60 Songs That Explain the '90s

by Rob Harvilla

In 1992, for her second song as the musical guest during her second appearance on Saturday Night Live, Sinéad O’Connor sang Bob Marley’s “War” a cappella, and after singing the last line—“We have confidence in the victory of good over evil”—she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II and yelled, “Fight the real enemy.” Her mother’s photo of Pope John Paul II, as it turns out. The photo Sinéad pulled off her mother’s bedroom wall on the day her mother died. She did this to protest child abuse within the Catholic church. However you feel about this—maybe especially if it upsets you—this was, inarguably, the single most punk rock gesture of the 1990s.

don’t recommend rewatching the “Criminal” video now. As you may recall, it’s just Fiona Apple—NYC native, piano prodigy, jazz aficionado, hip-hop fan, wounding singer-songwriter, and architect of the sweltering 1996 debut album Tidal—writhing and scowling and sulking and semi-flirting amid faceless, passed-out heroin-chic models. This isn’t a moral objection or anything. It’s just that nowadays the “Criminal” video plays like the Joker directing an Abercrombie & Fitch ad,

and the hell with it. (The video’s actual director, Mark Romanek, also made the video for Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt” that makes me cry every time I watch it, so overall he’s totally cool with me.)

To my mind, McLachlan’s 1993 hit “Possession”—a spectral, driving rock song inspired by disturbing letters she’d received from a stalker who then tried to sue her for quoting him—sets the tone for Fiona’s work, specifically the issue of songs as therapy, and songs as weaponry. Songs you write that are then used to attack you; songs that you then write to defend yourself against the attacks triggered by your earlier songs. This problem of mistaken intent. Of misunderstanding. Of misappropriation. The first way Fiona Apple tried to fight back against it all was by singing searingly unmistakable words as forcefully as possible.

dude. But “Criminal” was the clear breakout moment: the percussive clatter, the accelerated pace amid Tidal’s myriad unearthly ballads, and the thrilling cliff dive of the song’s bridge when she howls, “What would an angel say? / The devil wants to know.” But “Criminal” the phenomenal song had to constantly contend with “Criminal” the controversial video, and Fiona Apple the songwriter had to constantly contend with Fiona Apple the blunt and unfiltered interview subject who’d tell you the truth if you asked her.

And she brought that commitment to the truth to every conversation, about anything, with anyone, even if it hurt her, even if she was wildly misconstrued at every turn, even if it depleted and exhausted her to know that everyone was listening to her, not to mention leering at her.

The vowels are getting knocked the fuck out. The vowels will submit. The vowels are destined for relegation. Majestic, elongated, luxuriantly contemptuous vowels. Those long ehhhhhs and eeeeeees and ahhhhhhs. “You make me laaaaauugh / Gimme your autograaaaaaaaph.” Each Liam vowel gets its own little bespoke parka and thousand-yard sneer and pair of brass knuckles. Even on the ballads. Even on The Ballad. Each Liam vowel ignites its own miniature drunken brawl.

Can I be honest and say that I find Liam and Noel’s insults to be more vibrant, to be more musical, to be of greater lasting sociocultural value than most other bands’ songs? For example, in a May 2020 episode of the podcast Matt Morgan’s Funny How?, Noel observed how much weight Liam had gained during the initial days of COVID-19 self-quarantine. Specifically, Noel said, “He’s not fucking isolating from the sweet trolley, is he?”

And meanwhile the hills are alive with the sound of Britpop, which as an unworldly Ohioan teen I mostly understand as a rad new subgenre in which English rock stars are talking just absolutely wild shit in the media all the time.

Talking wild shit, often, about America.

What you hear, on “Wonderwall,” in real time, is Liam Gallagher realizing that even if it is a bit Sting, this song suits him just fine. What you hear is Liam and Noel setting their differences aside and delivering the greatest power ballad of their generation, in which Oasis ascend, and transcend, and ultimately explode in hilarious contemptuous megalomania.

Cocaine: the Devil’s Reverb. Cocaine: the Other Third Gallagher Brother. Cocaine: the sweetest sweet in the Sweet Trolley. Cocaine: the mortar in the Wonderwall. Jerkoffs need power ballads too, and in fact need them more than anybody.

I fell for Billy first. William Patrick Corgan Jr. Lead singer, lead guitarist, rhythm guitarist, possibly-all-other-guitars guitarist, maybe bassist as well, frontman, primary songwriter, mastermind, and dictator of Chicago rock band the Smashing Pumpkins.

Billy is a ’70s-rock-star sorta guy, and not the punk parts of the ’70s: Think Yes (for the prog), think Alice Cooper (for the cheeseball glam), think Cheap Trick (for the defiantly uncool power pop). No time to play it cool; no time to be cool. Billy schemed. He whined. He took himself ultra-seriously; he embraced the pro-wrestling-heel silliness inherent to taking yourself that seriously.

He was a Michael surrounded by Titos, you might say, if you were him. And the result, on a grouchy and colossal and pulverizing jam like Siamese Dream opener “Cherub Rock,” is a rock band that sounds 200 feet tall but also doesn’t quite sound like a functioning rock band at all. Instead, it sounds like a morbid, tyrannical, self-consciously villainous, outrageously talented person imagining a rock band in his head.

In Billy’s defense, at the time he was promoting the Pumpkins’ 1995 double-CD monstrosity Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which is a stupid title for an album I loved with all my blackened teenaged heart. I loved its unembarrassed excess, its maudlin grandiosity, its rad-as-hell guitar solos.

Limp Bizkit’s 1997 debut album, Three Dollar Bill, Y’All, is best known for its phenomenally disrespectful cover of the 1987 George Michael pop classic “Faith,” which gets my vote for the all-time cover song that most rigorously despises the original. Limp Bizkit covers George Michael the way Atilla the Hun covered Europe.

Which brings us, regrettably, to July 1999, when the ordinarily bucolic hamlet of Rome, New York, plays reluctant host to the infamous dipshit rage-fest that is Woodstock ’99, characterized by its sheer corporate greed, its epidemic of sexual assault and violence against women, its penchant for arson and destruction, its total disregard for private property and human

For a song in which two teenage girls argue over a boy who is clearly seriously dating both of them, ”The Boy Is Mine” is deceptively serene. They hardly raise their voices; it’s like they’d be screaming at each other if they weren’t stuck in a crowded library.

It’s a knife fight with no knives, just side-eyes. This is the Coldest War. This is liquid nitrogen incarnate. They trade off lines, but their voices intertwine so exquisitely that sometimes it doesn’t feel like a duet at all.

They both sing the hell out of the song, but that physical distance between them is the main attraction: The song only works if you truly believe that they can’t stand to be even six feet away from each other. When they finally do walk down their respective staircases and take center stage and risk any sort of proximity, it’s an electric moment whether you believe all the rumors or not. Monica sings, “Not yours.” Brandy sings, “But mine.” You decide what they’re really saying.

FUCK IT. We’re doing “Macarena.” And we will not tolerate, in this or any other venue, the unseemly specter of Performative “Macarena” Hatred. Nor will we tolerate, while we’re busy not tolerating things, dismissive use of the term one-hit wonder. I am morally and philosophically opposed to this term, as I find it to be rude, and furthermore, I’ve found there is quite a bit of wiggliness to the term hit, if you’ll forgive the term wiggliness. And so let us instead embrace the (I feel much better about this term) wondrousness of the supposed one-hit wonders, the flukes, the oddballs, the improbable comebacks, the covers of covers, the remixes of remixes, the pre-Peak Internet viral sensations. And let us begin with, yes, the extra-fluky (and extra-wondrous) “Macarena.” Fuck it.

There are a few different versions, but attractive, half-dressed young people dancing the Macarena is the unifying theme, and yet the real attraction is the Los Del Río fellas themselves in their natty suits, delivering the indelible refrain, perhaps dancing themselves for like 1.5 seconds at a time, perhaps twirling an umbrella, perhaps singing into one of those old-timey hanging microphones, and for sure generally still minding their own goddamn business.

There’s something quite charming about the inherent culture clash, the generational clash here: It’s like a relentlessly youth-targeted Gap ad that inexplicably includes the two middle-aged Gap executives who green-lit the ad.

What I can tell you about Billy Ray’s version of “Achy Breaky Heart” is that the way he sings the line, “You can tell your dog to bite my leg,” is country as hell. He sings that line like it’s the funniest joke ever told, and that’s how you gotta sing every line, so that’s how he sings every line. But no matter how jovial and unthreatening Billy Ray might’ve been, there’s no getting around the fact that this song achieved the sort of blockbuster oversaturation that inspires Performative Hatred in even the kindest and most open-minded among us. Even the inevitable delightful “Weird Al” Yankovic parody, 1993’s “Achy Breaky Song,” is much grouchier than his usual, expertly rhyming “you know I hate that song a bunch” with “it might just make me lose my lunch.” If you’re like Al and you still hate this one, too, I get it. But Billy Ray’s audible mullet will still reverberate forever.

PERFORMATIVELY HATE ’EM WHILE you can, by the way, because the very concept of the one-hit wonder is dying. They’ve done studies; they’ve compiled data.4 The biggest songs spend more time overall in the Hot 100 now—months as opposed to weeks—so there’s less room for newer shit,

The consequence for pop music is that you get fewer delightfully arbitrary thunderbolts like Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Come on Eileen” (No. 1 in 1983) or a-ha’s “Take on Me” (No. 1 in 1985) or Cutting Crew’s “(I Just) Died in Your Arms” (No. 1 in 1987, love the parentheses). And precisely because the artists in question did not endure as pop stars in the years to come (sorry), those hit songs come to define, and also perhaps explain, the years and indeed the whole decade in which they were briefly hit songs and those artists were briefly pop stars. This phrase one-hit wonder, despite being hella rude, is itself growing archaic, and we will miss it when it’s gone, and miss the one-hit wonders when they’re gone.

That sense of hard-fought exuberance—irrational, fleeting, tempered by the subversion-proof mainstream, and yet mercifully undimmed by the merciless passage of time—is what we can’t afford to lose, no matter how silly that exuberance often sounds and feels.

What’s the deal with “Man, it’s a hot one”? What elevates this blithe, half-muttered, temperature-based remark to the pantheon? Could part of the attraction be doubt? “When I listened to the lyrics and heard, ‘It’s a hot one,’ those lyrics are outside of time and gravity,” Carlos himself observed to Rolling Stone in 2019. “I thought we had entered a place of immortality. But with all respect to Rob, I said, ‘I’m having a little challenge believing you that what you’re singing is true.’”

Wow. Is it really a hot one, Rob? And who exactly are you to say? Don’t mansplain the weather to me, Rob. Let’s not discount the role of gentle derision here, and irony, and sarcasm. Your sarcasm, though, not the singer’s. Rob Thomas sings the line “Man, it’s a hot one” like he’s hot. He sounds sweaty. Grant him that. And anyway pop-song immortality often starts as somewhat of a joke. Ha ha ha, “Man, it’s a hot one.” That’s so dumb. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.

And what I know for a fact is that Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” is the platonic ideal of your first rap song, or at least the first rap song you ever loved.7 It’s a better song the less hip-hop you’re familiar with, the less context you have in general, the younger and more naïve you are. It’s the best rap song imaginable if you are but an adorable newborn foal, your shaky legs tottering adorably on the Disneyfied ice of late childhood or early pre-adolescence. It’s better if you don’t know shit about shit.

“Ice Ice Baby” is a way better song, for example, if you’re unaware that it samples the absolute bejesus out of the 1981 Queen and David Bowie arena-rock masterpiece “Under Pressure”; it’s a better song if you’ve never seen that exquisitely mortifying MTV clip of Vanilla Ice attempting to explain that “Ice Ice Baby” doesn’t sample “Under Pressure.” It’s better if you’re unaware that the lines, “Police on the scene / You know what I mean / They pass me up / Confronted all the dope fiends,” is the purest expression of white privilege in the history of American song.

Natalie Imbruglia sings, “Illusion never changed / Into something real,” and majestically contradicts herself, because pop music changes illusions into something real, something wondrous, all the time. And sometimes one song is all it takes.

The eternal question is what percentage of this band’s audience ever “got it,” however you describe that audience, however you define the notion of getting it, however you characterize what Rage’s it even was.

Whereas the great strength, and perhaps the ultimate weakness, of “Killing in the Name” is that “Some of those that work forces /Are the same that burn crosses” is unambiguous, but “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” is deliciously ambiguous.

“Killing in the Name” doesn’t judge. Anger is a gift, or so I’ve been told, and all Rage could ever ask is that you listen hard and get angry, but also that you be careful who you give that gift to, and who you accept it from. Beyond that, it’s enough to scream those words in a giant crowd of people also screaming those words, enough to feel that ecstatic collective fury, enough to belong. Because that’s an American Dream, too.

Now, the party line, amongst rock critics anyway, is that grunge killed hair metal. That doesn’t look right to me in lower-case, actually. Grunge Killed Hair Metal. There. That’s better. That’s the party line. Late-’80s MTV, you get GNR, you get Poison, you get Def Leppard, you get Cinderella, you get (hooray!) Bon Jovi. You get Spandex. You get hairspray. They, at least, get a lot of chicks. But early-’90s MTV, you get Nirvana, you get Pearl Jam, you get Soundgarden, you get Alice in Chains. You get darkness, you get self-loathing, you get zero chicks, or at least zero chicks willing to tolerate dudes who use any variation of the phrase getting chicks.

Nowadays I think of the “November Rain” video—which in 2018 became the oldest music video on YouTube to surpass one billion views, which is a phenomenal backhanded compliment—as the end of something, a putting away of forbidden childish things, a last gasp of shameless amoral cheeseball hair-metal majesty before I submit to my true destiny of being an Alt-Rock Teenager.

“Under the Bridge” is also a sumptuously mellow anthem about, well, drawing some blood under a bridge, and let just say that as a doofus 12-year-old who still didn’t know enough to even want to try any drugs, I was in no position to wrap my head around the heroin of it all, and that goes for every ’90s rock band I adored that occasionally or not-so-occasionally wrote hit songs about heroin, which was most of them.

They certainly rearranged mine. “Particle Man’ rewired me, and specifically rewired my sense of what cool was, or could be, or should be. Who gets to be cool? Who decides? What did my fellow teenagers think was cool from 1990 onward? Is coolness solely the province of angst, and rage, and furious moping, and confrontation, and crunchy guitars, and rampant badassness? Or does one achieve True Coolness by subverting that angst and rage and punishing volume and by instead embracing exuberance, and surrealism, and the sort of shrewd and defiant silliness often dismissed as quirky?

He’s a self-aware medium-funky white guy during a golden era for self-aware medium-funky white guys. Not a whole golden era, maybe, but okay certainly a golden hour.

Shit, we’re back to the suspicious self-deprecation, but I blame “Creep” for making me this way.

We are what we pretend to be; we are the hostile guitar sounds—JOOT-JOOT JOOT—we improvise in a failed attempt to sabotage the songs about what we’ve become. Maybe that’s pompous rock-star bullshit, but it’s pompous rock-star bullshit that defined the next 10 years of my life.

Pearl Jam’s fame, in my teenage memory, is inextricable from Pearl Jam’s intense discomfort with fame. Or Eddie Vedder’s discomfort with fame, at least. Pearl Jam, for the rest of the ’90s, are synonymous, for me, with rock-star self-negation. They retreat. They recoil. They refuse. So

Do not trust anyone who claims to know the exact words to “Yellow Ledbetter,” a transcendently languid classic-rock jam built, as Pearl Jam lead guitarist Mike McCready more or less concedes, on the foundation of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing,” and bolstered by Eddie Vedder’s most transfixing bout of mumbling in the public domain.

trio of Cheryl “Salt” James, Sandra “Pepa” Denton, and Deidra “Spinderella” Roper2—expertly glide across the line between risqué and obscene.

“For 30 years, we have been telling people that ‘Push It’ isn’t about sex, but no one ever believes us,” Pepa lamented to The Guardian in 2017. “Honestly, for us, as young girls, it was about dancing.” I respect that, and I believe her; You better respect and believe us is the whole goddamn point of the Salt-N-Pepa catalog. But I do think Salt and Pepa are the only two people on earth who believe that.

To wit, Blacks’ Magic also has a song called “Let’s Talk About Sex,” a breezy and bumptious shuffle with one of the catchiest hooks Salt-N-Pepa ever devised—“Let’s talk about all the good things / And the bad things / That may be”—that delves further into the love-versus-lust conundrum but never sounds like a lecture or a sermon or a junior-high health class.

All of this—the deadly seriousness, but the early total dance-floor frivolity, too—feeds directly into 1994’s Very Necessary, Salt-N-Pepa’s biggest and best record, which endearingly denounces pop-star gossip (“None of Your Business”) even as it gives everyone plenty to talk about

It also features the group’s two highest-charting hits, both of them mildly lewd and entirely joyous and only deepened by Salt-N-Pepa’s hard-fought wisdom, even if you can’t hear a trace of the fight in the songs themselves. “Whatta Man,” a remake of Laura Lyndell’s 1968 Stax soul single, is a delectable summit with powerhouse Oakland girl group En Vogue, who absolutely crush one of the sweetest and coolest and most indestructible hooks mid-’90s pop had to offer, but yeah, no, “Shoop” is the one.