thought, be dubbed on to the best tape ever, the ultimate tape, the one I would never grow tired of listening to. Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, Carman, Glad, Scott Wesley Brown, Phil Keaggy, First Call, Rich Mullins, the Imperials, Twila Paris, Keith Green, 2nd Chapter of Acts, Wayne Watson, the then-unheard-but-magnificently-rocking Petra…. These were the pop acts of my 80s childhood (Madonna, Michael Jackson, and U2 were mere shadows in the newspaper by comparison), and more were being added constantly as my appetite grew for wider and more varied sounds to add to my tapestry: Marty Goetz, a Jewish convert who sometimes sang in Hebrew, Teri DeSario, whose Trevor Hornish electronic soundscaping freaked me the hell out, some kid’s-music tape with a supposedly “urban” finale called “God Don’t Make No Junk.” I was always eager to expand my Christian-music horizons.

That didn’t mean, though, that just I could hear anything I wanted to. Missionaries are (this may come as a surprise to you) not particularly rich. I had no money to spend, and nowhere to spend it if I did. So I, surreptitiously and with great fear and trembling, for the first time in my life switched the little cassette deck I owned to FM. Some of the effects of that have already been chronicled; more will continue to be.

Chagall Guevara came and went: their first album met with unpromising sales, MCA didn’t particularly support them, and everyone in the industry was caught flat-footed by the sudden boom of alt-rock. Their literate Georgia Satellites-meets-Midnight Oil sound was immediately passé. Since they weren’t on a Christian label, they never even showed up on the Christian-music catalogue that missionary families received in the mail, a sort of Columbia House mailer for virginal minds, from which my family would occasionally order a tape or two. (I got trad-Irish combo the Crossing and old-time black gospel quartet the Fairfield Four out of the deal. I had weird tastes back then too.) But . . . .

The catalogue did eventually list an album towards the back, in the various-artists section. Strong Hand of Love: A Tribute To Mark Heard. I had never heard of Mark Heard. But I had heard of Kevin Smith, who had the first cover on the album. And Phil Keaggy, and Rich Mullins and Tonio K. And . . . and . . . the last track on the album was by a band whose name I had never forgotten. I had scrawled it in the margins of notebooks during class, read up on Marc Chagall and Che Guevara in the school library, and wondered and waited while soaking up a completely new and different kind of music from the radio. Then I saw an ad for the album in the back of Breakaway, a truly terrible Christian teen-boy’s lifestyle magazine. I knew what it looked like. Then a classmate told me about a new store in Guatemala City: a Christian-music store. A cool Christian-music store, what was more: they had obscure, quasi-dangerous stuff from the likes of One Bad Pig and Bride and Code of Ethics. I knew I had to go there. I had to.

My sixteenth birthday, 1994. I had forty quetzales (ca. twenty dollars) saved. I convinced my parents to drive me up to northern Guatemala City. It was there. The album was there, and I didn’t even have to hunt for it: it was on a display right when I walked in. I paid for it with trembling hands, turning it over and over, not even daring to try to remove the plastic wrap for fear I damaged it. Because it was the first CD I ever owned. And we didn’t even have a CD player.

We borrowed a Discman from somebody. My dad hooked it up to the stereo system. And I pressed Play.

I still listen to that album with some frequency. There isn’t the slightest possible chance of my being objective, but it’s a fucking great album. Even the weak link, Bruce Carroll’s anemic country cover of “Castaway,” a not-that-great song to begin with, is okay. It’s all popular music by alternative-type Christians in the mid-90s: there’s some hard rock, some folk, some country, some atmospheric U2-type stuff. And then the last song, a song about death and loss and triumph anyway.

I had been living in lush, tropical Guatemala for four years by then, but the deserts of northern Arizona, where the bones of the earth push through the topsoil, red and sandy with scraps of scrub brush still clinging to their sides, was where I was born and where I will always, no matter where I live, belong. The opening notes of “Treasure Of The Broken Land,” drawling and gritty, will always evoke that desert for me, and the clear and sweeping sky above. Mark Heard lived there too — and died there in a plane crash, leaving widows and orphans that the tribute albums went towards feeding — and while I would later come to know and love his own pastel-colored music and his depressive, fighting-towards-grace personality, it was in the hands of Chagall Guevara that I glimpsed glory under a banner I recognized as home.

It would be their last song. Years later, thanks to eBay and file-sharing, I would track down everything they had ever released — a puny seventeen songs, and one of them was a between-tracks skit — and while I wouldn’t call them one of my favorite bands, they’re one of my favorite secrets, with a good half-dozen songs that could hold their heads up in any company. And this song is a rock & roll song, a desert-air Faces (who I would call my favorite band, if absolutely forced to choose) who sound like they know it’s their last shot and want to give Mark and themselves the extended rave-up they’ve always known they were capable of. “All the way to Macon,” they shout during the outro (Mark Heard was born in Macon GA), and I can’t help thinking of second-line funeral bands in New Orleans. The saints are marching in, all of them, and if heaven fulfills the deepest desires of our hearts there will be a lot of kickass bands reuniting there.

This list is inevitably unrepresentative of my actual listening experience in the 90s: there’d be a lot more Christian music if it were a more faithful record. But there wouldn’t be anything as great as this.

30. Social Distortion “Ball And Chain”
(Mike Ness)
Social Distortion [Epic] • 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.

The one Orange County punk band that everyone can get behind (or just about everyone; there are always people willing to show off the breadth and depth of their grumpy disdain), Social D started out as a Misfits-lite group in the early 80s before bandleader Mike Ness’ escalating drug use and violent outbursts landed him in jail. Which is where the story really begins, at least as far as people who don’t particularly care about California hardcore go. (Yes, that would be me.)

This was the band’s second album after Ness got out of jail and rehab, and the first one on which his new Johnny Cash/Stones ca. Jimmy Miller persona really clicked. Turning tales of wasted lives, dead ends and self-abuse into country songs, rather than sticking to the hardcore formula, turned out to be a stroke of real intelligence, if not genius (the Mekons had figured it out a half-decade earlier, as had the guy two entries down from here, with his first bands). But keeping the buzzsaw attack of punk, just slowing it down so the exhaustion and regret could really seep in, was Social D’s lasting gift to rock & rollers trying to age gracefully.

The entire album is superb. The high-school-fuckup-returns-to-town “Story Of My Life” is the one I’ve most often heard on the local “alternative” radio station, and the cover of “Ring Of Fire” was my entry point into the original, what with my not being able to appreciate mariachi horns and senses of humor around 2000 (what an insufferable little twit I was), but it’s this drinker’s anthem, which Ness purposely wrote to try to achieve the country-folk immortality of a Cash, a Hank Williams, or a Willie Nelson, which is the true standout and the punk song every barfly with a broken-down hog parked in the dust outside should know by heart. Ness even manages to pull off a double reference to Ted Daffan’s country-folk gem “Born To Lose” and Johnny Thunders’ gutter-punk classic “Born Too Loose” in the same line, which also happens to be the most awkwardly-scanned line in the song — nothing like keeping it ineptly real, huh, O.C.?

There is a sense, I think, in which Social Distortion’s whole thing has been kind of shunted aside by flavor-chasing hipsters (of which flavor-chasing I’ve partaken in my fair share) (yes, that parses). It’s certainly not particularly cool to like them, and especially not this album. But it’s not particularly cool to like any album that has sold so well for so long — try to buy a copy for more than fifteen bucks, I dare you — and the fact that Ness has since mostly just plowed the same furrow to diminishing returns since is always an issue. Music nerds can be as bad as sports fans in the “what have you done for me lately” arena.

But as long as domestic beer tastes like cat piss, as long as guys with sideburns and farmer’s tans and stupid tattoos put cigarettes behind their ears and think they know how to handle guns, as long as the American flag flies over no-hope places where the cars that pass through on their routes between major metro areas get stared at real hard, as long as some shitkicking asshole feels cool for putting a punk rock song on the jukebox, Social Distortion will be one of the great American bands and this song will be one of the great American anthems. I, frankly, wouldn’t have it any other way.

29. Belle & Sebastian “The Stars Of Track And Field”
(Stuart Murdoch)
If You’re Feeling Sinister [Jeepster] • 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.

So it makes a kind of sense, from a thematic point of view if not a tracklisting one, that the next song would be the one where I talk about Anglophilia (or, not to unnecessarily annoy the band’s compatriots, Britophilia, which just raises the question of whether conscious inaccuracy or insufferable neologisms are worse).

I’ll actually have plenty of chances to talk around the subject — the list gets pretty Brit-heavy from here on out — but few British bands are quite so specifically British as Belle & Sebastian. Stuart Murdoch’s lyrical method would not even be possible in America, let alone desirable; and the fact that the band is in fact Scottish only underlines how deeply insular (ha ha, get it) the United Kingdom’s shared history, culture, manners, and manias can be. Just as one example and I hate to do this because I read Language Log pretty religiously and I’m not trying to be Whorfian or anything here, but bear with me: how many cultures would turn the word “bedsit” into an adjective? (Americans: don’t know what the noun means? Look it up.)

I honestly have no idea what the major appeal of Belle & Sebastian is for actual people who live in Britain, aside from their obvious virtues of melodic construction, lyrical complexity, and thoughtful, even tender production. But for me, listening to them is a way to live vicariously in another world for three to four minutes at a time, a world more overcast, drizzly, crumbly, tightly-knit, easily flustered, and waspishly witty than the one I recognize around me. Which I suppose isn’t that different from how the post-war British youth heard American r&b, country, and rock & roll, only, you know, completely inverted.

But ever since as a child I wished that the Narnia books spent more time in England, because a place where winter happened at all was just as magical as one where it never ended, I’ve spent my life riding a cyclical fascination with British history, arts, literature, culture, and (eventually) pop. Cyclical because there is, ultimately, a wall for those who choose not to expatriate, a thus-far-and-no-further, and despite all her faults America is mine by birthright and by choice: given the choice between Chess and Factory, I’m with Muddy and Etta and Chuck and Wolf every time, heart and soul.

It’s the fantasy of Britishness I love — after pop, my deepest well of transatlantic insight is Wodehouse — and it’s the fantasy that Belle & Sebastian are (practically) uniquely skilled at delivering.  Take this song, probably nobody’s favorite B&S song, not even mine, it’s just that I first came to them post-millennium and in working my way back this was the first one to snare me because it was the first one I heard. It’s a portrait (I take it) of shy, tremulous, and painfully sarky kids watching, admiring, envying, and sneering at the athletes at their school, and every single detail is completely different from how such a topic would be handled in American pop, if it ever even was. The way the song builds from hushed guitar-and-Stuart to pounding rushes of drums and horns and organs is a double increased-heart-rate metaphor, for athletic activities and more intimate ones — but the lyrical sketch is so ungainly, and delicate, and pale that I can practically see the red spots under blancmangish skin that bespeaks a Briton exercising, and I think of Charles Ryder’s Schooldays and Orwell’s “Such, Such Were the Joys” and the passion of D. H. Lawrence dressed in the prose of E. M. Forster. It may not sound like much of a fantasy, but properly (mis)understood, all difference is exotic.

28. Alejandro Escovedo “The End”
(Alejandro Escovedo, Stephen Bruton)
Thirteen Years [Watermelon] • 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.

Which means that I have no idea what my British readers (I know I have a handful) would make of this. Does alt-country translate across the Atlantic? Hell, does it translate across the Alleghenies? Although this song ramps up the alt and tamps down the country, you can still hear a cowpunk twang deep in Escovedo’s voice, a fiddle plays the hook, and like many Texas singer-songwriters over the decades, he’s so hard to pigeonhole that the alt-country warehouse is as good a place as any to store him until the next mass critical readjustment. (I completely missed when we all started calling new wave New Pop. I’m still not used to it.) Owing as much to versatile rock-n-poppers like Elvis Costello as to the holy trinity of Johnny, Willie, and Gram, Escovedo’s been pretty much the definition of a cult artist for his entire career; like Victoria Williams, he’s about as famous for having a bunch of more-famous people do a covers album to pay his medical bills as for anything he’s actually done.

“The End” is a comfortably swirling rocker, borrowing a title from the Doors and an aesthetic from Echo & The Bunnymen (so, the Doors again, then) and should have been a massive hit. In fact, I’m almost certain it was, and everyone just forgot: I could have sworn that massive wheeling hook soundtracked at least one drive to the beach junior year. It may be less sharply-observed and witty than the songs that gave Alejandro his cult, but it packs the kind of punch that Poe (Edgar Allen, not the Garbage knockoff) would kill for: every element in it aims in full consort to a singular, almost granular effect.

There may be a nagging feeling at the back of some of my fellow obsessive list-compilers’ minds that Escovedo is on the list as much because I wanted some diversity as for any other reason. And while I won’t deny that putting “The End” in this position felt a bit like killing two birds with one stone — alt-country and Latino! A double threat! — if the song hadn’t refused to leave my earspace for weeks on end I never would have considered him. And, well, Hispanics are underrepresented in conventional pop narratives. Partly this is because Latin America (of which a substantial population is within U.S. borders) has a whole alternate pop universe to play in, so that their stars rarely make much of a stir here on Earth-Prime; partly this is because conventional pop narratives tend to be driven by New Englanders, Brits, and (more recently) Midwesterners, and some things just aren’t on some radars; but largely I think it has to do with what could, taking a shortcut, be called racism, but on the scenic route is something more like a mistaken assumption of cultural familiarity: most Anglo pop fans think they already know what Latin pop is, and don’t care for it. Escovedo isn’t exactly the kind of person to force others to redraw their cultural boundaries — he’s more Charley Pride than Sly Stone — but he (and many others like him) are a step towards a greater cross-cultural pop dialogue.

27. Goodie Mob “Cell Therapy”
(Big Gipp, Cee-Lo, Khujo Goodie, T-Mo, Organized Noize)
Soul Food [LaFace] • 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.

One of the greatest pop personalities of the next decade enters, stage right. He takes the second verse. He sounds oddly Jamaican for the first couple of lines, then fades into a Southern rasp and sounds like himself: Cee-Lo Green, the Soul Machine. For a more thorough examination of his brilliantly psychotic appeal, we’ll have to wait till the end of the year when I post my 100 Great Pop Songs Of 2000-2009 list (title, concept, and effort all subject to change) — life is uncertain in a lot of ways, but there’s no way in hell he’s not making that list. But for now, let’s talk Southern Rap.

Goodie Mob invented the term Dirty South; they were part of the Atlanta-area Dungeon Family, in which production team Organized Noize and hip-hop funk icons OutKast were other major figures; but more than most of their peers, they took the music of the black South to heart, and their gruffly full-hearted, righteous hip-hop was steeped in backwoods blues, hard-driving soul, sweaty funk, and the thick-mouthed bonhomie of long history and the profuse evolution of methods of dealing with history. Their first (and best) album was called Soul Food, and it was as unreconstructed Southerners, creating a future without being ashamed of the past, that they presented themselves to the hip-hop world, a world which was mostly divided between the whip-smart sneer and hustle of New York and the grimly comic violence and swagger of L.A., with just the beginnings of input from the cerebral, better-than-this strut of Chicago.  There was still a sense, lingering if not fully expressed, that hip-hop was an exclusively coastal phenomenon, and an urban, high-rise one at that: the Bible Belt had (for once in the history of American music) nothing to say. Goodie Mob didn’t change all that — on the commercial level, Outkast and Lil Jon and a bunch of Texans did — but they did challenge it.

“Cell Therapy” was their first single, one of the great narcotic, paranoid productions of 90s hip-hop, always looking over its shoulder as it stalked through an unseen darkness. There’s no coherence to the narrative: it’s all atmosphere, dread, muttered warnings from forgotten records. Khujo goes rural and talks about lynching, the Holocaust and child molestation, Cee-Lo delivers a suspicious meditation on suburban gated communities, T-Mo and Big Gipp get all Old Testament with prophecies and lamentations, and through it all runs the gleefully barbaric chorus: “Who’s that peeking in my window?/Pow/Nobody now” while someone doing a really good Louis Armstrong imitation moans wordlessly behind them. The suggestion of violence in defense of self, family and property — or is it that, the violence over, there was never anyone there in the first place? — is just destabilized enough to add to, rather than resolve, the paranoiac mood hovering over the song.

And it’s fun to sing along with, too. The hook, as a wise man once said, brings you back. On this you can rely.

26. Pearl Jam “Yellow Ledbetter”
(Eddie Vedder, Mike McCready, Jeff Ament)
“Jeremy” b-side [Epic] • 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 haven’t got much to say on this one. I loved the sparkling, space-making guitar when I was fourteen years old and hadn’t heard a note of Jimi Hendrix. Now I love the song for the same reasons, and in the same way, that I love listening to great pop in languages I don’t understand. Eddie Vedder is definitely not one of his generation’s great writers, but he is one of its great singers, and on this song he may as well be Betty Carter scatting over a piano improvisation, simply vocalizing his frustration, regret, and loss without recourse to any specific imagery or ideas, all of which would fail at the task of living up to the way his voice moans and throws itself across the arcing line of those crystalline guitar figures.

Of course, I know that the song actually has lyrics. I simply do not choose to try to figure out what they are.