60 Songs That Explain the '90s

by Rob Harvilla

What if the assless-bodysuit man is literally Prince? All I know for sure is, if you play “Gett Off” in an aquarium, the sharks will start fucking you. Another uncomfortable silence between me and my mother occurred in her Toyota when Prince’s “Cream” came on the radio, and that song’s intro isn’t even tremendously porn-y: a few abstract moans, a cowbell, a simple boom-kick drumbeat, and a sultry and muted guitar riff that makes it sound like the guitar, also, is wearing an assless canary-yellow bodysuit, and okay, yeah, it’s way pornier than I remember. And also the song’s called “Cream.” And also it’s Prince, who would spend the rest of the ’90s releasing a reliably great but hilariously indigestible amount of material—including the 1996 three-disc set called Emancipation, followed by the 1998 three- or four- or five-disc set called Crystal Ball—whilst also changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol and writing the word slave on his cheek, actions that seemed merely eccentric at the time but revealed themselves, with the fullness of time, to have far more troubling and vital exploitative-music-business explanations.7 Take him seriously, always. He’s earned it.