60 Songs That Explain the '90s

by Rob Harvilla

“I Will Always Love You,”8 which graces the zillion-selling soundtrack to the 1992 mega-melodrama The Bodyguard, is one of these ’90s songs so ubiquitous, so humongous, so inescapable that I don’t blame you one bit for trying to escape it now, because if you hear it again you won’t be able to stop thinking about it, which means you won’t be able to stop thinking about 1992, and everything that happened after 1992, and specifically everything that happened to her.9 What amazes me though is that this song can still bear the weight, bear the myth, bear the heartbreaking tragedy of it all, with a resilience and a dignity and a slow-burn vivacity even most zillion-selling songs can’t manage for this long, all thanks to Whitney’s pure volcanic force, and the song’s pristine controlled sense of mega-melodramatic escalation, and especially the fuckin’ key change.