Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

As always, the whole list has been compiled onto one single page, added to the bottom of the list at right. Or click here.

Comments on the list as a whole, or late-breaking comments on any facet of it, can go there, please.

1. My Bloody Valentine “Soon”
(Kevin Shields)
Glider EP [Sire] • 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.

1999-2001:

In trying to make sense of the pop history I hear on oldies and classic rock stations, I perform web searches (this is pre-Google, folks, we’re talking dawn of time stuff) on the Beatles and the Who and end up at George Starostin’s website, where I eagerly devour his take on rock (begins with the British Invasion, ends with punk) (he’s since expanded his repertoire) and hungry for more, check out his links. Mark Prindle is prominent among them. On Prindle’s website, I for the first time that I can remember encounter the name My Bloody Valentine. I may or may not have known about the horror movie of the same title from a childhood both terrified of and fascinated by the horror aisle in the local video store.

2002:

Searching for chatter about Blur and Radiohead, the twin poles of my then-obsession with Britpop, I stumble across a site called Pitchfork. I am fascinated immediately. The writers are intelligent and well-versed in cultural minutiae, but also young and slangy. Their legendary snobbery is not an issue: I’m a snob myself, and am eager to learn the ins and outs of indie-rock tastemaking and tastebreaking. In rooting around in the Pitchfork website, I find their first Favorite Albums of the 1990s list, and note with some surprise that My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless is #1. “I should look for that some time,” I think, and for a while the idea of really digging into the music of the 90s hovers there in the back of my head, but I am too interested in new music, and nothing ever comes of it.

2003:

I have returned to my historical-overview fetish, and am busily engaged in making a box set of the 500 greatest rock songs from Elvis to I think the White Stripes was my cutoff. With the information that My Bloody Valentine made Pitchfork’s favorite record of the 90s rattling around in my head, I deign to look them up on allmusic and download a couple of tracks. “Come In Alone,” for whatever reason, is the one that sparks something, and I put it on the box set. Sandwiched uncomfortably between “Paradise City” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” it is a blast of shadowed, reluctant beauty in the midst of numbing obviousness and self-aggrandizement. I have listened to that set twice, I think. It took up twenty CDs and I would abandon CD-burning within a year.

2004:

I find Loveless cheap during an occasional record-store trawl with my best friend. He picks up Coltrane and weird dub-metal hybrids; I pick up Ike & Tina Turner, Leadbelly, and My Bloody Valentine. We go to his apartment and hang out; I put on Loveless. It is not a hit. We have the volume set low enough that we can talk, and it just sounds tinny and stupid, although the subterranean melodies do pick their way out of the surrounding slush and give me hope.

2005:

I listen to Loveless on headphones, like you’re supposed to. I am at work, in an furnace-like filing room adjacent to a garage, and I sit frozen to the spot until the record finishes. Oh my God. I get it, finally. A few months later, I listen to Ladytron’s mix set Softcore Jukebox. “Soon” is the leadoff track. I am shocked at how poppy and upbeat it sounds when it hasn’t been preceded by an hour of gorgeous noise and tinny drums. I suddenly start to take Ladytron a lot more seriously.

2006:

I list Loveless as one of my five favorite all-time albums on an Internet message board. It has become part of my habitual listening, something I’ll put on when I don’t know what else to put on. I have still not really listened to any other shoegaze.

2007:

I get hold of the Glider EP so that I can hear “Soon” without the fadeout from “What You Want” layered over the first few seconds. It assumes a status in my head as the My Bloody Valentine song, their “Layla” or “Smoke On The Water,” the archetypal single in comparison with which all else pales. (How could I ever have thought that “Come In Alone” …? but I was so much younger then.)

2008:

I start making plans to compile my 100 Great [Something] Songs Of The 1990s list. I think for maybe a fraction of a second before deciding that “Soon” is #1.

2009:

I sit in a church parking lot waiting for “Soon” to end. I’ve been listening to the last few songs on this list in a row, getting ready to write about them. Trees quiver and gel in the rearview mirror in time with the kickdrum bass. The inimitable (meaning I can’t reproduce it vocally, let alone onomatopoeically), beautiful, undistorted melody line comes bouncing and shaking out of the roar and thump, and all I can do is waggle my head in response.

All my life is words. They hedge me about and define me, they are the filter through which I process all experience. When I find something that no words can touch, against the skin of which they slide off like so much quicksilver, that is something precious indeed. “Soon” is an incandescent pink ball of fire, against which all constructed meaning burns away, and all that is left is Sound and Rhythm. There are lyrics to “Soon.” They are unknowable, and I wouldn’t choose to know what they were if Kevin Shields himself were to call me up and offer to tell me.

In the end, my vision of 90s pop is, more than anything else, mine. Its gaze is interior, not exterior. In some iterations of What Pop Means, commercial success matters as much as critical clout, perhaps more, and nothing can be the greatest that is not widely perceived as such. I have some sympathy for that view, but being neither a mass-market journalist nor an ideologue, I don’t have to organize my life by it; I don’t have anything against commercial success, but it informs rather than constrains my sensibility.

In embracing noise here at the end of all things, Sam, am I performing an anti-pop gesture? There are some who’d think so, and applaud it or scold it, or insist that I’m engaging in category confusion. I’d suggest that they have misunderstood noise, pop, and this song pretty profoundly.

Like The Return Of The King, I’ve got too many endings. Thanks for reading. I’ll have something else again soon.

2. The New Radicals “You Get What You Give”
(Gregg Alexander, Rick Nowels)
Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too [MCA] • 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.

It’s a little frightening looking back over the past dozen years of my life to realize how much of the time I’ve spent driving a car. And 98% of that time had some form of audio entertainment going, whether music (mostly), audiobooks (more rarely) or podcasts (sharp increase over the past couple years). Car-hours have been especially important when thinking about my exposure to mainstream pop music. Since graduating high school, I have almost never listened to the radio indoors. My education in Sixties pop, classic rock, the Eighties, and current chart music all took place behind the wheel of a car in the late 90s and early oughts. (As did my education in the exquisitely dull good taste of NPR and what might be called popular classical music, i.e., nothing after Brahms. But that’s a different, still incomplete self.)

Increasingly, those half-hour and forty-five-minute commutes (ah, blessed urban sprawl) became the only moments of unalloyed pleasure in a life that felt like it was closing in around me, choking, dry, and foreordained. If I had failed to create a satisfying life as an adult, living paycheck-to-paycheck at jobs I hated and snuffing out any chances at worthwhile relationships through lack of emotional oxygen, I was equally dissatisfied with the perpetual youth that avoiding responsibility was supposed to be the whole point of enabling. I was around actual young people — volunteering at church youth groups, watching my younger siblings grow up and lap me in terms of coherence, success, and stability — and was horrified by the idea that, in the tragic line from Dazed And Confused (I haven’t seen it, I just know the line), I would grow older while they stayed the same age.

Pop music became the only window in the prison of my mind. For three to four minutes at a time, for more years than I care to think about, songs about being young and cool and in love and feeling so much were my release into a larger world than the solipsism of self-pity, which a smartass depressive with a facile intellect can turn anything more ambitious into. High art, whether tragic or sublime, was too easy to incorporate into my self-obsessed narrative of doomed and thwarted ambition brought down by the tragic flaws of laziness and forgetfulness; the unpretentiously pleasure-inducing was all that could take me out of myself and into it, however briefly.

I must have heard “You Get What You Give” about a thousand times before it dawned on me what a great pop song it was. And I mean great pop song, like once-in-a-lifetime stuff, a “God Only Knows” or “Respect” or “I Feel Love” or “Anarchy In The UK” type of thing. It had simply short-circuited all my (still-nascent) critical faculties; I didn’t even know I loved it until I thought about it. I had simply lived with it, breathed it, pulsed with it. It’s only slightly hyperbolic to say that the New Radicals, along with P. G. Wodehouse and my discovery of a universe of healing, gently funny comics outside the suffocating soap-opera kabuki of superheroes (John Stanley, Lewis Trondheim, and Cliff Sterrett: good God, y’all), kept me alive ca. 1999.

Let me be clear. “Don’t give up, you’ve got a reason to live, can’t forget we only get what we give” strikes me now, as it did then, as tritely affirmative homiletics, sub-Oprah bullshit of the kind that slides off the meaning-seeking mind like warm butter. (Mini-epiphany of the last few months: reading David Foster Wallace’s “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” and realizing that some people can actually get something out of those contentless maxims, and being simultaneously happy and sorry that for whatever reason I simply can’t operate on that level.) It is not in the lyrics — or not in those lyrics — that the Great Escape lies. It is in the music; and again I want to be clear. I am as cynically unmoved as anyone by the great sweeping, stirring crescendos popularized by U2, Coldplay, the Arcade Fire, and so forth. There is nothing soaring about Gregg Alexander’s tightly-wound mechanical toy of a production: it may pound, but it never builds-and-releases (except perhaps on the line “we’ll kick your ass in,” which anyway works more like a punchline than what the ancients meant by catharsis), and when he goes into falsetto it’s less because the Big Important Melody needs to swoop into the stratosphere than because falsetto is simply another of the classic pop tools in his arsenal — cf. Roy Orbison, the Bee Gees, and Michael Jackson — and he’s showing off.

Showing off is an inherently childish thing, sure. Unsurprisingly, it’s something I’m pretty good at. (If you’ve been impressed by any particular verbal dexterity in any of the foregoing 97 theses, rest assured I meant to do that.) Shutting up and letting the fruits of my labor be their own reward, I’m not so hot at. I do, though, see it as  goal, an ideal to aspire to, and perhaps another stick with which to beat myself. Which is why this song is at #2. But more about that next time.

“You Get What You Give” saved my life (metaphorically) in the sense that I found a channel (pop) into which I could divert the irresponsible, gleeful childishness that’s been struggling to sabotage my adulthood. Even Wodehouse comes to an end, and as Wimbledon Green knows to his sorrow, perfect comics are all too rare; but pop is a unquenchable Fountain of Youth, an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (in the sense that Pope meant, not Gondry) which cannot be exhausted. There are always new frontiers: other countries, other decades, other genres. (I’ll get around to listening to post-1980 country someday, I swear.) So bracketed, I have become free to grow up, and in fact I’m busier than I’ve ever been in my life before, finally completing my degree while working two jobs (public sector and nonprofit), while bills get paid on time and I only contemplate suicide occasionally, as a bit of relaxation after a long day. (Yes, that’s meant as humor.)

An aside. There is, to my mind, nothing so irrepressibly pop as the one-hit wonder. Everything that pop could possibly be arrayed against militates against the entire concept: Serious Album Artists, Rock Provocateurs, those who aspire to make music in classical modes like jazz or composition, even Business, the true arch-enemy of pop (ooh, how thrilling! it’s always the ones you never suspect, the ones closest at hand). Because businessmen, of course, want a continuous return on initial investment, and one-hit wonders provide only that, a one-time spike and then flatline. One-hit wonders have gotten conspicuously more rare of late, a combination of industry pressure to perform and the increasing irrelevance of the charts; even when a band can be officially tallied as a one-hit wonder, they have a massive following elsewhere. The heady days when the New Radicals, Eiffel 65, or Len could appear and disappear without a trace are more or less gone. Sic transit gloria.

Finally, a reminder. All of the above, including the last two entries, is a narrative. There are others. This is the one I’m telling now. Life itself is not a narrative. It is life. Don’t mistake the two.

3. Radiohead “Paranoid Android”
(Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, Colin Greenwood, Phil Selway)
OK Computer [Parlophone] • 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.

But I digress.

The fear of growing up that I listened to pop to stave off in my teenage years did not lessen as I unavoidably grew up. I just found ways of coping, as everyone does. My main method of coping fell under the heading of Irresponsibility. Failing to apply for classes before the deadline … failing classes themselves … failing to hold a job for more than six months … failing to make space in my head for separate categories of life and getting fired after being too consumed with my private life … failing to take care of myself, ending up in the hospital, moving back in with mom and dad … failing to finish even one creative project of the dozens I set for myself over the span of a decade … failing to maintain a single relationship for any appreciable amount of time … failing … failing ….

Did I mention the depression? Yeah, that helped too.

The trouble was that I didn’t enjoy my irresponsibility. I was too serious-minded, too apt to read my life as a Thomas Hardy novel, overdetermined and marching implacably towards unalloyed misery and death. I didn’t even get any decent substance abuse out of it: too obsessed with control to get drunk and too cowardly to get high, I only ever allowed myself to get addicted to the Internet.

And it was on that Internet that I first heard of Radiohead. (Wait for it….) The too-cool-for-school nerds who founded my first internet hangout were all excited about Kid A in the fall of 2000, and I for some reason implicitly trusted their judgment, probably because they were the first people I recognized as smarter than me that I’d ever known in real-time, as opposed to out of books. I asked for — and got — Kid A for Christmas. (That was the last record I ever really wanted that I didn’t just go out and buy myself. It took me a while to figure out this being an adult stuff, I’m telling you.) I was deeply confused, to put it mildly, when I put it on.

This — this was just a bunch of noise. Where were the guitars? It was supposed to be good music, right? Good music had guitars! Electronic glitches and a ghostly, chopped-up voice wasn’t rock! What the … what?

It wasn’t actually that long before I assimilated Kid A (it’s still one of my favorite albums), and then in quick succession Amnesiac and everything else Radiohead had released. (Lightbulbs dawned when I heard “Creep” and “High And Dry” and “Karma Police.” I had heard Radiohead before; I’d just never known it. I hadn’t even known those were all the same band. Hell, I had “High And Dry” on one of those cassettes I’d taped off Guatemalan radio.)  There, at last, were the guitars.

My relationship to guitars are a bit like my relationship to geek culture: I got into them more or less because I felt like I was supposed to, and spent years fighting my way out to the space where my taste stands on its own two legs, unembarrassed and unafraid. At the same time that I was leaving the wide-open spaces of pop behind for the narrower confines of guitar rock, I was developing a fascination with superheroes that I was fortunate enough to leave behind once I discovered that I loved pen and ink, not overcolored fascism. There’s a parallel to be drawn between the macho angst of late-90s rock and the hypermale melodrama of post-80s superhero comics: in both cases I was lost in an aesthetic dead end ca. the turn of the century until it dawned on me that the larger medium (comics and pop, respectively) was what I was really interested in. In that regard, Radiohead was exactly the kind of band I needed to wean me off guitars: the Vertigo imprint of rock music, exploring heady themes with the kind of adult sophistication you didn’t expect to find in post-grunge. Not, when you get a broader perspective, actually groundbreaking or even very adult (all that quivering emotion and rage at the injustice of the world), but perhaps the perfect expression of the existential dread shot through with sudden glimpses of expanding horizons that is young adulthood.

“Paranoid Android” became my favorite Radiohead song early on: Jonny Greenwood’s guitar squalls towards the end ensured that, and the angst-rawk-artsy interlude-rawk structure borrowed from Queen’s masterpiece (one of my fondest memories is of participating in a spontaneous a capella rendering of “Bohemian Rhapsody” in the back of a tour bus in Italy) ensured that. But what sealed the deal was Brent DiCrescenzo’s infamous “sorry honey” capsule review, the place I first stumbled upon Pitchfork and now relegated to the no-man’s-land of web.archive. If I’ve moved somewhat away from it since those heady days when my greatest pleasure was freaking out to its freakouts, that has more to do with my ambivalent attitude towards the science fiction conceits that OK Computer uses as a springboard than with the song itself.

One of the Internet Dudes I respect most took me to task for calling science fiction inhuman back at #91 on this list. Perhaps it would be better to say that I resent science fiction for questioning what it is to be human. But it would be most honest to say that I simply don’t like it. I’ve tried, honest — I plowed through Asimov and Bradbury and Ender’s Game in high school and hated them all; I’ve read Ellison and Dick and Bester and Clarke and Delany and Le Guin and anthologies by the pound and I just have no sympathy whatever with the aims, the ideas, or the tropes of classic science fiction, and I’ve actually decreased in sympathy the older I’ve gotten and the more I’ve nailed down what it is I do like. It took reading all of Douglas Adams to do it, ironically enough; the man destroyed science fiction for me to such an extent that I treasure his wit but can’t even revisit the Hitchhiker series and only ever re-read the Dirk Gently novels.

So Radiohead borrowed a two-word phrase for the title of this song from Adams, but the lyrics read more like the apocalyptic Philip K. Dick, or even Anthony Burgess. But of course they aren’t meant to be read: they exist primarily in Thom Yorke’s strangled croon, paranoid indeed but not (except in the text-to-speech voice that interpolates in the first verse) inhuman at all, in fact hyperhuman, practically D. H. Lawrence in its vivid physicality. And yet there’s a nagging something that reminds me of the interminable hours I spent reading science fiction, trying desperately to give a shit about people who aren’t people in places that aren’t places doing things for no reason other than to prove a point. Maybe it’s the overdetermined nature of that shiny late-90s production, maybe it’s the claustrophobic effect that Yorke alone among his falsetto-crying peers can manage, maybe it’s simply that I can’t for the life of me disassociate music from cover art; there’s a story in here somewhere of a robot getting mad, and it makes me want to die.

In the wrong mood, that is. Usually, I’ll just croon and howl along with Thom and headbang in odd time signatures. I still read four-color comics now and then too.

4. 2Pac “California Love”
(2Pac, Dr. Dre, Roger Troutman, Woody Cunningham, Norman Durham)
single [Death Row] • 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.

In the spring of 1996, I was a high school senior trying not to think about the summer, when I would return to the United States, go off to college, and begin a completely different kind of life, one I wasn’t at all sure I was prepared for, and prepared or not didn’t want.

I’ve had trouble relating to the vast majority of my peer group (that’d be surly nerds with obsessive interests in music, comics, literature, and philosophy) my entire adult life. The main difference, which I finally put my finger on when reading yet another Chris Ware work about a stunted man-child lost in a maze of narcissistic memories, is that my teenage years were not significantly unhappier than my childhood. Which could simply mean that my teenage self was as sheltered and solipsistic as my childhood self was allowed to be; or maybe I was a singularly depressed child. (Bit of both, far as I can tell.) But for the first eighteen years of my life, I dreaded adulthood. I knew how good I had it without responsibilities, worries, and a checkbook to balance. (And every young adult I knew was kind of an asshole, and why would anyone want to grow up to be an asshole?)

So in my usual way of dealing with unpleasant reality, I spent a lot of time glued to the radio, scanning between stations to find new songs to fill up the cassette tapes I listened to on the family Walkman while mowing the half-acre back yard that daily rains kept nice and lush for half the year. I listened to that last cassette, the one compiled May 1996, more after I left Guatemala than before, so its associations are bittersweet for me. It even felt like a ground shift: Babylon Zoo, Spacehog, Live, Hootie & the Blowfish, and Bush were on there, subtly transforming the landscape of pop I’d grown so familiar with into something alien and more grandiose. And there was a couple of minutes of a rap song on it.

My heart was hardening against rap, and had been for the last few years, once I realized how stupid dc Talk’s early records were. There was an almost-imperceptible cultural divide in my senior class: the “cool,” “rich,” and “athletic” kids (this is all in the context of a missionary kids’ school, thus the irony marks) could listen to hip-hop and r&b, while the impoverished nerds only liked guitar music, whether angsty or happy. (There were only eighteen people in my graduating class; solidarity rarely broke down along any clear lines, but musical taste was one of them.) As I had decided in my junior year, with the fine impetuosity of someone easily beaten at basketball, that I was an intellectual and not a physical being (good golly what a dipshit), guitar music was really the only option.

But the thumping electric-piano break, the processed-to-noise horns, the vocodered vocal hooks, and the glossy, glamorous sheen of this song that I’d recorded almost by chance was too much to resist. I didn’t know who’d recorded it, as I came in almost halfway through, but it didn’t matter. (They were all the same, anyway.) “Kyaaliforia … knows how to paartee,” sang a robot black man, and I could believe it. It was only a stopover between Serious Rock Anthems on that cassette, but it was a window into an alternate universe, one in which the crudely sexualized, thinly-produced rap party anthems of four or five years ago (I’m thinking mostly of Wreckx-N-Effect, I guess) were replaced by a heavy blanket of sound that covered all possibilities for happiness. Sex, sure, maybe, but mainly just driving around under the palm trees with your buddies, everything so blinding that you have to wear shades, the heat of the sun offest by the breeze blowing in from off the ocean. California is the eternal Promised Land in the mythology of the American unconscious, and these anonymous rappers had found a way to re-energize that myth for the electronics-and-angst 90s.

About six months later, I heard about this guy named Tupac Shakur. I was going to community college in central Phoenix for a semester before transferring to the real university that had accepted me, and everyone in my ENG 101 class was various shades of brown, and a few weeks into the semester it seemed everyone but me was shattered by the news of Shakur’s death. New tattoos sprang up overnight; one girl submitted an essay that was nothing but an analysis of his lyrics; every desk had 2PAC RIP carved into its surface within a week. My younger brothers reported that high schools and middle schools were even more distraught. I — this isn’t easy to admit — I sneered.

It’s no defense to say that I was for the first time beginning to pursue Serious Literary Themes in my writing, which had previously been dominated by rip-offs of Star Wars and The Lord Of The Rings. But Evelyn Waugh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and E. M. Forster had become my new heroes over the past couple of years (thanks, respectively, to the backs of Penguin Wodehouse editions, The Great Gatsby on an English teacher’s Great Books list, and the Merchant-Ivory Howards End), and I was attempting a novel that combined my still-fresh memories of Guatemala with the Big Ideas of serious fiction. Like every young would-be novelist, I was a fucking snob. (Scratch young and would-be from that sentence, and it’s still pretty true.) And the unconscious racism that comes with being a young white dude who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else and whose exposure to other cultures/classes/ethnicities has been at best limited held me hostage. The outpouring of grief would have been ridiculous to me no matter who it was. (I’d felt the same two years earlier about Kurt Cobain, and would feel the same a year later about Princess Diana.) But the fact that it was a rapper, and one I’d never heard of to boot (the essence of cultural snobbery right there) only strengthened my resolve to be unlike these people. I wouldn’t even inform myself. I would never listen to a Tupac Shakur song. That’d teach ’em.

(Teach them to what? To invest a large portion of their identity in a celebrity? To feel grief at the death of a fellow human being? To elevate rap lyrics to the status of literature? I can only report on my state of mind at the time, not on the logical basis for it. There was none.)

I don’t remember when it was that I first found out that Tupac was the guy who did “California Love.” I do remember having learned it at one time, and going “oh yeah,” when I came across it again a couple of years ago. And then feeling really, really stupid. (I still haven’t really gotten into Biggie. I mean, I’ve listened, but that’s it.)

“California Love” is the greatest pop song rap produced in the 1990s. This is, I’d imagine, pretty inarguable. It has so wholly swallowed up its source materials that Joe Cocker and Zapp are become mere voices crying in the wilderness, preparing the way of the One Single To Rule Them All. Dr. Dre was already immortal thanks to his single-handed invention of gangsta rap and the West Coast aesthetic; with this production, he ascended to Godhood. And 2Pac?

Yeah, 2Pac was pretty great. There. I said it.

Feels good.