60 Songs That Explain the '90s

by Rob Harvilla

CÉLINE DION sings her songs like they owe her money.

She sings the songs that make the whole world cower in the storm cellar. She sings as though she intends to fell the mighty oak and drink every drop of the sea. PUT CÉLINE DION IN SUPER SMASH BROS. She sings like the floor, the ceiling, and also the very air she breathes is lava. She sings these songs like she has a very particular set of skills. Skills she has acquired over a very long career. Skills that make her a nightmare for songs like these.

She sings hard even at her softest; she sings incomprehensibly loud even at her quietest. She is everything louder than everything else. She is the too much that will never be enough. She is the Final Boss of Popular Song. I picture her towering over the 1990s like a benevolent colossus, like a Quebec-born Godzilla with a sparkly microphone, like a volcano that can serenade itself.

Céline Dion helped define the decade but did not let the decade define her, and this is a pop star’s greatest challenge, the eternal conundrum, the nigh-impossible mission: How to achieve true domination without getting trapped in the bejeweled amber of your prime.

Her strategy? Sing harder. Sing louder. Sow even more chaos, ever more ecstatically. Baffle the masses even as you entrance them; get weirder as you get huger. That’s how your song...

was overwhelmed by both Céline’s voice and the profound effect her voice could have on someone. To plenty of snooty ’90s critics, that sense of overwhelmedness is disqualifying, and almost inhuman: She sings love songs so overwrought that they couldn’t possibly depict normal people being in love.

The sad quiet guy with the acoustic guitar and the bombastic pop diva with the full orchestra. Don’t ever ask a rock critic to pontificate on this moment and the philosophical divide it represents. Just trust me. Feel free to slap me, if you ever catch me pontificating myself.

But the new level of mastery that Céline brings to “My Heart Will Go On” is that she’s figured out how to be super loud quietly. There is nuance. There is drama. There is precisely calibrated rising action. This song is a bear attack in a library. Which only makes that final, bellowed, gale-force chorus (“You’rrrrrre herrrrrrre”) even more overpowering and exhilarating. Because the final chorus, historically, is where Céline Dion sings the hardest and makes most of her money and kicks most of her ass. She is a self-serenading volcano impersonating a mortal human woman. And she is convincing even as she erupts.

With any piece of music, though—any artist, any circumstance, any version of this decade or any other—your personal memory matters more than the reality.

By certain objective measures—tabloid column inches, seething diss tracks from rival rock stars, the mountains of ground dust from all those gnashed teeth—Hole singer, guitarist, and ringleader Courtney Love has sown more chaos than any other rock star of her era or anybody else’s.

“It’s better to burn out than fade away.” Christ. For all his hallowed rejection of the rock-star myth, in this awful moment, as his final public gesture, Kurt Cobain quotes Neil Young. He extends the rock-star lineage. He aspires, on some level, to that lineage, however much of his public life he devoted to insisting that he didn’t want it. Don’t believe the hype of his rejection of the hype: Kurt wanted to be a rock star, no matter how furiously he insisted otherwise. But one reason people are still throwing stones at the cardboard cutout of his wife 30-plus years later is that she’s way better at being a rock star than he ever was.

Does Madonna reel off the names of so many timeless, glamorous stars—Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Ginger Rogers—because she wants you to worship them, or because she’s trying to convince you she’s one of them? Why not both? Is Madonna crudely appropriating the hallowed art of voguing, as depicted in the heartening and heartbreaking 1991 Jennie Livingston documentary Paris Is Burning, or is she celebrating it, honoring it, casting a warming mainstream light upon it? Why not all of the above?

“Tell me why,” what? To what does the why refer, in that chorus? Who is the I in “I Want It That Way”? Is it me or is it you? What is the nature of that way? To what way does that way refer? How does a song that starts off by rhyming fire and desire descend so quickly into semantic chaos? And why do we find that chaos so purifying, so edifying, so satisfying? What makes “I Want It That Way” math, and pop, and art, and scripture, and inarguably the single greatest boy-band song ever born?

Want It That Way,” an early exemplar of his soon-to-be-famous songwriting philosophy of Melodic Math. Every mildly garbled phrase in this song from “Tell me why” forward is a triumph of syllables over words, melody over coherence, math over language.

The resulting blockbuster songs are less songs than equations, albeit luxurious equations that entail one pop star or another purring sexy-adjacent nonsense directly into your ears. At first this might feel antiseptic, or inauthentic, or just robbed of the intimacy of a single human writing and then singing a perfect song to another single human. But you gotta know the math to fully appreciate the art. Think of it as “I fake it so real, I am beyond fake” on an industrial scale, but generating bombastic and frighteningly immediate stadium anthems, redolent with fire and desire, that enthrall millions, billions. This was pop music’s atom-bomb-bright future, and it threatened to blind us all whether we were wearing shades or not.

The teen-pop backlash—as helmed by such (occasionally) charming nü-metal goons as Korn and Limp Bizkit4—stretched from the late ’90s into the early 2000s, but nobody straddled the 20th and 21st centuries with more contemptuous gusto than Eminem. The Slim Shady LP—which introduced the wider world to the feral Detroit rapper otherwise known as Marshall Mathers, with a then-crucial cosign from rap god Dr. Dre himself—blew up in 1999 and ensured that we’d be dealing with this guy for the whole next millennium, as indeed we did, we have, we are, we will.

Eminem was a white rapper, see, who could rap dazzling circles around the likes of early-’90s crossover knuckleheads like Vanilla Ice and Snow. Matter of fact, Jim Carrey, who viciously parodied both those knuckleheads during his pre-superstardom In Living Color years, was the second-best white rapper of the decade.

The truth is that MTV was still raising me in the ’90s, but the cultural landscape it depicted had atomized; whereas in 1987 I was sufficiently awestruck by just one astronaut planting a colorful flag on the moon, now each new video gave birth to a new galaxy, a new religion, a new type of pop star, a new radiant persona to build your whole life around.

THE PEOPLE WHO HATE a hot new band can define that band’s identity every bit as much as the people who love it; you learn as much from who runs from the chaos as you do from who runs toward

it.

1997, when “Firestarter” propelled the group’s breakout third album, The Fat of the Land—released in America on Madonna’s own label, Maverick Records, because she knows where the action is—to inexplicable chart-topping infamy, rock ’n’ roll was dead and had been replaced forevermore by electronica, according to many reputable music magazines I devoured at the time.

The artists then known as the Dixie Chicks—with lead belter Natalie Maines joining founding members Martie Maguire and her sister Emily Strayer—were incomprehensibly huge in the late ’90s, Nashville disruptors and triumphant standard-bearers all at once, a living, fire-breathing rejoinder to the stuffy, venal, unimaginative, chauvinist, artistically and emotionally bankrupt, timid, soulless, cheese-dicked nincompoops of Music Row.

My eyes welled up when I revisited the “Goodbye Earl” video recently, not because it’s crying-emoji funny, and not because it’s trying to be jump-scare upsetting or maudlin or melodramatic. It was just my baffled reaction to a piece of mass-market pop art so tonally dense and horrifying, but also goofy, but also deadly serious. It’s as close to truly shocking as I think a nationally distributed music video is ever gonna get, and shit, then I’m skimming the YouTube comments and someone argues that the most crushing line in the song is “Right away Mary Anne flew in from Atlanta on a red-eye midnight flight,” because it depicts a friend dropping everything to come to an abused woman’s aid, and now my eyes are welling up again.

It is tempting now to view “Goodbye Earl” as the prelude to a music-industry tragedy, as the capstone to a late-’90s country-music era that at least in imperfect retrospect is held up now as a glorious and bountiful Garden of Eden-type paradise for female country superstars: Shania, Faith, LeAnn, Lee Ann, Trisha, Martina, Reba, et al. The tragedy is that this era ended, definitively, in the early 2000s, as America reverted to wartime footing and country radio pushed its women to the margins with such blatant ferocity that it’s common knowledge now that many DJs aren’t supposed to play two female artists back to back.

But let’s not do that. Let’s not reduce the Chicks to mere victimhood. Earl is the ultimate victim of “Goodbye Earl,” and the twirling, jubilant, shining-faced crowd that surrounds the band in the video as they not-so-metaphorically bury him is proof of this song’s, and this moment’s, everlasting power. It’s like they made the whole plane out of the black box of Johnny Cash singing, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” They just came up with a way better motive.

LARS ULRICH is the Derek Jeter of drummers. I take no joy in reporting this; I say this with great affection. No, wait, sorry, that’s not true: I take great joy in reporting this. Sorry. Let’s establish up front that making fun of Metallica is fun. It’s fun if you hate them, or if you are indifferent to them. But it’s extra fun if you love them, if you worship them, if they constitute your whole lifestyle. That way, you can take the greatest possible joy in making fun of them with the greatest possible affection.

Lars is a god, an all-timer, a Hall of Famer, whatever. But he’s also a crazy overrated drummer. He’s flash over competence. He’s ostentatious. He’s booting easy ground balls, and diving all over the field unnecessarily, and diving into the stands unnecessarily.

And we all do! But the larger truth—given that making fun of this band gets more fun the more you love them—is that Lars is the all-time Drummer of the Year precisely because we know he’s not, he’s a Hall of Famer because he’s crazy overrated, he’s a god because he’s such a profoundly flawed mortal.

This notion of selling out—compromising your art for money, for fame, for mainstream validation—absolutely dominated the decade; the great author/critic/pop philosopher Chuck Klosterman, in his 2022 book The Nineties, described the sellout question as “the single most nineties aspect of the nineties.” Here in the 2020s, it is just as dominantly fashionable to marvel at how antiquated,1 how irrelevant the sellout question seems now that even the coolest artists in any medium are encouraged to get as rich as possible by appealing to as many people as possible. But at the time, mainstream popularity was a colossal embarrassment, and even modest ambition a mortal sin. That’s an oversimplification, but what isn’t, what wasn’t?

Rock ’n’ roll, broadly defined, depending on the era and the subgenre and the specific band, is anywhere between 85 and 99.7 percent bullshit. That’s the point. The bullshit is the point. The bullshit is the vast majority of the point. Whether they’re trying to sell out or not, very few rock bands in world history could even conceivably cut out all the bullshit, and basically none of those bands should.

WHAT ARE THE RIGHT reasons to be a rock star, though? Such a dilemma can’t help but feel a tiny bit frivolous in the face of the existential crisis facing young hip-hop superstars at the same time.

“Gangsta’s Paradise” is his attempt to bridge that divide, or maybe his attempt to burn the bridge between that divide. The galactic flip of Stevie Wonder’s 1976 classic “Pastime Paradise” is unforgettable, and the same goes for Coolio’s thunderous opening line about walking in the valley of the shadow of death. It’s the shockingly Tupac-caliber intensity of his voice, the genuine despair, the preacher’s grandiosity. This is Coolio reveling in all his charisma, and ferocity, and even swagger, but he ain’t laughing, and this time nobody else is, either.

“Gangsta’s Paradise” is, at heart, a very serious song. An anguished song. A tragic song. And a pop song whether Coolio wanted it to be one or not. And the least generous read of “Amish Paradise” that I can offer you is that for some large percentage of Weird Al’s target audience (and Coolio’s less-targeted audience), the Amish lifestyle and the gangsta lifestyle are equally remote, equally exotic, equally unimaginable.

Ice Cube knew that, too. “I do records for Black kids,” he once told the revered feminist author bell hooks,8 “and white kids are basically eavesdropping on my records.”

A lot of people who listen to, and love, and rap along to “It Was a Good Day” are eavesdropping. Let’s put it that way. I was. I am. For all Ice Cube’s anger (delightfully sprayed all over his solo catalog) about other rappers who sell out, who go pop, who can New Jack Swing on his nuts, this song, on his terms, is immaculate, revered, enduring pop music. It’s fun. Have fun. Rap along to it. Or rap along to most of it. But depending on who you are and where you come from and what experience you have with where Ice Cube comes from, just respect the fact that your favorite lines might feel a little different in your mouth.

Tragic Kingdom, the ’90s record I’d most underestimated as a commercial behemoth when I returned to this decade as a nostalgic podcasting adult, documents the world’s most cheerful hostile takeover, with Gwen’s bandmates (including her brother, outgoing co-founder Eric Stefani) all but physically knocked offstage by the fearsome power of her spotlight. It’s not that the band entirely abandons its ska roots on this record (see the first and last 10 seconds of the anti-phone-harassment anthem “Spiderwebs”), but those roots are no longer a focal point (see the whole rest of the song, a zippy New Wave jam in its own right). But maybe with “Just a Girl” it’s best to imagine No Doubt as a space shuttle where the rocket boosters burn out and detach once it achieves true superstar orbit, and in this case, those abandoned rocket boosters just happen to be labeled “SKA” and “EVERYBODY IN THE BAND OTHER THAN GWEN.” That’s not really selling out; that’s a little something called personal growth.

There is an abstract quality to all these accusations of selling out, a know-it-when-you-see-it vagueness, an impossible ideal. What—or better yet, who—is the precise opposite of selling out?

Nobody sold out more effectively than Green Day—20 million copies sold, plus apparently 10 million T-shirts, too!—but nobody paid more to do

A less embarrassing phrase I overuse is grunge counterprogramming, which I have heroically deployed to describe anything on the radio from 1991 to 1995 that was milder, sweeter, less caustic and self-loathing, and more melodious than Nirvana or Soundgarden or what have you. Think Counting Crows, or Hootie and the Blowfish, or the Gin Blossoms, or even a sweet-but-caustic power pop bro like Matthew Sweet.

Whereas Dolores O’Riordan does not need to sing a super-heavy, mega-distortion rock song to thrive amid the many thousands of super-heavy, mega-distortion rock songs extant in this moment.

The terrifying burst of pure, righteous, gnarly, more-grunge-than-grunge distortion that kicks off “Zombie” is not expected by 16-year-old me in 1994, based on my prior knowledge of and affinity for the Cranberries. This jump-scare intro is designed, quite skillfully, as a Holy Shit moment. The Cranberries are through fuckin’ around. The Cranberries don’t give a shit if you get what you want no matter how many times you say please. The Cranberries would just as soon kill you as—ah, shit, I’m doing the badass thing again, aren’t I? Sorry.

“Zombie” is one of roughly 12 billion songs released in the 1990s that alternate between Deceptively Quiet Verses and Incredibly Loud Choruses, but the bonus sneak-attack aspect here—the whiplash abandonment of the sweetness and light that made “Dreams” and “Linger” so indelible—just knocks me on my ass. Sorry, sorry. There’s just got to be a better way to put that, but I haven’t found it yet.

With even the simplest, most direct pop songs and pop songwriters, there’s a natural instinct to avoid the clunky-to-my-young-ear repetition of bombs there, to find another rhyme, to find a clever-er way to put it. But now the bombs double-shot strikes me as shocked, indignant, almost childlike emphasis, and only further underscores the plain fact that “Zombie” is the hardest, toughest, brashest, scariest, and most thrilling rock song released by anybody in 1994. And maybe the trick to avoiding tumbling down Badass Condescension Mountain is to just say that and move on.

That stupendous first Garbage record, the viciously catchy self-titled jam from 1995 with the eerie pink cover, is the one with “Only Happy When It Rains,” the ecstatic chorus barely louder and snarlier than the riotously glum verses, Shirley’s inner torment barely distinguishable from her ferocious triumph.

Now, there is no denying the galvanizing anger of “You Oughta Know,” but what is harder to capture in three words is how funny Alanis can be, and how much funnier she gets the angrier she gets, which is bad news for the crap dude but great news for us, such that the best moment in the whole song is the vehemence with which she spits out the words, “I hate to bug you in the middle of dinner.”

It’s called “Waterfalls” because TLC are advising you not to chase them. Don’t do that is just such a bizarre message for a huge pop song, a cautionary tale all the more effective for being totally subliminal, given that everyone listening is too busy doing the dance from the video where TLC are turned into Avatar-via-1994 water people. The song’s as “conscious” as any conscious rap you’d care to name, and like 50,000 times more fun than conscious rap.

“No Scrubs” is also my personal favorite TLC hit for the admittedly selfish reason that the song defines the word scrub immediately: “A scrub is a guy that thinks he’s fly,” Chilli advises, “And is also known as a busta.” Incredibly helpful. I’m serious. Every pop song that uses slang in the song title should be required, by law, to define the slang term within the first four lines of the song. They should amend the Constitution. Call it the Scrubs Doctrine.

Lisa Lopes died in a car crash in Honduras on April 25, 2002; the 21st century is so much emptier without her in it, without TLC at full power guiding it.

IT’S ALMOST EMBARRASSING NOW to admit how astounded I was by the video for Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” in 1990. There’s scrub 12-year-old me gawking at the unflinching close-ups of this self-possessed Irish woman with the shaved head and the black turtleneck and the tears rolling down her cheeks. And she’s just singing: no explosions, no quick cuts, none of that hyperactive “MTV-style editing” everybody was always complaining about. Just the stillness, the gravity, the gorgeous severity of

But really, “Nothing Compares 2 U” was a Prince song; Sinéad made it a Sinéad O’Connor song the moment she sang it. And this is her greatest act of defiance, of confrontation, of self-possession. This is a hostile takeover. She embodies this song on a molecular level. She changes the fundamental meaning of the song. She steals this song. She owns this song now. Just the audacity of that. The greatness and the fearlessness that requires. Sinéad O’Connor saying, “I’m gonna steal a song from Prince” is like Nicolas Cage saying, “I’m gonna steal the Declaration of Independence.” But that’s what she did.