I’ve called these “Pop Songs” using a fairly expansive definition of “Pop” which with a few exceptions just means “songs by bands”. For no reasons that would hold up under scrutiny other than to refine the scope of the thing and to play to my actual knowledge and interest this does not include individual pop stars like Madonna or Britney, hip hop, anything instrumental or jazzy, or any songs by Green Jello. Remember those guys? I have no idea why they just popped into my head, but that’s the kind of thing we’re dealing with here.

Also, I’ve tried (and occasionally failed) to limit this to one song per band, per album, because nobody wants to hear me do a track-by-track exegesis of June of 44′s Four Great Points.

I won’t go too much into the dark, nerdy magic behind the spreadsheets I made to get this list together before I started writing it up, but as a loose guideline, I used four scales to determine the rank of each song: 1. Objective musical value (oops, yikes), 2. Value to me (did I love it then?, do I love it now?), 3. ’90s-ness, and 4. Influence (on, like, future, non-’90s bands). As an example of how this worked in practice, “Hey Jealousy”, clearly the greatest song ever written, got extremely high marks in categories 2. and 3. and extremely low marks in categories 1. and 4. (because let’s be honest), which is why it is where it is on the list and (spoilers) not at #1.

This list is designed to be skimmed through and strongly disagreed with and occasionally nodded sagely at, and I hope you enjoy it. It’s been really fun to make.

Here’s the list, in 10 parts:

• The Top 200 Pop Songs of the ’90s: 200-181
• The Top 200 Pop Songs of the ’90s: 180-161
• The Top 200 Pop Songs of the ’90s: 160-141
• The Top 200 Pop Songs of the ’90s: 140-121
• The Top 200 Pop Songs of the ’90s: 120-101
• The Top 200 Pop Songs of the ’90s: 100-81
• The Top 200 Pop Songs of the ’90s: 80-61
• The Top 200 Pop Songs of the ’90s: 60-41
• The Top 200 Pop Songs of the ’90s: 40-21
• The Top 200 Pop Songs of the ’90s: 20-1

And if you want to listen along, here’s a playlist of all the songs that exist on Spotify, which is most of them. Have fun!

Some time in the year 2000, I got a message from my roommate while I was on a weekend trip saying simply that something really bad had happened and that I should call. There could only be one disaster catastrophic enough to warrant that much urgency, and, with a rising horror, I knew what it was immediately: My CDs had been stolen. All 700 of them. Someone had kicked down our door and ignored my TV, VCR, and laptop in favor of obliterating half a lifetime of collecting and curation in one cruel blow. All I had left were the 12 albums in my CaseLogic travel pack. In the months that followed (during which they were essentially all I had to listen to) these would come to be known as the 12 Apostles (if you’re interested, it was kind of an odd mix: My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything, Get Up Kids’ Something to Write Home About, At the Drive In’s In Casino Out, A St. Etienne comp., Wilco’s Summerteeth, Placebo’s Without You I’m Nothing, an Art Blakey album, Blur’s 13, and some other stuff I don’t remember anymore).

But so the weird thing was that here I was in a new millenium with an unpleasantly fresh start and a shockingly material, non-metaphorical break from everything I had lovingly tried to salvage from a decade of musical exploration and discovery. Just me and 10 years of memories and an uncertain future of pop music stretching out in front of me without a scrap of continuity to hold me over except 12 random-ass CDs in a CaseLogic as a reminder that there was once a time when I devoted abundant amounts of energy to collecting little pieces of plastic and arranging them on my wall in some absurd and arcane and complicated filing system as a statement about myself and my tastes and my own weird little journey through the magical undefinable frustrating musical world of the ’90s.

About a year later (after a daring sting operation by two Dundee detectives) I miraculously had all my CDs returned to me, but that’s another story and anyway, it wasn’t really the same anymore.

Here’s my top 20:

—
20: Matthew Sweet, “Sick of Myself”

The title of Matthew Sweet’s 1995 album, 100% Fun, is a quote from Kurt Cobain’s suicide note: “The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun.” That trick – sounding upbeat and life-affirming when you’re actually having a really brutally lousy time – is something that Sweet is fantastically good at, and “Sick of Myself” is a wonderful case in point.

—

19:  Fugazi, “Bed for the Scraping”

DC was utterly saturated with Fugazi throughout my adolescence, so I have them in my blood to some extent, but Red Medicine (1995) was the first Fugazi full-length that I really got my teeth into. It was around this time (maybe a couple of years later) that I first got to see them play – during one of their annual appearances at the free outdoor summer shows Ian MacKaye organized at Fort Reno in Tenleytown – and attending that show felt almost reverential, like we were finally paying fealty to the God-creators of DC music as we knew it. Headbanging as an act of devotion.

Red Medicine is a little bit more of an intellectual album than some more “classic” Fugazi stuff, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t rock your fucking face off – just that it tends to do so somewhat more thoughtfully, and with more tempo changes.

—

18: Belle and Sebastian, “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying”

Hearing If You’re Feeling Sinister for the first time was an epiphany – I can even tell you exactly where I was (in a room, in a house – it’s not that interesting, but the point is that I remember it). It’s difficult even to really describe what it felt like except that, absurd as it seems, I hadn’t realized that you were even allowed to make music like this before.

And I’m aware that “music like this” veers pretty quickly into the (potentially) dangerous territory of whatever precious tearjerkers that chick from Garden State probably had in her record collection, but (1) that movie came out 8 years after this album, and (2) for Belle and Sebastian, “twee” was just a palette they were using to paint these lush, intricate masterpieces that, in 1996, were, well, like I said, an epiphany. Which is all a pretty roundabout way of saying that this is still one of my favorite songs to sing in the shower. Nobody writes them like they used to.

—

17: Counting Crows, “Mr. Jones”

Despite following in the hallowed footsteps of misters Loverman, Vain, and Wendal, Mr. Jones was immediately and uncontestedly the quintessential mister of the decade. This was a Buzz Bin song, I think – at least I definitely remember hearing it first on MTV – but it had a weight to it that didn’t seem like the work of a bunch of upstarts. It’s the narrative, I think, that gives it ballast, plus the three or four heaping tablespoons of emotion that Adam Duritz puts into his voice during the crescendos, and it’s just totally obvious from the first time you hear it that this is one of the great singalong jams of all time.

—

16: Belle and Sebastian, “Sleep the Clock Around”

Shortly before this album came out, I had been able to get my hands on a bootlegged cassette of a bootlegged cassette of one of the mythical 500 copies of Belle and Sebastian’s first album, Tigermilk, and the hype leading up to the release of The Boy With the Arab Strap in the dusty, cigarette-smoke stink of my ground-floor bedroom in a flophouse on 8 John Street in St. Andrews was going to be pretty tough for this Glasgow band to live up to. Obviously they did, and frankly this song was all they needed to do it, even if Arab Strap hadn’t been the masterpiece that it was.

—

15: Neutral Milk Hotel, “Two-Headed Boy”

Anyone who has ever heard In the Aeroplane Over the Sea knows that it is an assault. It is impossible to ignore. It grabs you and sits you down and forces you to listen to every moment of its sad, sad, wonderful story until you agree that you will tell everyone you know the magic words it spoke to you, except for that creeping fear that you won’t be able to remember even a hundredth part of the sweet, sweet, terrible feelings that those words make you feel once it’s over. Is how I feel about this album, anyway.

I also remember that we almost called our intramural soccer team Neutral Milk Hotel in college because someone had heard them on John Peel and thought (rather reasonably) that it was dumbest name for a band ever.

—

14: Pavement, “Cut Your Hair”

Why this is the case I don’t know, but there is something about the fact that Stephen Malkmus is quite deliberately being coy about whether he is saying “career” or “Korea” near the end of this song that always makes me really happy.

DC and Baltimore’s favorite “alternative” radio station, WHFS, was good enough to play “Cut Your Hair” essentially on repeat for about 6 months after it came out, which I feel is probably a thing that wouldn’t happen nowadays with an equivalent song.

—

13: The Cure, “A Letter to Elise”

This is random as fuck, but I was on an exchange in Monthey, Switzerland, some time in the early-ass ’90s hanging out in a mall – as you do when you are just an idiot kid and don’t what you’re supposed to do on vacations – when whatever the Swiss version of MTV is came on in a store and they were doing an hour-long Cure retrospective, because they wear their hearts on their damn sleeves in Switzerland apparently, and I just sat there and watched video after video after video – from “Pictures of You” to “Lovesong” to “Just Like Heaven” with Robert Smith whirling around on a mountaintop to “Catch” and on and on until I was just completely besotted with this band.

I know that can’t be an apocryphal story because I would have made up something much more romantic and intense for my formal introduction to The Cure if I’d been allowed to. Anyway, I’ve given this an awful lot of thought, and I’m pretty sure that “A Letter to Elise” is the best song off Wish. Discuss.

—

12: Guns and Roses, “Don’t Cry”

The first song I listened to off the Use Your Illusion albums was “Get in the Ring” – over at my friend Franz’s house. We listened to it kind of a lot, because Axl says pretty much every swear word in the book on “Get in the Ring” and that kind of thing was extremely interesting to me in those days. But once we were able to make it past that particular aspect of G’n'R, there was “Civil War” and “November Rain” and “Yesterdays” and “Don’t Cry” to contend with and even our juvenile-ass minds were sharp enough to appreciate that whatever the hell was going on here, it was fucking big.

—

11: Pearl Jam, “Black”

For Christmas of 1991, my cousin bought me U2′s Achtung Baby and Pearl Jam’s Ten. The message was very clear: The only band I ever really talked about in those days was The Beatles, and there was contemporary stuff that I needed to be listening to if I wanted to stop embarrassing myself (and indeed, my entire family) in front of the other 7th-graders. For whatever reason, it didn’t really work, and I refused to give either of those albums anywhere near the attention they deserved until years later. Which is maybe fortunate in the case of Ten, because I think I would have missed this track in all the “Jeremy” hype, and that would have been a catastrophe.

—

10: Liz Phair, “Fuck and Run”

Exile in Guyville is a crash course on how to fix all your problems with sarcasm, and “Fuck and Run” is its final exam. This is the most convincing disquisition you’ll ever hear about the three universal truths: that boys are assholes, that everyone’s an asshole, and that the only way to get through it is to have a fucking attitude about it.

Liz Phair has the best attitude of all time on Guyville, and I still think that one eye-roll from her is worth all the letters and sodas in the world.

—

9: Smashing Pumpkins, “1979″

1979 was an important year for me because I was born in it, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what the Pumpkins were going after with this one. I think what they were going after was nostalgia, the sticky-sweet homesickness for a relived past that’s just as achingly distant as a dreamed-of future. I think that if this is a feeling that you want to have, then listening to this song is like mainlining it. Be careful! The video gets all of that stuff right too, so it’s like a double dose.

—

8: Modest Mouse, “Trailer Trash”

Lonesome Crowded West made its way into my hands during the spring of 1999 when I was in my Junior year of college and there are those who would claim that it would eventually become my favorite album of all time. Me. I am those would claim that. It’s just a tough thing to come right out and say.

I remember listening to it for the first time falling asleep on the floor of a dorm room in Glasgow and waking up with a heart attack when they got to the really really loud part in “Shit Luck” (THIS PLANE IS DEFINITELY CRASHING). And I remember listening to it on a thousand road trips, which is what Modest Mouse was made for. I’ve had a lot of different favorite songs off this album over the years, but “Trailer Trash” is the actual best.

—

7. Radiohead, “Let Down”

Weirdly, the thing I remember about the day I bought this album was that it was the same day I started reading Brideshead Revisited, during the summer of my senior year in high school. Both pieces of work constitute fairly important formative moments in my late adolescence because at that age you are an open mind turned towards the world and when someone shoves into that mind something as complex and powerful as, say, OK Computer, or, like, a book that doesn’t suck, it is going to fucking resonate.

But so what happened was that I sat in my room for two straight days and read Brideshead from cover to cover and listened to this album on repeat, and the two things are now completely inseparable in my mind which is a weird but wonderful way to experience one of the greatest albums about alienation ever made and one of the greatest books about alienation ever written.

—

6. Pulp, “Common People”

Different Class is an album about not fitting in; being an underdog; watching hopelessly from the sidelines. But it’s also (especially in its latter half) about the very specific feeling you get after you’ve been to an all-night rave and you’re coming down from God-knows-what and you try to take stock of your life but everything’s in too many pieces to make any kind of sense, and then you’re stuck almost certainly in some dreadful coffee shop or all-night diner staring at a plate of uneaten toast or grits or scrambled brains and watching hopelessly from your own sidelines. Which is just a singularly unpleasant experience.

Anyway, this album came out when I was about 17 and it really spoke to me.

—

5. R.E.M., “Country Feedback”

This has always been my favorite R.E.M. song, and I’ll back that up by saying that it’s also Michael Stipe’s favorite R.E.M. song, or at least that that is a thing he used to claim when they’d play it at shows.

The Out of Time cassette tape had a “Time Side” and a “Memory Side,” which is a concept that won’t even register with anyone born after, say, 1994, but this album will forever be divided into two distinct parts for me, with the two movements of “Country Feedback” as the emotional centerpiece that unites them. If you do happen to be familiar with the frustrating magic of the Walkman’s auto-reverse function, you will recognize “Country Feedback” as one of those songs that you can rewind forever and still be at the end, which is fitting somehow.

More importantly, and setting aside the structural nuances of Out of Time for just a second, this song is utterly and permanently devastating. Listen with caution.

—

4. Nirvana, “Come as You Are”

It’s difficult to know how to talk about Nirvana because the emotional experience of their story is essentially public domain for anyone my age, but these are the snapshots that stick in my memory:

Krist Novoselic throwing his bass in the air after “Lithium” at the MTV music awards and knocking himself out with it;
The video for “In Bloom” where they’re all dressed up like “decent fellas” from the ’60s, and the experience of “In Bloom” which is mostly not knowing whether it’s OK to sing along;
The surprisingly intense liner notes from Incesticide;
The fear and consternation when it was revealed that Steve Albini would be producing In Utero;
The Unplugged performance where Kurt butchers “Pennyroyal Tea”;
That whole hospital robe thing at Reading;
Learning about Kurt’s suicide from MTV News;

And then almost 20 years with just the legacy to go on, and the Foo Fighters.

—

3. James, “Laid”

James were already just about in our collective subconscious in 1993 because of their singalong radio anthem “Sit Down”, but “Laid”, song and album, blew the roof off all that. I got my copy, I am fairly certain, through the mail-order relic that was Columbia House, and pushed past the oh-so-’90s weirdness of the album art (they are all in dresses eating bananas in front of an ornate door, clearly) to discover something vastly more rich and intricate and beautiful than I could possibly have expected.

Arriving at the crescendo of “Laid” after 10 tracks of James (and Brian Eno) being sultry and hypnotic and portentous is as satisfying a payoff as you could hope for, but the journey there is breathtaking.

—

2. Mazzy Star, “Fade Into You”

Shhhhh – Hope Sandoval is talking. She’s saying something about how she melts into your shadow and breathes the same air that you breathe but you never seem to notice. There is a fucking slide guitar that is backing up her point in a really unbelievably convincing way. The concert piano is like, “uh-huh.” It knows exactly what she is talking about. She never even has to raise her voice. “You put your hands into your head and your smiles cover your heart.”

—

1. Beck, “Loser”

Obviously.

I used to dress up for shows. The only time I dress up now is for weddings, so it’s weird to think, but I used to cogitate pretty hard about whether my tight (probably polyester) pants were too tight or just the right tight, and which T-shirt had the right (probably pretty vague) message for the occasion, and which of my 30,000 track jackets was just the right level of washed out and frayed at the edges to suit the rigorous demands of the Mooney Suzuki/Makeup/Ruby Dare/Delta 72s show I was headed out to that night in my Dad’s 1991 Toyota Camry. (I used to dress up for raves too, but that’s a different, horrifying, and certainly baggier story.)

And there’s definitely something that’s pretty silly and even maybe slightly distasteful about that (which in fairness was not a thing that I was totally unaware of at the time), but there is also something I miss about it – the idea of belonging to a thing that seemed so important that you had to have a uniform for it. I’m sure that this is a function of growing older and not a function of, like, “people don’t dress up for shows anymore”, but I’m also sure that it’s a bit different every time and that the way in which it was different in 1998 (or thereabouts) was pretty fucking sweet.

Here’s 20 more songs:

—
40: The Las, “There She Goes”

“There She Goes” was actually released in 1988, but didn’t gain traction until the Steve Lillywhite remix hit the charts in 1990. All that being said, this song didn’t really mean a whole lot to me until it appeared on the soundtrack to So I Married an Axe Murderer, which at the time I thought was probably the greatest movie soundtrack ever created, despite the fact that I had (a) not enough money to purchase it and (b) a nagging sense that maybe buying movie soundtracks wasn’t all that cool of a thing to do.

Oh, also, on the same soundtrack (and just to be confusing), you will also find the Boo Radleys version of this song, which, frankly, is pretty much the same except maybe a bit more noisy than it strictly needs to be because the point of the song is that it is clean and crisp and poppy as fuck.

—

39: Green Day, “Basket Case”

In high school we had this punk band that later became The Rejects but who were originally called PJS, short for “Pearl Jam Sucks”, and they used to go around carving slogans into desks and tables that indicated their infinite disdain for anyone lame enough to listen to shitty, corporate not-really-punk music like Green Day.

Which was a great sentiment and all, but it certainly made me very confused and ashamed and conflicted about the fact that I really liked this song and “Welcome to Paradise” and the other hit, whatever that was, and pretty much everything else on Dookie. Liking things was so much more fraught in the 9th grade.

—

38: INXS, “Beautiful Girl”

I didn’t come to truly love this song until I revisited INXS in college and discovered that they had a ballady side that was a lot more my speed than stuff like “Devil Inside” or whatever. I remember that at the time someone told me this song was about a hooker, which adds a darkness and a sadness and a poignancy to “Beautiful Girl” that I’ve always liked. For what it’s worth, Wikipedia insists that it’s actually about (keyboardist) Andrew Farriss’ baby daughter, but fuck Wikipedia.

—

37: Semisonic, “Closing Time”

This is a great song to play when you need folks to leave your party, and I mean, obviously people were always going to start playing this at the end of their shifts and so forth, but the sentiment isn’t all in the lyrics – this is just a magnificently crafted pop song. Fun Fact: Singer Dan Wilson also wrote “Someone Like You” for Adele, so the man clearly has a gift for writing a song that captures a moment.

—

36: Alice in Chains, “Would?”

I used to like to make a joke that Cantrell and Staley were the greatest singer-songwriting duo since Simon and Garfunkel – mostly just to piss people off, but it’s true that I’ve always been a sucker for the idiosyncratic way those dudes harmonize with each other (see “No Excuses” for a great example).

My first real encounter with AIC was when I saw them headline Lollapalooza in 1993, which (aforementioned) was a pretty formative experience for me. This is the best song they ever wrote.

—

35: Yo La Tengo, “Autumn Sweater”

I Can Feel the Heart Beating as One was another purchase I made at Rasputin Records during an incredibly fruitful musical period for me in Berkeley where I was doing Ancient Greek in the summer of ’00. I’d never been all that into YLT before then, but this album and I hit it off pretty much immediately and it helped me through more excrutiatingly irregular verb forms than I can count.

Heart Beating as One is packed with goodies, but “Autumn Sweater” has that almost ravey baseline that hits you halfway through, as well as that line “Is it too late to call this off?”, and both of them kind of make me sweat.

—

34: Afghan Whigs, “Gentlemen”

It took me years to figure out that everything I hated about Greg Dulli’s chaotic vocal style was everything that makes this band awesome. I’m not sure that totally makes sense, but the point is that you can’t really appreciate the gloriousness of this album until you let him work his entropy on you. “Gentlemen” is a good place to start.

—

33: Sunny Day Real Estate, “8″

This song on my Sony Discman over and over and over again, walking, huddled, through the Baltic fucking winds of a St. Andrews winter on my way to and from class just waiting for that glorious crescendo to hit at 1:12 and warm me right up in a flash. “Drives me …. CRAZY.”

—

32: Superdrag, “Sucked Out”

I like the way he says “feeling” in this song more than I like almost anything in any song. So much and so little feeling all at once and also the creeping feeling that maybe it was me who sucked out the feeling by not being cool enough, and Superdrag won’t ever let me forget it.

—

31: Slowdive, “Dagger”

I discovered Slowdive through a Creation Records kick in college and actually had a hell of a time getting my hands on copies of Souvlaki and Just for a Day because, you know, no Internet to speak of in those days. Souvlaki became the soundtrack to whatever I was going through while I was struggling with my dissertation, but “Dagger” was always already the song that plays in my head when I’m dreaming.

—

30: The Breeders, “Cannonball”

In 1994, I went to my second Lollapalooza to see the Pumpkins and Green Day and The Beastie Boys, but it was The Breeders who unexpectedly stole the show. One of those rare moments of realizing that you were in the presence of a band whose greatness you somehow hadn’t properly registered before. Obviously “Cannonball”, but also “Driving on 9″.

—

29: Sonic Youth, “The Diamond Sea”

When I saw them on tour for this album, they played the 20-minute version of this, which is about 3 minutes of song and 16 minutes of chaos and 1 absurdly cathartic minute of song again, during which process you have time to realize that you are the motherfucking Diamond Sea. Time takes its crazy toll.

—

28: Shudder to Think, “Red House”

Originally on 1991′s Funeral at the Movies with a really awful sound mix (unless my copy’s just fucked, which is entirely possible), but re-released on 50,000 B.C. in ’97 so that a (slightly) larger audience could experience Craig Wedren’s wail and that moment when he says “Someone I want bad. But. Can’t. Have.” and you suddenly feel like you need to throw something heavy at someone. Or maybe that’s just me.

—

27. Nine Inch Nails, “Hurt”

Certain songs find you in odd ways, and the important thing about “Hurt” for me is not that everyone lost their minds about The Downward Spiral in 1994 but that there’s an episode of Homicide that uses it at the end in a way that is just devastating. Later popularized by Johnny Cash LOL.

—

26: Cracker, “Low”

This is embarrassing to admit, but I initially loved this song because I thought it was super cool how David Lowery was referencing “being stoned” like it was this awesome secret between me and Cracker, who were clearly the only other people who’d ever gotten high before. Turns out that’s not even what he’s saying, but the song still stands up.

—

25: Blur, “Parklife”

Like anyone from the U.K., I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with Blur over the years, but there’s never been anything that’s not perfect about “Parklife”, song and album.

—

24: Depeche Mode, “Enjoy the Silence”

My first encounter with Depeche Mode (weirdly) involved seeing posters for their Violator tour everywhere I went in Germany during a memorable family vacation in 1990. I’m not sure I really had any idea what their music was about at the time (or even if I actually heard any of it), but it stuck in my mind that whatever this thing was, it was something that was big and important and way cooler than my 11-year-old brain could really take on board.

So anyway, it was another 6 years or so before I actually managed to enjoy the silence as it were, but it was worth the wait.

—

23: Harvey Danger, “Flagpole Sitta”

Word to the wise: If you’re planning on working in a record store during the summer of ’98 like I did, you may want to get used to people coming in and humming the chorus to “that ‘paranoia paranoia’ song” at you. This can also double as a cautionary tale for bands who are thinking about giving their scorchingly awesome new hit single a whimsical name that doesn’t even appear anywhere in the lyrics.

—

22: Hole, “Miss World”

Jesus, Courtney Love was so angry – so unrelentingly furious about everything and nothing but mostly herself. If you have the chops to channel a maelstrom like that, it makes for one hell of a fucking record.

—

21: Radiohead, “Paranoid Android”

Everyone has already said most of the things about Radiohead and especially about OK Computer, but I can’t even begin to describe the strange and maybe slightly frightening experience of watching the world premiere video of this song (my first taste of the album, a month or so before its release) and realizing that music probably wasn’t ever going to be the same again.

>> Next: 20-1

A safe choice for Mr. Reynolds, but he doesn’t exactly take it to the house.

wait

bring the house down is better.

Safe to say, Ryan Reynolds doesn’t bring the house down. In Safe House.

In the movie Safe House, actor Ryan Reynolds saves the day but he can’t save a hackneyed old concept from boring the audience. House.

Safe House is a safe bet for a night at the movies, but ultimately there’s no one home.

No one is safe. OK, no.

If you want a night out of the house, you’re safe with Safe House, but you’d be better off saving your money and getting housed instead.

No. Christ.

Um.

House it going? Jesus. Fuck. FUCK.

-Inspired by @McCarrick

She sighed sensuously. How did a small-town librarian with nerdy and demure but also secretly kind of sexy glasses who had never left her small town – never even left the library! – end up in such a predicament? Out of nowhere, three men had disrupted her quiet life among the stacks and changed it forever – an architect from the big city; a soft-spoken ranch-hand from some kind of ranch where you have pitchforks or whatever but don’t have to work with manure; and now a helicopter detective?! How she longed to be back inside that helicopter, spinning through the air on the way to a crime scene and Frenching passionately with David as the wind rushed through her hair but not too much.

She sighed languorously. Perhaps life would have been easier if Xavier and James and David hadn’t all accidentally turned up in her small town due to, respectively, an architects’ convention and a dark past that was best left behind, some kind of farm-related thing, and a broken down crime helicopter. At least she had her library and her passion for teaching children about the joy of reading books or magazines or whatever. She sighed obstreperously. And what about S-E-X?

<< Excerpts From My Romance Novel, Part 2
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For the better part of a decade, if you went to a show at DC’s Black Cat any night of the week, there would be a large homeless gentleman with a booming voice at the door, and as you approached, he’d say, “Black Cat! Black Cat! Spare some change for the homeless.”  Depending on what show you were planning on seeing, he’d throw in a reference for good measure: “Modest Mouse, baby! Spare some change for the homeless.”

I must have seen dozens of bands play at the Black Cat during that era – particularly DC bands like The Make Up, Trans Am, Tuscadero, Circus Lupus, and Dismemberment Plan – as well as a who’s who of indie bands from around the country who made their annual pilgrimage to the legendary venue. The Black Cat has since moved down the street to a larger space, and the homeless dude who announced the shows doesn’t seem to be there anymore, but it’s still one of the best best best places in all of Washington, D.C., and long may it last.

Here are 20 more songs from the list:

—
60: Nirvana, “Dumb”

When In Utero finally came out, MTV essentially devoted their entire day to talking about it – I remember numerous segments of confused “person on the street” interviews where everyone was like, “What’s the deal with ‘Rape Me’?”

Turns out there’s a whole lot more to In Utero than whatever the deal is with “Rape Me”. The album’s unifying factor is that it’s a document of a band who are extremely uncomfortable (to the point of rage) about the ludicrous expectations that the whole world has suddenly placed on them. And right at the center of the storm that this produces is “Dumb,” which feels like the perfect sentiment for the moment.

—

59: Beck, “Lord Only Knows”

I bought Odelay and Pulp’s Different Class on the same trip to a Virgin Megastore in London in the summer of 1996, which – that was just a really successful trip to the record store. A lot of the songs on this album are the best songs on this album, but “Lord Only Knows” stands out as having some of the finest Beckisms. You’ve only got one finger left, and it’s pointing out the door.

—

58: Dinosaur Jr, “Not the Same”

In, I’m going to say 1993, my next door neighbor and I made frisbees out of all the random terrible CDs that he had accidentally gotten by failing to mail back albums to Columbia House. The idea was to see if we could get them to bounce off the roof of my house and end up in the driveway.

About 6 months later, a more musically enlightened version of myself was digging through that same pile of now-gravel-encrusted rejects to pull out “Where You Been” and hope against hope that it was still at least semi-functional. As a result, my version of this album has always been a bit skippy, but that seems kind of appropriate for a band as raw and punchy as Dinosaur Jr. “Not the Same” is a rare moment of quiet beauty on an album that is otherwise packed with ferocious J. Mascis shredding.

—

57. Elastica, “Connection”

The fact that the opening riff is (according to the legal settlement) actually a Wire riff only adds to how fucking cool this song is.

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56: Matthew Sweet, “Girlfriend”

The Matthew Sweet rule is, I think, that only every other album is good. Which may just be an unfair dig on 1993′s “Altered Beast”, which has the misfortune of being sandwiched between the equally magnificent Girlfriend and 100% Fun. Regardless, it is fairly clear that Matthew Sweet knows what he’s doing at least 66.6% of the time.

—

55: Pavement, “Range Life”

Pavement first turned up in our lives during high school thanks to the ministrations of a hip drama teacher, and I’ve been through a lot of different phases with them since, but “Range Life” is the song I come back to the most.

I like the whole “Elegant bachelors” thing and that this is on some level a Smashing Pumpkins diss track and that you can almost, for a second, believe Stephen Malkmus when he says that all he wants is to settle down. Except, clearly, that you can’t.

—

54: R.E.M., “E-Bow the Letter”

As an admittedly fanatical fan of this band, I say this advisedly, but “New Adventures in Hi-Fi” has to be the most underrated album of all time. This is one of 14 reasons why.

—

53: Tool, “Sober”

In all honesty, alt-metal was a byway that was probably not worth exploring in the short history of modern music, but it did have quite a promising start before everything all went horribly wrong. Almost anything by Helmet, for instance, and Alice in Chains at their best, and (occasionally) Living Color. But particularly this moody, broody, buildy-as-fuck masterpiece by Tool.

—

52: My Bloody Valentine, “When You Sleep”

If I could create a perfect band, they would sound a hell of a lot like My Bloody Valentine. They would play me the songs they had made for me and I would be like, “More distortion!!” “Layer your vocals, for Christ’s sake!” “Pedals, damn you! I need more pedals!” That is what I would be like.

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51: Galaxie 500, “Hearing Voices”

I came across This Is Our Music at a record store in DC a few years after Galaxie 500 broke up. That was the day that I learned it was possible for music to be really, really good and really, really slow at the same time.

—

50: Sonic Youth, “Sunday”

Everyone has a different Sonic Youth. Mine is Daydream Nation, Dirty, Experimental Jet Set, Washing Machine, and A Thousand Leaves. Each one of those albums has some amazing moments, but the transition, on A Thousand Leaves, between Kim Gordon frantically yelling about kittens on “Contre Le Sexism” and the opening bars of “Sunday” has a strong case for being the best of the best.

The video is also a keeper. It has Macauley Culkin in it.

—

49: Third Eye Blind, “Semi-Charmed Life”

The first time I did crystal meth this song came on the radio and it surprised the shit out of me. In those days, I thought drug references (and by extension, drugs) were a lot cooler than they probably are, but “Semi-Charmed LIfe” still holds up exceptionally well.

—

48: Oasis, “Don’t Look Back in Anger”

I remember reading a newspaper article claiming that Oasis was the vanguard of a full-on third British Invasion and waiting excitedly for the rest of the troops. Which, I guess, Blur and Pulp and Suede to a small extent, but by the time Morning Glory came out, it was clear that Oasis were doing most of the legwork, as far as the Americans were concerned. This was by far my favorite of their many laudable efforts to win over the Yanks.

—

47: Eels, “Novocaine for the Soul”

Eels secretly went on to make excellent, rich, and engaging albums for years after their one big hit, which shouldn’t be such a big surprise given the promise of this track.

—

46: Blind Melon, “No Rain”

Shall we watch the bee girl again? Let’s watch the bee girl again.

—

45: Belly, “Feed the Tree”

I followed Tanya Donnelly’s lovely airy voice and her quirky sensibility from her early stint with The Breeders through both of Belly’s fantastic albums and well into her solo career (and later, all the way back into the Throwing Muses’ back catalogue) and obviously “Feed the Tree” is a major highlight, but it’s worth pointing out that there is an awful lot more where this came from.

—

44: At the Drive-In, “Napoleon Solo”

In, Casino, Out was released in the summer of 1998 and I was desperate to get my hands on a copy in the U.S. before heading back to school in the wilds of St. Andrews, Scotland, where such a feat was more or less unthinkable.

I ended up having to send my long-suffering father to a dingy indie record store in DC to purchase it and mail it to me a few months later. I have vivid memories of finally getting the album in the fall and listening, particularly to this song, over and over and over until my roommate told me to shut it the fuck down before he throttled me.

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43: Shudder to Think, “X-French Tee Shirt”

DC natives, Shudder to Think were graduates of the Field school, where I always wished I went because it had girls at it and because it was alternative and cool, unlike my own high school, which was full of monks and which made us wear suit jackets. You can kind of tell that they’re nerdy DC private school kids just by listening to their records, which is probably a big part of why I love them so much.

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42: They Might Be Giants, “Birdhouse in Your Soul”

I probably listened to TMBG more than almost any other band through the mid ’90s. Once I started listening to louder, shoutier stuff, my mom would beg me to put on a TMBG album instead because she liked the lyrics so much. Pretty much anything on their first four albums is still my favorite song.

—

41: The Posies, “Dream All Day”

If they made a soundtrack to the whole ’90s, this song would be the centerpiece. The Posies were always meant to go on to more great things, but the ’90s was just too jealous of its favorite creation to ever truly let them go. Is how I see it, at any rate. Here they are with all their bittersweet beauty still intact, trapped in amber.

>> Next: 40-21

The first record store I ever really loved was an unforgiving shithole in Adams Morgan, DC, called DC CD. They sold independent music, which wasn’t true of most other places in the city, but they almost certainly didn’t have the album you went there looking for, which meant – to avoid walking away empty-handed after a long Metro ride, I ended up spending hundreds of dollars there on totally random shit by bands I’d heard of but never actually listened to like (memorably) Galaxie 500 or Karate or Low or, failing that, anything that had appealing album art or a cool name.

This was in no way a bad thing.

DC CD closed down sometime in the early aughts, partially because it was really not a very good record store, and by that time I had learned to love some other, shinier and better stocked emporiums – notably Rasputin Records in Berkeley and Plan 9 in Richmond, VA – but I still think of DC CD when I think about how much I miss shopping at record stores. The very best ones were the ones that had just the right imperfections.

Let’s do 20 more songs from the list:

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80: U2, “One”

The thing I want to say about U2 is that (despite, or perhaps because of their being the world’s only remaining supergroup or whatever) they tend to get passed over when it’s time to talk about what was important about the ’90s.

All I knew at the time (1991) was that Achtung Baby was a major, major event. And that they had to do the video for this song (it was the one with the cars with the painted people on them) like 5 times before they got it right, because, like, this was “One” and “One” was possibly already the defining moment of our young decade. Anyway, it’s not like it isn’t a marvelous piece of music, even if U2 is very earnest and monolithic and our modern tastes prefer something with a bit more irony.

—

79: The Cranberries, “Linger”

I like Dolores O’Riordon’s accent. I mean, I really like her accent. And the way she hangs onto those “r”s and draws them out like she doesn’t want to let them go is obviously pretty perfect for this song.

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78: Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Soul to Squeeze”

From the Coneheads soundtrack, no less, but oddly one of the Peppers’ most affecting songs. Even the obligatory funk breakdown mid-track (not to mention the impromptu Anthony Kiedis scat session) feels somehow necessary and extends rather than interrupting the soulful tone established by John Frusciante’s idiosyncratic opening riff.

If you watch the video closely, there is a Conehead and also Chris Farley in it, which I always found somewhat incongruous for such a dark, mournful song that is apparently about circus people?

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77: Eve 6, “Inside Out”

Eve 6 did this weird thing where they just kind of elbowed their way in out of nowhere with this song while everyone was listening to Sum 41 and Jimmy Eat World and Lit, and then just as quickly wandered off, never to be heard from again. Rendez vous then I’m through with you.

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76: Built to Spill, “Carry the Zero”

One disadvantage of going to college in a small town in Scotland essentially prior to the Internet was that it was hard not to occasionally miss stuff – even if you were a borderline obsessive about it. So I kind of missed Keep It Like a Secret at the time, and my metropolitan American friends (who could have let me in on the secret) were busy ignoring Built to Spill because they had signed with a major label a couple of years earlier (back in the olden times, we all thought it was super important that bands not get paid for their work).

Anyway, I’ve since made up for that oversight. This song’s a scorcher.

—

75: Bush, “Glycerine”

All I remember is that there was some argument at the time amongst my friends as to whether including all those violins in this song made it too “maudlin.” Which is so missing the point.

—

74: Faith No More, “Epic”

Faith No More famously went on tour with Metallica and Guns & Roses in 1992 and were booed so relentlessly by asshole G&R fans that they gave up even trying to play the piano part at the end of “Epic” – the part where the fish flops around in the video. Which is a shame, because that part is fucking awesome.

—

73: Live, “Selling the Drama”

I have a vivid memory of hearing this song for the first time on the radio on the way back from school and freaking out because I thought R.E.M. had come out with a new album. R.E.M., it turns out, were very much finished with making songs that sounded anything like this, but Live reeled me right in with that sleight of hand, and Throwing Copper (and, weirdly, Mental Jewelry) ended up on extremely heavy rotation on my shitty little Sony boombox for most of 1994.

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72: Local H, “Bound for the Floor”

Single-handedly responsible for introducing an entire generation of young people to a five-dollar SAT word.

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71: Weezer, “Undone (The Sweater song)”

Roughly 3 years earlier, I had worn my very favorite red Bugle Boy(?) sweater to school one day and had it maliciously destroyed by two boys who, literally, held this thread while I walked away. So “Undone” (to this day my favorite Weezer song) has always held a bit of extra poignancy for me.

Fun fact about this (Spike Jonze) video: The band was filmed in one take playing a sped-up version of the song, then the footage was slowed down to make it look like they’re playing in slow motion.

—

70: Wilco, “She’s a Jar”

Summerteeth was another album that just kinda showed up one day in the tiny CD store in Scotland where I bought pretty much every new release I could afford. I brought it home and immediately loved the sad songs (this one, and “How to Fight Loneliness”) and then I loved all the songs, and then I basically loved anything Wilco ever did, just like everybody else.

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69: Tori Amos, “Cornflake Girl”

It’s difficult to really explain how much Under the Pink meant to me when it came out in January of 1994. As a (bad but dedicated) piano player, I was intermittently fascinated by what Tori was pulling off with the keys on songs like “Yes, Anastasia,” but mostly I was just interested in listening to songs like “Pretty Good Year” and “Past the Mission” and being very, very sad. And amidst all of that, the (extremely unlikely hit single) “Cornflake Girl” is the song that holds it all together.

Relevant fact about this song: Tori Amos was in a Cornflakes commercial in 1985. (!!!)

—

68: Elliott Smith, “Needle in the Hay”

Speaking of being very, very sad ….

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67: Nirvana, “Sliver”

Incesticide was a lot more raw and noisy than The 13-year-old me expected, but I persevered with it (because, fuck, it was Nirvana), and it paid off in a big way. There’s a run near the beginning of this album that starts with “Sliver” and ends with two Vaselines covers that’s way, way better than any B-sides and Outtakes compilation has any right to be.

—

66: R.E.M., “Nightswimming”

I spent part of a summer in Winterthur, Switzerland when I was 17 and I don’t remember a ton about it except that there wasn’t much to do at nights except sneak a beer or two and climb over the fence of the town’s public pool for some illicit lap-swimming. The whole thing felt pretty dangerous at the time, but I bolstered up my courage with the thought that it had an implicit endorsement from R.E.M.

For what it’s worth, “Nightswimming” is 4 minutes and 18 seconds of pure, industrial-grade nostalgia, so you can probably use it to conjure up a glossy memory polaroid of your own, even if it doesn’t happen to have actual night swimming in it like mine does.

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65: Everything but the Girl, “Missing”

I’m not sure it’s really quantifiable, but you have to figure that the deserts miss the rain, like, a lot. Also, Everything but the Girl is a really good band name. There’s a story behind it.

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64: Marcy Playground, “Sex and Candy”

There is some backstory to this song about how the singer actually did smell sex and candy this one time and remarked on it and someone was like, “you should make a song about that,” but none of that explains how they managed to come up with that ridiculously infectious hook.

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63: Dada, “Dizz Knee Land”

Pitch-perfect execution of a really good idea (despite the distracting spelling). I’ve loved this song since the first day I heard it almost 20 years ago.

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62: Stone Temple Pilots, “Plush”

The second major rock concert I ever went to was The Flaming Lips, The Butthole Surfers, and STP, touring off of Core. We bummed some Marlboro menthols off of a disapproving grownup and managed to convince another one to buy us a beer from the concessions stand, which would have been enough to make it pretty much the best day ever even if Stone Temple Pilots hadn’t closed their set with this song.

—

61: Sonic Youth, “Bull in the Heather”

When I go to heaven, it’ll probably just be Kim Gordon saying random numbers over and over forever.

>> Next: 60-41

Stopping only to reach for my spectacles, I leave the house in a hurry, my addled morning thoughts beginning to coalesce around a fully formed idea: Tonight, I shall make my mark.

But such a bold endeavor requires careful preparation. Hence, today’s agenda:

1. Deploy whiskey mouthwash (I am honest enough with myself to know that, whence I intend to go tonight, it is unlikely that I will ever return).
2. Obtain professional grooming, with specific attention to my feet. My feet, I say!
3. Hide the shame of my nakedness with every single individual item in my wardrobe – my garments and my finery.
4. Entertain telephonic attentions (amorous) from male suitors. Telephonic.
5. Without concern for my comfort or well-being, expose my person to the cold night air.
6. Fill my ears and feed my mind with the music of my heart.
7. Arrive at social events, one after the other (but remain, always, an outsider).
8. Drink to forget.

Note to self: Keep moving until the friction causes electricity.
Note to the musicians: Play louder! For tonight, we go to war, and we will not rest until the rosy glow of dawn blesses our victory. Time may pass, yes, but what use have we for keeping time when we can keep company? The revels of this night shall never end. Never.

Paradoxically, I have no real obligations or worries, but I do have an abundance of alcoholic beverages on my person, which are themselves both an obligation and a concern. And I am destitute. I am penniless and broken, but I am present in myself.

Now, the men come – compelled no doubt by my (outward) confidence. But unless their faces are wrinkled and drawn – broken in a thousand places by the excesses of reckless youth; carious and worn, with pouting lips and sunken eyes like those of Sir Michael Philip Jagger, lead vocalist of The Rolling Stones – then I have no time for them. They hold no interest for me.

Perhaps I have not made myself clear. Picture this:

A wild, orgiastic beat drives us into a state of ecstasy. Crowds of men reach, acquisitively, for my genitals, but I rebuff them with increasing violence. As we begin to give way to the pounding of the drums and the irresistable allure of darkness and chaos, the authorities arrive without warning and attempt, desperately, to hold back the massive storm of flesh and rage and flesh and music that threatens, no – that promises – to envelop us all forever…

Now, the party don’t start ’til I walk in.

The first real rock concert I ever went to (pace The Beach Boys sans Brian Wilson c. 1987 … with my parents) was Perry Farrell’s third Lollapalooza at Charlestown Racetrack, West Virginia, in 1993.

Rage Against the Machine opened, followed by Front 242, Arrested Development, Fishbone, Dinosaur Jr., and Alice in Chains, with Primus as the headliner. I can’t say that any of those bands really went on to be a big part of my life (except probably Dinosaur Jr.) but the experience was more or less ecstatic. Like, the life-affirming, revelatory, kick-ass good time that I had watching bands play for 8 hours at Charlestown Racetrack on August 3, 1993, with my friends Carlos and Charlie and Peter and Alfonso was in a perfect inverse proportion to the grim, sweaty journey into hell that Alfonso’s mother had on that same day – waiting outside the venue amongst a hundred angry, ticketless alterna-punks with hairdos to make sure we were OK and didn’t do drugs or have heatstroke or just drop dead on the spot from the sheer chaos and strangeness of it all. When we found her after Primus’s set, she was in tears and inexplicably standing on the back of a pickup truck frantically waving her arms in the air.

For a couple of years after that I was obsessed with mosh pits (when you are only four feet tall, the mechanics of this are really weird). And crowd-surfing (we called it “swimming”? I’m certain this is true. Fishbone had a song about it). Here are 20 more songs from the list:

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100: Social Distortion, “Ball and Chain”

The most upbeat, bouncy song you’ll ever hear about being down and out and drunk and sick of it all. For the longest time I assumed this was about how Mike Ness didn’t get along well with his wife, which is a much less compelling thing for a punk band to be worrying about.

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99: Jeff Buckley, “Last Goodbye”

There are many things about Jeff Buckley, but the things that I think the most about when I think about Jeff Buckley are his unbelievable vocal range and also how he died in a river at night which is just the most poignant but also horrible but also still poignant way to die. I’ve just googled the thing about his vocal range and it was four motherfucking octaves, which, so, I was right about that.

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98: Juliana Hatfield Three, “My Sister”

I don’t even have a sister, but I hate her because of this song.

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97: Porno for Pyros, “Pets”

My friend Brett asked his dad to get him the Porno for Pyros album for Christmas in 1993 but his mom made him take it back because it had tracks called “Bad Shit” and “Orgasm” on it. For this, and other reasons, Porno for Pyros seemed exotic and dangerous to me at the time, and the fundamental strangeness of that album notwithstanding (and despite the fact that a weirdo song like “Pets” could only have been a hit single in the ’90s), it’s still a delight to listen to.

—

96: Radiohead, “Black Star”

There is a moment in Black Star where the song begins to fall apart and Thom Yorke brings it back by harmonizing with himself on the line “I keep falling over, I keep passing out” and I honestly think that it is one of the best moments in any song ever.

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95: Counting Crows, “A Murder of One”

I was probably just about at an age where I was starting to weigh up how cool I thought I was versus how much I really wanted to buy the debut Counting Crows album when August and Everything After came out, but this song (the second single from the album) pushed me over the edge, and I’m glad that the fleeting but briefly dedicated Counting Crows fan part of me won that particular battle.

—

94: Dismemberment Plan, “Ice of Boston”

I saw Dismemberment Plan play in support of Is Terrified at Fort Reno (DC’s awesome awesome awesome Ian MacKaye-organized free summer concert series) and bought the album off them after the show. I kind of have a fierce DC pride about this particular band, and this song really drives that home: like, why would you move to Boston, Travis Morrison? That was dumb.

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93: Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Scar Tissue”

I was way too distracted by Nirvana to get caught up in the Blood Sugar Sex Magik mania that took over every awkward house party I went to in the 7th grade, so I’ve never been anything more than a casual fan of the Chili Peppers. But “Scar Tissue”, in addition to being a huge surprise from a band that was fraying a bit at the edges, was my clear winner for 1999′s song of the summer. It didn’t hurt that I spent that summer in California, where the Chili Peppers make a whole lot more sense.

—

92: Frente, “Labor of Love”

It’s the accent, I think, that does it. And that jangly, jangly guitar. And the fact that anyone who heard their cover of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” was already kind of in love with this band anyway if they knew what was good for them. The entirety of Marvin the Album is actually really fun and Australian.

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91: Heavens to Betsy, “Axemen”

Sleater Kinney before they were Sleater Kinney, in case you missed it, and with even more rawness and edge to them, if that’s even possible. “Axemen” builds to a point where you’ll be fully ready to go to the pep rally and murder everyone by the time it’s finished with you.

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90: Smashing Pumpkins, “Cherub Rock”

I’d never really thought much about this before, but the production on Siamese Dream is just incredible. It all starts with that drum fill to open “Cherub Rock”, and then it’s just like, “Holy shit, it’s the motherfucking Smashing Pumpkins”.

—

89: Spacehog, “Meantime”

We knew some girls in high school who were Spacehog groupies. Like, they hung out with the band on their tour bus and gave them blow jobs or whatever. Which, that’s an odd choice of band to be a hardcore groupie of? Anyway. I like the part where he goes “ooh ooh ooh eee ooh ooh ooh ooh”.

—

88: Screaming Trees, “Nearly Lost You”

I will remind you that this little gem was on the soundtrack to Singles back when movie soundtracks really mattered or something. Eddie Vedder was in that movie? That was pretty neat that they made a whole movie about wearing flannel.

—

87: PJ Harvey, “Rid of Me”

I think I may have been too young to fully appreciate the intense, sexually charged badassery of Rid of Me when that album came out, but I wasn’t dumb enough to miss the fact that something amazing was happening with this song. There’s a tense-and-release thing going on here that nobody really does like PJ Harvey does.

—

86: King Missile, “Detachable Penis”

I went home to DC to visit my parents a couple of months ago and my dad was humming this song. Weirdest thing. He was like, “Yeah, I guess I heard it somewhere, and it’s just a really good story.” King Missile played the HFStival in 1991 with The Violent Femmes, Gang of Four, and The La’s and I really badly wanted to go, but I was 12, which is too young to figure out how you get tickets and/or rides to music festivals.

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85: Flaming Lips, “Waitin’ for a Superman”

There was always a bit of a disconnect for me that the goofy-ass band I knew as the one-hit-wonders who made “She Don’t Use Jelly” went on to make this rich, lush, beautiful album full of soaring, inspired future music like “Waitin’ for a Superman.”

—

84: Nada Surf, “Popular”

It adds to this song to know that most of the lyrics are excerpts from a teen advice book called Penny’s Guide to Teen-Age Charm and Popularity, and that Nada Surf were actually secretly an awesome band and went on to do great things. And also, the music video. This is pretty much why they invented music videos.

—

83: Jane’s Addiction, “Been Caught Stealing”

Fun fact about Perry Farrell: He is 52 years old now. If this song is biographical, he was “caught stealing” in 1964. Anyway, he makes it sound like a lot of fun.

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82: Blur, “Best Days”

I’ve always kind of preferred ballady Blur to jaunty Blur, probably because The Great Escape was my entry point into the band. The trio of ballads on that album – “He Thought of Cars”, “The Universal”, and the fantastic “Best Days” – are enough dramatic Blur melancholia to put you in a nostalgia-induced coma if you’re not mentally prepared. Listen with caution.

—

81: Pulp, “Babies”

Like a lot of British teenagers, I had a big poster hanging up in my room during high school of Jarvis Cocker sneering and giving everybody the V sign, as if to say “Fuck you, guv’nor; but also, I am an incredibly insecure person”. Pulp is a band that’s all about attitude, and while the particular poses that they strike on their three major albums (His ‘N’ Hers, Different Class, and This Is Hardcore) each have unique characteristics, they’re always deeply relatable. “Babies”, the centerpiece of “His ‘N’ Hers”, is a perfect example.

>> Next: 80-61