60 Songs That Explain the '90s

by Rob Harvilla

Here is my truth: Every time I listen to this song, when Pepa raps, “Girls, what’s my weakness?,” I physically point to a corner of the room or the car or wherever, as if cueing the imaginary girls there to yell, “Men!” I look ridiculous. It’s humiliating. I don’t care. A song that compels you to gladly humiliate yourself is the mark of true greatness. “Shoop” is a marvel of male objectification, a gender-swapped catcall summit.

This song is absurdly fun, this song is silly, this song is free of consequence, and that freedom is all the sweeter for how hard Salt-N-Pepa have always worked to teach us that freedom from consequence isn’t a real thing.3

I wanna fuck you like an animal I wanna feel you from the inside

Or, as I heard it 600,000 times on the radio: I wanna [ ] you like an animal I wanna feel you from the inside

Ah, yes, that’s my shit. An all-time-great goofy radio edit. The delicate elision. The dead space. The offending word just snipped out of the fabric of existence. So chaste. Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” is a transcendent pop song as well: hooky, mesmerizing, and deliciously subversive. You know what’s more subversive than writing and singing this song, though? Playing this song on the radio. The first DJ who cued up “Closer” violated more taboos and shattered more sociocultural norms than t...

don’t mean to downplay the many transgressions of dictatorial Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor, whom I worshiped in high school, and who often complained in interviews that modern rock stars have utterly demystified themselves: They talk too much, take too many photographs, and in general do too much explaining. They’re ruining everything; they’re ruining the illusion. ...

And I took it. Trent’s isolation was my isolation; his hate was my hate. “Closer” ends with a lengthy, majestic industrial-funk keyboard breakdown, and I memorized every individual second the same way I memorized all those Civil War battles in history class, and let’s just say I don’t remember jack shit about the Civil War now.

Alright, so picture a guitar-wielding man in a shredded, assless, canary-yellow bodysuit performing a porno-funk song called “Gett Off”—yes, two T’s in “Gett,” and you know why—at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards, spinning around to emphasize the asslessness of his bodysuit right when he gets to the line, “Move your big ass ’round this way, so I can work on that zipper, baby.” Is that more or less subversive than a prog-metal song called “Stinkfist” or an industrial-rock chorus of “I wanna fuck you like an animal”?

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.

Listen, this is uncouth, but I’d like to think she’d appreciate my being direct: “Fuck and Run” is way more about the running than the fucking. Yeah, I feel weird saying that; I feel weird reading about Exile in Guyville at all. Even Liz Phair’s biggest fans have a tendency to write wildly out-of-pocket shit about Liz Phair; even glowing reviews of Exile in Guyville can be super-gnarly, dude. Summoned by her sneaky-deadpan voice—and the dense, nervous, blurry furtiveness of her guitar-playing, not to mention her blunt and exasperated and legit-genius lyricism—new Guyvilles sprout up around Liz Phair wherever she goes, and with every challenging but inevitably misunderstood new album she makes.

All these Guyvilles usually intend to praise her, but they also seek to control her, to define her, to opine on what she should do next to stay in our good graces.

Exile in Guyville, in short, becomes a sort of self-perpetuating Guyville generator, in part because it’s a singularly fantastic, momentous, era- and genre-defining album, yes, but also because Liz Phair is, indeed, a dirty-talking lady, and society tends to respond very poorly to dirty-talking ladies.

Please don’t make me prattle on about the lost art of physical cassette mixtapes that you painstakingly dub yourself, and then you scrawl out all the artists and song titles in your lousy childlike handwriting, and then you give the whole tape some cutesy pompous quasi-literary title like I AM NOT AFRAID OF STORMS, and then you slip it to Your Crush Who Sits in Front of You in AP Biology or Philosophy 101 or whatever and you just pray the tape conveys some semblance of an idea of what a sensitive and passionate and charismatic person you are. It’s a beautiful thing. The first song on Side 2. Even burned mix CDs don’t got the first song on Side 2. It’s not the same thing.

can’t make you love me if you don’t

No offense to Sunny Day Real Estate, U2, Metallica, or the Goo Goo Dolls, but Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” is on another level on every conceivable level, and I never put it on a mixtape for a lady because (a) of course I could make anyone love me, and (b) this song possesses such a fearsome, lovelorn power that it would’ve somehow physically erased every other song on the tape.

That silver streak is a bit on the nose, as metaphors go, for a young instant-classic blues/rock/jazz/pop singer, for an old soul, for a masterful song interpreter somehow hitting a dazzling new peak at 42 years old and on her 11th album.

Even as an alt-rockin’ chowderhead teenager who thought 42 was primo nursing-home age, I cowered ever-so-slightly in the presence of “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” the monster piano-driven heartbreak ballad to end them all: I had my little crushes, and my little mixtapes to feebly woo all my little crushes, but subconsciously I recognized this song as adult, as the Real Shit, and more importantly I recognized myself as being nowhere near adult enough to go near the Real Shit.

I cannot convey to you how loud—how comically, crushingly, terrifyingly loud—Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was the first time I heard it. You will assume I’m exaggerating for melodramatic effect, and you will be correct, but no, no, dude, seriously: I’ve gone to probably 1,000 concerts, and spent cumulative decades of my life with overburdened car stereos screaming into my ears and noise-canceling headphones screaming even more directly into my ears, but, no, dude, for sure, I am telling you that Kurt Cobain’s voice will forever be the loudest, most terrifying noise I’ve ever heard

in my life.

Amazes me, the will of instinct. Whump whump whump whump. Over the terrifying colossal inhuman transgressive not-punk-rock racket we can hear the plummeting bodies of feathered ’80s hair-metal gods who flew too close to the sun and still didn’t burn but then Kurt Cobain, Tortured Voice of a Generation, incinerated their wings with one contemptuous breath and sent them spiraling down to earth, their bodies now crashing with a sickening mangled thud onto Matt’s roof. Winger (whump), Jackyl (whump), Poison (whump), Slaughter (whump). Bloody night out, bloody night out, bloody night out.

How long did I sit there, physically and psychologically obliterated by Nevermind, until Matt’s mom scraped me out of Matt’s computer chair?

And then we listen to Nirvana’s ultra-scabrous new album, In Utero, which Kurt keeps saying in interviews is The Real Him, the raw and uncompromising sound that’s always been in his head, not that Nevermind bullshit, that sounds like Mötley Crüe to him now, that embarrasses him now, aren’t we all embarrassed by it now? And so now we’re embarrassed, just a little, by how much we love(d) Nevermind, and no no totally we totally love In Utero instead, which seems to consist entirely of the thrashing, gouging, exhilarating screeches in between the chords of “In Bloom,” and there’s tons of I No Longer Wish to Be the Tortured Voice of a Generation screaming—“HEYYYY GO AWAYYYY”—but we’re into it, totally, no more Mötley Crüe cheeseball shit for us, no sir, and when he screams, “GO AWAYYYY,” he doesn’t mean us, no way, and also, oh, hell yeah, Nirvana did MTV Unplugged. Awesome. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is gonna sound so rad on Unplugged.

If he takes the breath the song keeps going, and the song ends, and the CD ends, and we leave the room, and everyone keeps getting older all the time, and we’re older now, too, and then suddenly we’re on the school bus at the corner of East Union and North Harmony, right in front of our old junior high, when the radio tells us that he’s gone. What do you mean he’s already gone by the time the Unplugged CD comes out, before he shuts us all up, before he takes the breath, before he keeps going after he takes the breath?

He was never real to me. Not really. I thought too much of him to believe he was real: a “real person,” a mere mortal, a vulnerable flawed melodramatic human, a scrawny kid with an aching stomach. Yes, he’s a kid to me now: I’m, like, 17 years older now than he ever got. He’s a myth to me, a deified abstraction, a creator and destroyer of worlds: He destroyed the ’80s of my childhood and created the ’90s of my adolescence. I am never, if you want the truth, a true Nirvana superfan, but I mourn him all the same, and worship him all the same, because my understanding is that everyone worships him, here in the ’90s he created, here in the computer chair in the bedroom I’ll never leave. Never take me home.

ANOTHER WAY TO PUT it is that you’re nobody till somebody kills you, but once you’re painted into a mural, you become somebody else.

My favorite thing about “Juicy”2 is the way Biggie gets to devise and burnish his own myth for a change, paint his own self-portrait masterpiece that captures his essence but keeps some of his secrets. “It was all a dream / I used to read Word Up! magazine.” Fact check: true, and that’s also very arguably the greatest opening line in rap history, because you can feel the hunger in his voice, and you can hear his awe, too, as it dawns on him that his hunger might actually be sated. This is the moment where Biggie makes it, the moment where he ascends the mountaintop and maybe climbs up onto the cross.

The pain, and destitution, and conflict, and hardship, and desperation of Biggie’s upbringing—the glory but also the atrocity of his beloved Brooklyn—is palpable throughout Ready to Die, on hard-nosed but startlingly vulnerable songs like “Things Done Changed” and “Everyday Struggle.” But there’s something so tremendously charming to me about Voletta Wallace’s never-ending multimedia fact-checking of “Juicy.” I am charmed, I suspect, as a defense mechanism, as a feeble attempt to ease the excruciating pain of watching as this woman has to speak about the son she lost in every biography, every documentary, every new elaborate and justifiably hagiographic tribute.

Every Selena record, from her self-titled 1989 debut forward, is a negotiation between Selena the Established Tejano Star and Selena the Future Global Pop Star. When should she cross over? How should she cross over? She is singing in English on the sumptuous prom-theme title track to July 1995’s Dreaming of You; the song finally landed her on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 22, and the whole record was the first Billboard No. 1 album mostly sung in Spanish, but these accomplishments came months after Selena’s death,5 and from that day forward Selena the Person, as we’d ideally remember her, now exists partly in the shadow of Selena the Sainted and Extravagantly Mourned Tragic Figure.

Stars are manifestly not just like us, and yet they totally are, and that maddening contradiction will taunt us forever, but we should never stop trying to unravel it, and that, I suppose—beyond the mourning, the celebrating, the deifying—is what all the murals are for.

WHITNEY HOUSTON WILL NOT be diminished and reduced so easily, no matter how sad it makes you to think about her; Whitney Houston will pack a galaxy’s worth of staggering beauty and ecstatic release into just three words, and she’ll do it herself.

The music in this song is lovely. Shout-out music. But have you heard the a cappella version? It’s phenomenal. All we’ll ever need is Whitney Houston’s voice. The rest is noise. The rest is noise pollution. What if we just luxuriated in this voice, to the exclusion of all else? What if we burrowed deep into those 11 spectacularly unadorned words and refused to ever leave?

“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.

Whitney Houston is the Mozart, the Picasso, the Frida, the Aretha, the Alpha and Omega of key changes, and the “I Will Always Love You” key change is her masterpiece: It’s like you’ve been shot out of a cannon directly into another cannon, and then you get shot out of that one.

What I’m saying is that sometimes you gotta let the singer be the singer and let the song be the song, and not hold its former culture-throttling ubiquity against it, nor hold its long-term unbearable biographical baggage against it. Empty your mind of all unpleasant and unnecessary context. Approximate, as best you can, the mentality of a disastrously naïve 13-year-old. Try it. Let’s try it with something else.

Shit, here comes Britney Spears. The final boss of unpleasant and unnecessary context, forever wielding the present tense10 like a flamethrower. Is it really a good idea to reapproach Britney’s culture-throttling 1998 debut single “… Baby One More Time” with total naïvete? (No.) Can we really make ourselves forget everything this song did to her, and did to many of our brains? (Also no.)

“Oh baby baby.” Every phase of the frantic and treacherous Teenage Pop Star experience. The gritty and humble origins. The meteoric rise. The jubilant, screaming fans. The sneering haters, some of whom are screaming even louder. The snide accusations of lip-syncing and other alleged inauthenticities. The backlash. The backlash to the backlash. The whiplash that comes with growing up in comically exaggerated fast-forward. The withering light and stultifying pitch-darkness of true superstardom. The innocence you lose when you insist you’re not that innocent. You careen through all of that—the rise and the fall and the rise and the fall—in three seconds. Three words, three seconds. Two of those words are baby. The most spectacular and iconic and morally fraught delivery of the word baby since Ronnie Spector.

Britney’s too-muchness works for her, spectacularly, if you manage to just focus on the song, focus on her triumphantly apocalyptic diction. Focus on the percussive megaton explosiveness of her syllables: “Oh baby baby / The reason AH breathe AH is you AH.” Each syllable triggers an aftershock. Each syllable leaves a crater. Every breath is a bomb. Think about how well you know “… Baby One More Time” even if you don’t like it, how ingrained this song is in your psyche even if you’ve never once listened to it by choice. Think about the power of that, the power that exerts on the world, and the power the world then tries to exert over the teenager with all that power. Or, even better: Stop thinking! No thinking! The whole point was not to think about any of it. Give us one more transcendent pop song to not think too hard about.

Aaliyah’s 1994 debut album Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number, produced and mostly written by R. Kelly, is one of the most fundamentally cursed12 documents in pop-music history; cruelly, for years, thanks to all that industry chaos, it was also the only Aaliyah album you could easily hear.

Aaliyah has a smokey, sinuous voice and a truly staggering charisma-to-force ratio: maximum charisma, minimum force. Her falsetto can float off into the stratosphere, and her lower register can drill down into the core of the earth without disturbing the ground beneath her feet. “One in a Million”—written by Missy Elliott and Timbaland—features one of the best ’90s song openings in which nothing much happens, a subdued and self-contained Timbaland beat suffused in chirping crickets and in fact conjuring up a whole swamp, a whole ecosystem, a whole planet. The squiggles, the airplane whooshes, the narcotized rhythm that staggers like a drum-and-bass track stuck in quicksand: A lesser singer would be overwhelmed, would be engulfed by all of this. A lesser singer would try to do too much with it and end up doing virtually nothing.