The 1990s were a turning point in music: with the increasingly connected world enabling an unprecedented coalescence of various styles and genres, the decade featured the rapid evolution of sonic artistry — and subsequently shaped the soundscape of eras that followed. Listen along as The Ringer’s preeminent music critic Rob Harvilla curates and explores 60 iconic songs from the ‘90s that define the decade.
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Or the band, the song, the universe physically receding and leaving me there alone, the sense of a frigid night, falling. This sense of an exquisite suffocating loneliness descending. I'd hear that part, and I'd get really quiet. I'd withdraw inward. I'd feel isolated and desolate. Sometimes I'd start crying. I was a pleasant and low maintenance kid. Often, but not always. Not now. So as a little kid, I've already got a sense of what music means to me. What a bizarre and irrational and profound and lasting spiritual effect music could have on me, and it scared me. And sometimes it incapacitated me, but it fascinated me too. And I think even before I could vaguely articulate what I wanted do with my life. I knew that one way or the other. I'd spend my life trying to articulate that feeling or trying to recreate it because it really did scare me. This sadness, this loneliness, this helplessness that could be triggered in me by a band, literally named Supertramp. But I knew even then that I'd never run away from that feeling. I'd always run toward it. Uh-uh So now make me a teenager. Right? This will solve everything. Now I'm a teenager and my loneliness and helplessness is perpetual and also insufferable, but at least sometimes my outsized super emo reaction to someone singing the word goodbye is appropriate. Right? Boys to men's
Being with a soul. I fade in as the song fades in. Steve Miller Band. Swingtown. 1st song on Steve Miller Band's greatest hits, 1974, 1978. It fades in. That drumbeat fades in. It only takes 10 seconds to fade in, but it feels longer. There is a pleasing, prolonged, primordial ooze quality. This is the sound of my eternal soul crawling out of the swamp from whence it came. The dawn of man. The dawn of me. This tape, it's a very popular tape, the Steve Miller Band's greatest hits. Blue cover, a cool looking horse in profile, red circle background, and the cool horse's mane has got some orange flame like action going on. Great cover. Great tape. Trust me. Your dad owned this tape even if he didn't own any tapes and he didn't like Steve Miller. He still had this tape. It's the damndest thing. This is a great choice. I'm into swing town as the first song I ever loved. Hugely appealing to babies, this song. Baby me has got phenomenal taste. Is Steve Miller's voice auto tuned there? Obviously, it isn't on account of this being 20 plus years before somebody invented auto tune, but nevertheless, he's auto tune there. Ain't he? Don't get mad at me, Steve. I get the sense that Steve Miller is a little grumpy nowadays. I forget where I read that or why I think that. Maybe they finally inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and he was a little
/simmons. Henry David Thoreau once said, when I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and to the latest, end quote. He was talking about rage against the machine's cover of Bruce Springsteen's the ghost of Tom Joad. No. He wasn't. That's not what Henry David Thoreau was talking about. I apologize. He was talking about something else. I am talking about Rage Against the Machine's cover of Bruce Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad. I am talking about that bitchin' roaring guitar tone right there, the I heard this song for the first time when I played it on college radio, and I stood in our modest DJ booth with our modest speakers cranked up to incredible volume. And I felt this song radiate majestically across our campus where nobody else could hear me on the radio at all due to technical reasons, and I let the wash over me and course through my veins and transform and baptize and radicalize me. I feared no and I vowed and I vowed to devote the rest of my life to vanquishing them. I'm sitting down here in a campfire light, Tom Joad is a noble character in the 1939 John Steinbeck.
That how weird it sounded. And I didn't know what, you know, what alternate tunings were or what prepared guitar was. So I would try to imitate these songs on my own, you know, standard concert to guitar. What the fuck? Why doesn't it sound like Sonic Youth? You know? So it was just, you know what, that was a band that was that changed my life, and kind of altered the course of everything that came after that. I don't have many of those. But that's a band that or and after a moment from when I heard them. And they're one of the most influential bands for me. And they had this. They were just kind of wrapped in, this mystery. You know, I would buy a spin magazine just in case they had wrote something about it. Yeah. Yeah. And usually they have They're just such a mystery to me. Yeah. I remember it was one of the first times I saw them. It was a 100%, and it was a like a live MTV in studio thing. You know, and the first time you see Thurston, you know, doing what like, just whapping the guitar with a drumstick or whatever, like, this the last 60 seconds of that song is, like, pure noise. Yeah. Right? And even in context on MTV, like, that was, you know, that was fairly mind blowing for me. Kind of frightening for me at the same time. It's cool you got to hang out with Lee. I have to say that Lee is my favorite. Like, my my favorite Sonic You songs tend to be Lee songs. Like, Wish Fulfillment is my favorite song on Dirty, and Mode, of course, is great. Like, I I hope it Lee is cool. Right? Like, Lee is, like, a cool guy to hang out with. Right? Please tell me that he's not. He's cool. He's cool. He's a total sweetheart. And, and, you know, just, whenever I talk to him, talks like, you know, I'm a peer, which is, you know, I've met a lot of people that I've admired over the years. And that's not the case with everybody.
Lead and then blew a 3 one lead, and the Cavs won the title. That was me. That was all me. I personally propelled the Cavs to the NBA championship by jinxing the warriors during a phoner with mister fab and e forty. Victory. Call me captain Save A Mo Williams. That is the stupidest thing I've ever I do feel bad for jinxing e 40, for jinxing my favorite rapper's favorite basketball team, but I don't feel that bad. We did it. I don't bump mainstream. I knocked underground. All that other sugar coated and watered down. All from the bay where we huffy and go dump. From the soy wooden rappers be getting their lingo from. In 2006, E40 put out a hit single called Tell Me When to Go that I heard on KMEL roughly 50,000 times in 3 months. The delightfully bonkers Bay Area rap subgenre known as hyphy, you don't have to be on ecstasy, but it wouldn't hurt, was poised for national blockbuster mainstream success. I read in the San Francisco Chronicle that 2,006 was gonna be, quote, Oakland's version of the summer of love, end quote. But I screwed up, and I missed it because that's the exact moment when I moved to New York. And in New York City, every summer, there's one song. Everybody listens to 1 song, just the one song, playing on a loop on hot 97, which is tied with KMEL as the number one greatest hip hop radio station ever born. The same song blasting out of every radio, every open apartment window, and most importantly, every car, every taxi, every bus, every moving vehicle or not moving vehicle in the 5 boroughs. I mostly hung around in Brook.
