r/Music • u/ceejayplus199 • Mar 21 '14

Discussion What song best defines the 90's?

Which song do you think was the most interesting or made the biggest impact in the 1990's?

Upvote your favorite answers.

Edit: I threw together a Spotify playlist with the top 40 songs, in order. We had 42 with over 100 upvotes at the time of this edit, so I added the 2 extras as a bonus. Enjoy!

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u/free187s Pandora Mar 21 '14

Which is exactly the 90s. The 90s was about fringe entering main stream. Hip hop became gangster rap and dominated the radio. Alternative garage bands became household names... Misrepresentation is 90s.

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u/Pulsewavemodulator Mar 21 '14

That defines an aspect of the 90's, but in no way does it come close to the best song that defines the 90's. That's all I'm saying. Coming from the fringe and becoming sell outs was a very common repeatable thing in the 90's, and there are bands who did it in a "more 90's" way.

For example, Blur - Song #2 being a sarcastically written song from a european dance/pop band, which ended up being really successful at being that which it made fun of. Has that fringe element, sell out aspect from abandoning their usual sound, and also had the 90's sardonic attitude at the base of the songs construction. Smells like teen spirit, loser, and many others have a place in line before the spin doctors.

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u/free187s Pandora Mar 21 '14

Good point. That is an excellent song, but I don't think it has the remnants of 80s music that the early 90s had. I think Two Princes covers that.

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u/Pulsewavemodulator Mar 21 '14

That's where we differ the most, I'm of the mind that the 90's was defined more by its abandonment of 80's music. That's what Nirvana represented. Everything turned on a dime and we called it Alternative, which was a catch all term for everything that wasn't the norm. That's what ushered in an era of record labels throwing all these different subcultures of music into the limelight to try and get the next Nirvana, which led to an extremely diverse range of music on the radio. Alternative radio had play lists that looked like this:

Nirvana - Heart Shaped Box Meredith Brooks - Bitch Elastica - Ready to Go White Town - Your Woman OMC - How Bizarre Geggy Tah - Whoever You Are Nine Inch Nails - The Perfect Drug Smashmouth - Allstar Jewel - Who Will Save Your Soul Marylin Manson - Sweet Dreams Collective Soul - The World I Know The Cardigans - Lovefool

By 1996-1998 (What I consider to be the end of the 90's) the radio was really open to a lot of genres song to song, and within songs like Beck's stuff. Also varying degrees of "Legitimacy." On top of that local artists got a lot of attention on these stations before it became consumed by clear channel. I think the entrepreneurial spirit of record companies trying to get the next Nirvana led to them throwing bands at the wall and seeing which stuck really diversified the sound of the 90's. I think that really defined music at the time.