Pitchfork: The Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s: 20-01

I mean all the above is corny as hell, but its also the truth

Say what you want about this list but the inevitable torrent compilation is going to kick ass.

Sometimes > Only Shallow, voted for Loser for old time's sake. Bought the CD single because I would usually rather get 2 singles than one album with my $12 for music.

I still think its a marvellous record, though I don't play it often now, as I perhaps played it too much a decade or so ago. I can't deny that it still moves me today, when I do hear songs from it, and even a track as outwardly-ebullient as 'Holland 1945' remains affecting, not least for the poetry of Jeff's lyrics, and the sentiments and stories its telling.

QFT

xp: The Loser CD single was dope too! The alternate version of Soul Suckin' Jerk is soooo much better than the album version.

re: NMH, i got the holland 7" before the album and was v excited, the album was subsequently a ridiculous disappointment to me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_5nNQmszDw

between gold soundz and juicy for me

I bought the first Neutral Milk Hotel album after reading a rave review in Spin or Magnet, liked a couple tunes but didn't really see the big fuss and then proceeded to ignore them for the next couple of years, only later realizing that In the Aeroplane had become an indie touchstone.

At the same time, the Elephant 6 collective as a whole was definitely a *thing* if you paid attention to US indie in the late 90s. I mean, I skipped In the Aeroplane in 1998 but I did buy Olivia Tremor Control's Black Foliage.

"Loser"

Sorry, autogoons

In ILMverse I would assume "Enjoy" will take this handily.

'da funk' or 'midnight iapw' for me

lot of those choices, mbv, outkast, b.i.g., don't seem right to me, and very few of the rap choices blew up in the uk, at least from the perspective i had -- some of them i heard later -- whereas 'da funk' and 'midnight were everywhere when i was 16/17.

aaliyah, even though it isn't even the aaliyah single that made my own top ten for this thing.

the NMH song is one of my all-time favorites; has been for years. Try Again wd be the Aaliyah song that would have made me think about changing my mind...

i want to read more on why k8 hates "common people" because whenever people talk about pulp these days there's a really really strong assumption that *everyone* loves them, that you *should* love them and jarvis cunting cocker is a national treasure and wise man of letters, which is BULLLLSHIT, so yeah, k8, if you have time?

i was 11 when "loser" was released - surprising, thought i was older, but at any rate i had no conception of the music press or indie or whatever it meant, i just thought it was HILARIOUSLY PATHETIC. and i was right, c'mon, to like that song you really have to hate yourself.

xp "Try Again" came out in 2000.

yes good job maintaining the same mindset/attitude you had at 11, lex.

atlex shrugged

dyslexia more like

i still love janet & luther's "the best things in life are free" with all my heart, which iirc i did at 11 too

to like that song you really have to hate yourself.

Ha what? Most of what I liked about Beck in the '90s (indeed, starting with "Loser") was his collage-like aesthetic in both words and sound. "Loser" is a triumph of great nonsense.

lex, you know you're making the same assumptions about the audience for this shit as the Ashlee and Taylor haters, right?

They like "Loser" because they hate our freedoms themselves (and want to die).

So very 90's.

i still love pizza, which iirc i did at 11 too, but i'm not gonna go around shitting on people who liked tacos* back then (or now) because 21 years later i've managed to grasp concepts like subjectivity.

*of course, i like tacos, too. much as i like both "common people" and aaliyah. but it's a wacky world.

I'd hate myself if I loved Janet Jackson, that's for sure.

collage-like aesthetic

totally read this as "college-like aesthetic" at 1st

beck is so dreary and staid. i remember him being lauded as a great experimenter and innovator lolololol please tell me no one actually believes that any more?

Say It Ain't So. Kind of defined that era for me.

lol @ the way everyone in this thread is often totally ready to shit on a band's fans but as soon as someone does it to one of their own lame teenage nostalgia trips it's all about getting on your high horse about subjectivity

i'm not quite sure when the last time i shat on a band's fans was, but feel free to point out to so i can 40 lashings myself for penance purposes.

lex, you're a madman. you know that right?

lol @ the way everyone in this thread is often totally ready to shit on a band's fans but as soon as someone does it to one of their own lame teenage nostalgia trips it's all about getting on your high horse about subjectivity

including you

people probably wouldn't care that you hate some of these songs if you didn't act like an annoying teenager about it

Nothing on the list comes close to "Enjoy The Silence" for me, after that, I guess it's "Common People". I never liked much 90's indie rock, I like Weezer but "Say It Ain't So" is maybe the 6th or 7th best song on that album, "Windowlicker" is just another one of the 8484 Aphex Twin tracks from the 90's, etc. I like almost all of these songs but not in a "best of the entire decade" sort of way.

"Windowlicker" is just another one of the 8484 Aphex Twin tracks from the 90's, etc.

lol whut

Surprising omission from this list: Baby One More Time. Unless I missed it in one of the see also areas.

Windowlicker's pretty stand-out, but there were so many awesome Aphex Twin tracks in the 90s that it's easy for me to see how someone could rate it pretty far down their personal list.

xpost to me, Just seems essential to 'telling the story' of 90s pop.

I get why everyone goes crazy for "Windowlicker" but I've always been a "Ventolin"/"On"/"Come To Daddy"/"Girl/Boy Song" guy; I would rather have seen any of those on the list.

xp "Try Again" came out in 2000.

dammit I knew this; I'm a disgrace to NMH fans everywhere :(

Don't let the current status of Jarvis Cocker (annoying knob) get in the way of the facts here, "Common People" is the best tune here.

Aphex's "Milk Man' ftw.

-x post-

Aphex, like many artists on this list, is irreducible. Not to the extent that, say, Oasis is (if you like them), but "Xtal", "Girl/Boy"/"4" - he was in the mix during multiple creativity peaks, techno, dance, jungle etc. My crit-hat quip on "Windowlicker" is that it's in so many ways a remix of "Closer". Which makes it even more excellent.

"Common People" is a great song but if you're purporting to account for the 1990s in any way, as a time period, take, say, Pearl Jam. Hugely unaccounted for, a random cut low in the list. I hate Vedder more than words but they were just an absolutely enormous band with a string of SMASH HITS off that debut. Even a deep album track in "Black". And to put a marginal, extremely UK-centric act like Pulp at #2 for the decade, with Nirvana at #13, who were easily massive as Pulp in Pulp's native country, is both challops and poor history.

Eh, usually I wouldn't post something like this on ILX because I know that both Common People and Cocker himself are such sacred cows (and I don't want my dislike to be interpreted as some lame challops for the sake of it any more than I want to repeat arguments I've had since the mid 90s.) But for you, Lex, I'll say a little of it, because I suspect you will understand my reasoning.

1) The terrible awareness that I (middle class, arty, have probably engaged in bouts of class tourism) am exactly the person that the entire nasty vipituous diatribe is aimed at. You're right. I will never *really* know what it's like not to have an expensive education. I will never *really* know what it's like not to have my class background. I don't think that gives you (author or listener) the automatic right to sneer at such a person for wanting to broaden my horizons and *trying* to understand. And also, due to peculiar quirks of the British class system (that one can actually have education and breeding and still be as poor as a church mouse) this does *not* mean that I do not know what it means to live with lack or poverty or difficult choices or narrowed horizons.

2) the conflation of the British class system (Posh vs. Common) with the idea of common vs. uncommon. You're right. I will *never* live like "Common people" and, in fact, I absolutely *refuse* to live "like common people" because I refuse to see it as something negative to aspire towards the extraordinary, the sublime, thegoodthebeautifulthetrue. This song, for me, really encapsulates this kind of negative anti-cultural-Thatcherism which produces some pretty questionable aesthetic results and political conclusions if taken to the logical conclusion. The only kind of aspiration is *not* simply the material kind. I am the kind of person who will spend money on books when she hasn't the money for new clothes, so this has nothing to do with wealth. I can NOT conceive of a world where there is nothing else to do but "drink and dance and screw, because there's nothing else to do" because no matter how little money I have, I *always* have my imagination and enough intellect to think of *something* else. I refuse to apologise for that.

I realise that these things are not entirely of Cocker's intentions, but they are certainly what the song has come to symbolise. In fact, I would have thought that Cocker, with his weirdo arty intellectual background, would understand, but, as we talked about on twitter yesterday, if you play with archetypes that are bigger than you, usually it's you that gets played.

This will of course all be misunderstood and torn to pieces because I don't think I've expressed this very well, but hey, it's Friday afternoon on ILX, I've got time. :-/

As an American tween/teenager it felt like an awesome pop song with an interesting angle and it still does today. It's amazing how much can be wrapped up in a song like that for some people and not for others. Not that yanks don't have our own multitude of issues but that kind of classist self-examination and judgmentalism isn't one of them, or at least it's not at the front of our minds.

it's the british 'pretty fly for a white guy'

As the lone Brit in a group of Americans (who were all massive Anglophiles) I kinda got sick of being the only person who actually saw any kind of class issues at work in that song, and also really really really hated having to constantly explain why I wasn't going completely bonkers over the "weirdoes, we're great, actually, thank you!" message that was all my American friends ever saw in the song.

So perhaps having that conversation about a dozen too many times has also contributed to my dislike of the song.

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MusicChangesMe
1 hour ago

I know nothing about rock music i'm only here because pitchfork named this the number 1 song of the 90's...i can kinda see why though...this song really has a 90 feels to it. when you hear this track it brings back memories from the 90's

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MusicChangesMe
1 hour ago

oops sorry for calling this rock i see that it's indie oops my bad

It is hard out there for a posh.

thought that might be something to do with it k8, and fwiw i totally agree (and though this is totally removed from what that song is about, i've seen it happen a lot whenever someone who isn't working-class becomes involved in "urban" street/underground music.

i don't like the song, but what i like even less is the way it's most often picked up by middle-class kids as a defence of working-class, idk, purity or something, and as an attack on "posh kids" (lacking the self-awareness of their own privilege, of course).

I also got really really really sick of explaining to Americans that "posh" and "rich" were not the same thing in UK culture at all, even though they are practically synonymous in the US.

And also wanting to say to Cocker, "look, I understand that you had it rough as a working class weirdo, but please don't leap to the assumption that it was somehow... *OK* to be an upper middle class weirdo. If anything, it had its own particular set of pressure from both sides. That you got kicked really hard by posh people for being a weirdo and kicked even harder by "common people" for being posh."

So yeah, first world problems. Whatevs. But also yeah: but what i like even less is the way it's most often picked up by middle-class kids as a defence of working-class, idk, purity or something, and as an attack on "posh kids" (lacking the self-awareness of their own privilege, of course). *TOTALLY*