60 Songs That Explain the '90s

by Rob Harvilla

CÉLINE DION sings her songs like they owe her money. She sings her songs like she’s a street-walkin’ cheetah with a heart full of napalm. She sings as though the song were Sisyphus and she were the boulder. She came here to kick ass and sing songs, and she’s about out of ass. 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.

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.

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.

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. That’s not the line. That’s not what he says. I misheard so much of what he said and misinterpreted most of the rest. But I’ll never truly believe that, and you can’t make me, and I can’t make myself.

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:

Shit. This song—written and coproduced by our old friend Max Martin, who understood the baffling provocation of having a 16-year-old girl sing the phrase, “Hit me baby, one more time” repeatedly, even if he insisted he was just doing the melodic math—is too much. She’s too much. Britney’s too-muchness works for her, spectacularly, if you manage to just focus on the song, focus on her triumphantly apocalyptic diction.

So you, there, cavorting in the crowded bar, screaming along to this famous jubilant country-pop song, you may be, in this moment, imagining yourself as a super-famous pop star. You might be fantasizing about being Shania Twain. But believe it or not, in this moment, while she’s actually singing the song and really being the super-famous pop star, Shania Twain might very well be fantasizing about being you. A normal, frivolous, average-sexy person having fun, with no suffocating pop-star responsibilities whatsoever, whooping it up in a crowded bar where no one notices her. She’s just a real person, and so real that nobody notices her or demands that she be someone else. With the lights out, it’s less dangerous, and for a change, why don’t we all entertain ourselves?