It's time to party like it's 1999. No Prince this year round, however, as we jump forward in time to the end of the 20th Century, which was meant to be the End of History. It was an odd year in the charts which seemed to look back as much as forward, but presented the future of music and the past in the charts.
Not as well known as their two big hits from 1998, this is Catatonia in far more chilled mood. A top ten hit in 1999, Dead from the Waist Down came from the Welsh band’s third album. Guitarist Mark Roberts had come up with the general riff and basic lyrics during the bands tour of America. And yet what is the song about? People unable to sleep with each other, either through tiredness (of touring?) or because the relationship has gone beyond that point in saving. It might be lighter in tune, but that doesn’t mean the Catatonia claws are any less sharp. Also, at this point I really should point out that Cerys Matthews and Tom Jones cover of Baby Its Cold Outside really ought to be in the top 40 for 1999 on artistic merit. However, I am aware that the song now has a different context for many readers, and regardless of my own views on history, I have chosen to take it out so as not to dillute the overall message.
I’d have liked to put Live for the Moment in the 2002 charts, but it never charted, for some reason. So here are Monster Magnet a few years earlier with a lesser tune, but to be honest, if you’ve heard one Monster Magnet song, you’ve heard them all. All their songs lead to the Dave Wyndorf yelled chorus which need not make much sense. “I’m not going to work another day in my life, the Gods told me to relax” he roars. For a band cosplaying as Lemmy in between Hawkwind and Motorhead, I guess that’s not too bad. Although they have their fans, they still tour (when there isn’t covid), they still release albums, and the use of songs by the likes of WWE, JC jeans and Electronic Arts mean steady royalty income for the band 20 years on. They may have had one song, two guitars, a loud voice and a bunch of gusto, but it certainly worked for them. And in the UK, this song charted but Live for the Moment didn’t. Sods law, really.
Elvis Costello’s cover of Charles Aznavour’s 70s classic reached the UK top 20 in 1999, and was my introduction to the song. Elvis covered it for Notting Hill, and both he and Charles made some healthy dosh off it. Charles Aznavour kept performing till his death, which is normally an exaggeration of sorts, but not in his case: his last public performance came on French TV in 2018, less than 12 hours before he died in his sleep of natural causes, aged 94.
Although the biggest issue with The Offspring is that their best single by far – Come out and Play – was released years before they made it big in the UK and so didn’t chart here. This is the song about the guy who tries to fit in but fails abysmally. I think we’ve all been there.
Yes, this feels suitably late 90s. “You're lickin' your lips and blowing kisses my way but that don't mean I'm gonna give it away” sings Christina in another of those turn of the century tunes which uses sex appeal to tell us the singer is about more than sex appeal. Aguilera started off on the Mickey Mouse Club on US kids TV, before her big US music break singing on the Disney film Mulan. This lead to her teen pop phase, and a song which was, frankly, fucking huge on both sides of the Atlantic, with more number one success than Pete Waterman had to declare in his taxes in the late 80s. Genie is somewhat similar to SAW tracks in that the tune, lyrics and track were put together before the singer was assigned, and Aguilera got the gig off Mulan. At the time she was considered a Britney clone, having followed the same career path, but she managed to carve out quite a successful path in music, winning 5 Grammies over her career. As for Genie in a Bottle, the success is partly Aguilera’s voice (confident and alluring) and the beat in the background. They combine to lure in the listener. Add in a memorable chorus and you’re practically on Bingo on the KLF’s how to make a number one hit. Christina Aguilera went on to use her fame to give her generation much needed Aesops, but we’ll cover that in greater detail in future years. As it is, Genie wants to have its cake and eat it, but is a bit too much on the “come hither” stance and less of the independent women bit. Which is a shame. Better was to come. Catchy bloody tune though.
Ah, Nine Inch Nails. Either the industrial rock pioneers of the 1990s, or an emo kid singing about things which had no meaning in experience, depending on your point of view. There was a point in time when I would have called NIN one of my top five favourite bands, and this was when I was an emo kid writing about things had no meaning in experience. Lots of poetry that rhymed mire and funeral pyre, and thought that clever. There is another train of thought that Trent Reznor writes songs which can become great songs in the hands of better singers, and the architects of that view tend to point to Johnny Cash’s cover of Hurt as their prime example. Which is a fair point, tempered only by the fact that Johnny Cash was a once in a lifetime emotive music genius who could sing the London Monopoly board nd make it majestic. (Admit it, you can hear him now: “Old Kent Road, community chest...”) I think the truth lies in the middle of the great debate: that Reznor was a bit of his time, but the band did produce some pretty good songs which have stood the test of time. And if other people can pull them off better, why, that just makes it an even better accolade for the songwriter to have written it in the first place. We’re in This Together has all the elements that made NIN work: a dance floor filling electronic synth beat, repeat lyrics which sounded vaguely meaningful but didn’t really mean much, and a headbanging chorus which spoke to the crowd and the individual in the exact same way. You might well say that the fact I look down on the club favourites of the 80s (Jive Bunny) in the same way I forgive the club favourites of the 00s is a bit hypocritical. Well, it is, but I contain multitudes, as a wise man once said.
German electronic dance music which reached the top of the pops. Suggestive instrumental electronic jazz hybrid.
Typical feel good go your own way Irish 90s stuff from the band who still hold the record for biggest crowd at Glastonbury. “There’s only one way of life and that’s your own” sing the band who tried to mix centre left wing politics with easy to remember slogans. The Gordon Brown of 90s music? (Before you say what about Tony, I point to their chart positions...)
LA blues rockers Jamiroquai, sort of a missing link between 70s Chic and the 00s dance electronica, were the hot act of the late 90s. Their regular top ten slots in the charts faded away shortly after the turn of the millennium, the press focused less on the music and more on lead singer Jay Kay’s excesses. The band continue to tour in some form or another but in 2020 they are shorn of the talents of keyboardist Toby Smith, whose beats are the bits people remember from their 90s hits like Canned Heat, and who left the band in 2002, got cancer, and then sadly died in 2017 aged only 46.
Canned Heat follows the Jamiroquai template – beat in place, catchy chorus, Jay dancing like a nutter all over the song. Canned Heat, canned top ten hit. If so many of these hits seem to be following a formula for success, well, that seems to be the story with 1999 in the charts so far.
Trance music from the 90s by Paul Oakenfold, remixed by Oakenfold for re-release. The sort of thing to go and headbang to on a dance floor at 3am when wasted. The singer is Dominique Atkins who appeared on a number of dance tracks from the time.
Canadian alt-rockers produce this semi-humorous track about people trying to get the last laugh during a couples argument. Although if you’ve been fighting for a week because neither can say sorry, that’s a bit OTT. Mind my Gran’s second favourite bit of advice, given out at my wedding: never go to sleep on an argument.
Her favourite? “Never start an argument when your wife has a cast iron skillet in her hands, as your dear grandfather found out one day...”
It’ll still be two days till they say sorry, apparently. Get a room, guys! Oh wait, they already do, that’s part of the issue.
Weird Al’s homage to this about Jerry Springer is a good laugh too.
Eddie Guerrero’s group hadn’t even debuted yet so how could we have New Radicals? Sorry, untimely reference to the old adage in wrestling that anything with New in the name is doomed to failure: New Blackjacks, New Rockers, New Originals. The exception is The New Age Outlaws, but that was part of the ironic echo pop culture of the late 90s which is now the standard nostalgia of the last decade. What was that folk were saying about the slow cancellation of the future again?
Much along with anything with New in the name, The New Radicals didn’t even last 24 months together, and produced one album and one charting hit of note: this. If you listen to it now, it is the epitaph for a year of music, if you hear the chords you know exactly when it was and probably what you were up to. I was just being introduced to the wit and wisdom of Mick Foley for the first time, which I quote above and which this band completely failed to take notice of. As such an iconic post it note, it deserves a place on this list, but its a testimony to undeserved excess as much as anything else. As they sing of smashing Mercedes Benzs and running miles in style, you cant help but think that is a bit of a put on, a try hard, looking to be noticed but not lasting in the spotlight.
The amusing footnote is their Call Out moment, which seemed the niche thing in turn of the century pop, where you call out contemporaries as not being all that to look cool and new. Here they call a number of acts fakes including Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson. Mansons response was to have no issue with being called a fake, just that he wasn’t keen on being lumped next to Love! And whilst Manson himself might be a bit of try hard in his shocking imagery at times (and in 2020 is a good two decades off his prime), he was often an eloquent advocate for the vulnerable and misfitting in society when interviewed, and produced more than one memorable tune. Which is why he remains fondly remembered, whereas the New Radicals were Marty Jannetty trying to look relevant by sticking to everything that once made them the future a decade prior.
Underrated opening theme to an underrated James Bond film. With lyrics by Don Black and music by David Arnold, it was just a case of slotting a band into place as usual with the Bond themes. Having written the song, they offered it to Garbage, and Shirley Manson – a lifelong Bond fan – jumped at the chance, making minor edits to the lyrics with permission. When she expressed her own doubts of carrying a Bond theme, she was told “you can’t do worse than A-ha!” Poor A-ha! Given what was directly around the corner with Bond, when a bonafide music A lister flopped in the lead music role, and the mediocrity we get nowadays, Garbage certainly hit all the right notes. It does what you’d expect from the song, and that’s not always the case with Bond songs. And in a year of such wildly differing quality of music, that’s more than enough for a spot on this list.
“The world is not enough
But it is such a perfect place to start.”
Says absolutely nothing about the film, mind you!
Anthem filling pop rock by the chap mum claims is the heir to Tom Jones. This song is written by Welsh singer-songwriter Karl Wallinger, who you might recall as bassist on The Whole of the Moon, or later as singer-songwriter of Is It Like Today? Yep, Robbie Williams was covering the World Party! And in fact he had the musicians for World Party on the song, which is why both versions sound very familiar to each other. But the one person who wasn’t told, who didn’t get to go to the Brits, and didn’t get the acclaim over the hit single? Karl Wallinger. It’s no shame in finding an obscure track by an underrated artist and covering it to greater success. There is in hiding away your citations so that the due respect never reaches the poor sod you are covering.
Oh look, here is the unstoppable pop behemoth of the time period. Britney Spears went from kids TV presenter to biggest star in the world in such a short period of time, the average persons head was left spinning, let alone the poor singer who seems yet to fully mentally recover from the blitzkrieg. Of all of Britney’s big hits, this is the most basic teen pop song of them all, and so the weakest. But because a force of nature is involved, it stands up. It doesn’t matter there's auto-tune diluting the song or background singers taking the strain off – if there’s one thing you can’t teach, its charisma, and Spears had it in spades from the moment the camera laid eyes on her. Add in another catchy tune, lyrics that seem meaningful but say little, and you have a top hit. Any more of those in this countdown and I’m subscribing to Bill Drummond’s email newsletter for hope of a quick buck!
Another alt-rock song from the year that was used in a film. In this case City of Angels. Like many of these cases, arguably the song is more recognisable now than the film.
Oh here we go, and with the aide of a beat taken off Chas and Dave (via Labi Siffre), the myth, the man, the legend Eminem is born. As an introduction to all things Marshall Mathers, this ticks all the boxes. As many meta-references to other music acts, some reverent, others piss taking? Check. Reverence to Dr Dre? Check. Dodgy lyrics about female singers? Check. References to real world issues before hiding away in juvenility? Check. Right at the genesis of a musical icon that pretty much still is one of the main talking points in modern music two decades later, you can see all the bits where he’d make more of in later songs. His attention seeking violence lyrics, more than not, would be fashioned into a cause. The inner turmoil of being the rap Scrappy Doo who becomes popular well beyond his expectations and tries to use that fame to save his own friends from the prejudices of society. The man who can’t diss people for two verses without bringing up how much he loves being a dad and how his daughter is his favourite person, and how twenty years on that’s still the strongest relationship in his life. The man who lives on the excess of his genre, and yet openly lampshades the white privilege that made him a millionaire. (There is, as he points out, no matter how much Dre and co love the guy, not that much difference between his route to money and Pat Boones in the 1950s…) The man who wants to fight prejudice, yet has often said the most outrageously prejudiced things, sometimes to deliberately shock, sometimes to be ironic (the last defence of 2020, so far), and sometimes because he’s not thinking. There are comments on homosexuality in early Emimen works that current Eminem would run a mile from, because, he’s allowed himself to mature somewhat. And so you often get the best and worst of music in his stuff. Sometimes in the same goddamn verse. But right at the beginning this was all to come. All we see are the fault-lines that will trigger a music revolution.
Is it because I live in bloody Scotland?
This was at the time Fran Healy’s biggest hit by far, and it’s spent 21 year having the piss ripped out of it by mean spirited sods like me. There is no correlation between the rain and lying when you are 17. But then there’s no correlation between a free ride when you’re already late, and irony, and the public lapped that up anyway. (“Unfortunate” is what Ed Byrne called it – personally I call a free ride when already late a Hail Mary pass on a bad day…)
Anyhow it sold because it had a catchy tune like so many songs this year, but is that a fault?
They also released the equally goofy Turn, but I think one Travis song is enough leeway as it is….
Typical 90s Chilli Peppers song. John Fruiscante and Flea’s guitar work over self-analysis by Anthony Kiedis. By this point, Keidis was out of his manic Give It Away phase, but still in his addiction phase. The singer had become addicted to drugs in his teens through family links to the trade, and even the death of close friend and band mate Hillel Slovak in 1988 couldn’t shake the vice. Here, Scar Tissue is not so much a shout to the world but a singer-songwriter asking himself to get a grip on his own life. In that respect, it worked, Kiedis kicked his habit in 2000 and is still going. His book on the subject was also called Scar Tissue, and has been credited with helping others kick the habit. This is by far the most mournful of all RHCP songs, as it feels like the one that is on the verge of giving up. But without it existing, we might never have survived to the point where the club classics of the 00s came out, and Keidis and the Peppers found new life. As a result, its hard to knock its importance.
Joyous life fulfilling pop about hayfever. What’s not to love? The Divine Comedy do not threaten the charts as often as their talents would deserve.
“Laugh at the tears you're crying
Smile while your head explodes
why' don't have to take this lying down
So blow your nose baby
And just get your fingers clicking
To the rhythm and the rhyme
Otherwise you'll just be kicking around
And that's a crime.”
To which this heavy hayfever sufferer writes: Atchooo!
Another familiar 90s rocker by the funk rock singer-songwriter from NYC. A song that came into being after an amp check gave Kravitz the idea for a chord riff, this was a UK Number One in 1999. Note the synthesizers working with the guitar riff as part of Kravitz’s attempts to make the music futuristic.
Song linked to the Austin Powers franchise. Working with musician William Orbit, Madonna writes and performs another UK Top 5 hit and international best seller. Makes it all look ludicrously easy. This is sort of 90s version of Nobody Does It Better by Carly Simon, written by Marvin Hamlisch for the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. “To know you is to love you” even feels like a tribute to Hamlisch’s style of songwriting.
Annoyingly catchy tune with stupidly memorable music video with folk dancing. In fact it’s a magpie piece, the chorus (complete with Praise You), comes from Camille Yarbrough (Take Yo Praise), but they add JBL Sessions “Balance and Rehearsal” stock music tune to it too. Through sampling and mixing this is the sort of thing anyone could have done, but could anyone have made it so memorable? Well, it is what it is.
Melancholic almost funereal song by Texas standards. Yeah, even by the one about bullying and abuse. “Time has such a puzzling grace” purrs Sharleen Spiteri and you wonder if you are at a wake.
Disturbing debut single by Britney Spears that was to become one of her trademarks. In the hands of an older gent, Hit me Baby is somewhat perverse. In the voice of a young woman, its hard to see it as anything other than deeply sinister. The song is about someone whose terrible relationship is falling apart and how begs for forgiveness, clearly completely consumed by the gaslighting aspect. Everyone from Rolling Stone to Britney herself call it the best song of her career, however. The defence is the lyrics mean “hit me up on the phone” not punch me, and there’s a language translation error, but, Death of the Author makes it one of the most memorably dark songs of the era. Johan Carlberg and Thomas Lindberg’s guitar work effortlessly compliment Max Martin’s audio mix.
“Oh, kiss me beneath the milky twilight
Lead me out on the moonlit floor
Lift your open hand
Strike up the band, and make the fireflies dance
Silvermoon's sparkling
So kiss me...”
Oh hell, sometimes you just like a song which is so entirely uncynical about being in love. There’s plenty of cynicism going around, let’s have this moment. The Grammy nominated song was by far the Texas bands biggest hit.
Take one lesser known Stevie Wonder track off an acclaimed album, bring in one of the most famous singers in the world and a well regarded blues singer, and mix together for a UK Top 5 hit. Right as Michael’s back catalogue was giving new life to the younger generation, so George proved he could breathe new life on forgotten tracks by the masters. It should have been a hit in America, but was pulled by Jay Boberg of IRS Records after George Michael’s public outing as a gay man. The man even overruled Sony. After George’s premature death in 2016, it was revealed that all the royalties from the album and single went to the Terrence Higgins Trust.
A serial killer confessing to all his victims. Or a 90s love song. The line there is so hard to judge sometimes. Of course, the memorable tune here is the work of the Cuban composer Perez Prado, who died in 1989 but saw new found fame in the 90s after his mambo version of Guaglione was used in a successful Guinness advert campaign. Up beat mambo, a sort of instrumental Tito Puente, was his stock calling card used here. Sans Prado’s work, Lou Bega became the very definition of a one hit wonder. Still, he had the money, money, yeah yea… no, wait, he got stuck in a legal battle with the Cuban great’s estate, because the silly sod, despite being protected by German law (riffs aren’t copyrighted in Germany) sought an agreement with the Prado estate and then went over it, thus allowing for an 8 year court case which he wound up losing, even though the lyrics are his and much of the skeleton piecing together the sample. Did nobody learn anything from Bittersweet Symphony? OH well, at least he had a little bit of Rita, it’s all he needs…
Seductive and sly, this track by Draco Rosa sold over 8 million copies and was one of the biggest Latin hits of the 1990s. The crazy life, indeed.
Memorable song by a band that grew out of Nirvana.
One of those songs on the list I actually remember from when they came out. There was a lot of buzz around this song, aided by an animated music video. Try hard emo rock, as Jon Arnold once put it. It might be music for whiny teens, but then, when it came out I was a whiny teen. KoRn songs are primarily about two things: being bullied as a kid, or sex. This is the raison d’etre that made them so popular with teenage boys at the time. Now, nearly a quarter of a century on, their sex songs are a bit embarrassing to say the least. (Although, even, the clues in the title All Day Long I Think About Sex, it’s thinking about an action rather than achieving it…) And the bullied kids one were more sort of a slightly older brother telling countless kids they weren’t alone, and would get through it, and apparently saved a number of lives, so you know, there’s no knocking that. Even if you aren’t going to get much textual reading from me on “I can see, I can see, I'm going blind”, if it actively helped vulnerable teens, cool.
Freak on a Leash is sort of the middle child in the midst of all this. It’s neither one type of KoRn song or the other, though it references both, and as a result it was one of their biggest hits. ADIDAS got a higher ranking in the charts, but then in the UK you could name a song Sexy Sexy Sex Time, put a drum beat over it, and collect your number one royalties. (If anyone does this, keep in mind your pal Michael after the first million, thanks…) In fact, their biggest number was Here to Stay, but I’m sure we’ll get round to discussing that one at a later date…
Freak on a Leah is a deconstruction of the good guy trope, long before I’d even heard of it. The character bemoans how his great romance has been ruined by “life always messing with me”, but even as he bemoans that “you and I were meant to be”, the mask slips and refers to the other (never defined as a man or woman) as a “cheap fuck”. What follows is the person continually trying to reassert his status as a heroic figure undone by their own fate, not even seeing that they are monstrous.. They moan about being misunderstood and having a bad life, and all the while Jonathan Davis is putting just the right stresses on words as if to say “listen to this jerk”. One thing that set Davis apart from the other singers of that ilk in the time period was the ability to add tone to his voice, so that the reading of lyrics might not be what comes across on the page. It gave an added nuance that, say, Limp Bizkit lacked. He mumbles all the references to sex too, as if they are disguised from the narrator too. On paper we see what a horror he was, but in his own mind, it’s blurred. It also gets that shit past the censors.
On the instrumental section, James Shaffer and bassist Reginald Arvizu are almost at war with each other, duelling guitars as the song delves further and further into a damaged psyche. And when we cut into what academics have called Davis’s “gibberish nonsence-utterances” phase, that mind is very damaged. As Lyricfind puts it: “Boom na da noom na na nema, Da boom na da noom na namena.” And I think we can all agree with that. “Melodic elements don’t play a part” said Elias Pamplank in a critical reading, but that misses that the “melodic” bits are as important as the ranting bits. It all reveals the whole of the man.
Or you could believe it ‘s about the band’s sex life. But I think you’ll find the inner truth more interesting…
I’ve never taken the National Express, even when my life was in a mess, but I hear it’ll make you smile. And for £20 to London, single travel, I guess that is quite good. Outwith the glib, The Divine Comedy are one of the great musical acts of the last 30 years, and if their flirtation with the UK charts is a rarity rather than regularity, that is the public's loss and not theirs. Well, I suppose it is their royalties loss, but you know what I mean. National Express is their most famous song, if you discount the theme tune to Father Ted, and whilst there are better examples of their work, there is no better example of their impact in the charts. Even a weaker but catchy TDC tune is better than most of its contemporaries.
Somewhat more quiet and thoughtful song than Blur’s earlier hits. This lacks the in your face style of Parklife, the loudness of County House or the repetitive nature of Girls and Boys, but in those quieter moments it holds up even better. The coffee and TV is what guitarist Graham Coxon used to recover from alcoholism. This feels like a call back to 80s Kinks work rather than the Britpop Blur, and it also shows how much better the band could be , stripped from that era of laddishness. But then Coxon was the least interested in the Britpop Battle, and this song – complete with “take me away from this big bad world so we can start over again” - can be seen as his riposte of the era. Jarvis sneered at it and told us the nostalgia was based on false memory, Blur here seem depressed and done in by the superficial state of music. And while Blur were soon to pack up, and Graham Coxon to spend time in the Priory, it seems apt that this track of all Blur tracks seemed to linger longest in the mind of Damon Albarn when he formed Gorillaz a few years later.
Incidentally, Coxon now works as a composer in his own right and did the music for teen Netflix/Channel 4 smash hit The End of the F***ing World, and also helped to get other musicians to recover from their alcoholism, including Pete Doherty. So perhaps this one moment of introspection in the long run was worth a thousand Country Houses, even if I know which song we all sang in school.
Gravelly voiced soul singer Gray had her biggest UK hit with this song which sounds like someone added a soul backing track to the channelling of the spirit of Patti Smith.
“Now the neighborhood's cracked and torn
The kids are grown up but their lives are worn
How can one little street
Swallow so many lives”
The Offspring work best when Noodles and Greg’s guitar work gets to overplay on each other complimentary. Their far bigger hit this year uses the guitar to get from A to B, but here its part of the social critique. From an instrumental jam point of view it might be their best example of the guitars being as much a seething lyric as the actual lyrics themselves. Its about a whole generation who got told they were in the best position anyone could be, only to graduate and find all the promised jobs had fucked off. As someone who graduated in the midst of the biggest recession since the 30s, I can sympathise with that one. The title is of course a reference back to the Who song, who was a rather idealised message for its time: that teens drank and fornicated and the like but usually turned out OK so the moral panic was OTT. This isn’t the flip of that, in that the Offspring, being of the generation they sing about, aren’t asking their elders to understand. They’re asking where all the supposed normal stuff has disappeared to, as if a ladder has been hoist up away from the younger generations. In that, the song only becomes more timely as we move further in time, and face yet more crisis. Dexter Holland notes he looked around his hometown in the late 90s in California, seeing all the old shops boarded up and gone, and all the old escapes from real life diminished, and getting so depressed he sat down and wrote this. At the time it seemed too depressing for chart success. Everyone wanted to be fly for a white guy instead. But time is vindicating this stance as more and more find common cause in the song, and it is now one of The Offsprings most streamed tunes. And as the sense of belonging to a place and time which is increasingly disconnected from the modern rush to popularism increases, I can only see this anthem out of time becoming more of the song that people to go to when they think of The Offspring in decades to come.
It’s also used in the opening scenes of The Faculty, an underrated horror flick from the time which also has been gaining appraisal as time marches on. Serendipity!
The Talking Heads version of this song just fits them to a T. As new wave funk, it fits David Byrne’s vocals and world outlook. (The song stemmed from a Tina Weymouth jamming session.)
So then Tom Jones decided to take the song, give it a Tom Jones upbeat tempo, couple with the Cardigans who are a different style entirely, and absolutely smash into the UK top 10. This entire mixture shouldn’t work, and yet it does, because Tom Jones is the closest the UK came to Johnny Cash in terms of someone who could just take any song and make it his own. 1999 was the year of cover songs clearly, but this one blows away most of the rest. It’s not unusual, I gather.
No idea if Tom would sing the Monopoly board though.
“Thought I had a dream to hold
Maybe that has gone
Your hands reach out and touch me still
But this feels so wrong “
John McEhone’s guitar work screams at you in this song, carrying Sharlene Spiteri’s voice to bitter levels you’d yet not expect. It’s the louder, angrier, in your face companion to Big Country’s Chance.
So the funny thing about this song and its links to Kurt Vonnegut. The article around which this song is heavily based circulated the internet at the turn of the century in chain emails, citing the SF legend as its source. And it’s very easy to see why. The entire thing reads like Kurt Vonnegut. It has his use of language, and hope, and misdirection, to inspire.
“If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it
A long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists
Whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable
Than my own meandering experience, I will dispense this advice now.”
I mean, admit it, you’re reading this in Kurt Vonnegut’s voice. I read it in his voice! Incidentally, if at this point you are saying to yourself “who is this Kurt Vonnegut?” then go immediately to your place you get books or ebooks, look up Slaughterhouse Five, and thank me later.
It got to the point where Vonnegut’s agents were being sent requests for permission to publish the article. His wife Jill even saw it and thought it was her husbands words. There was only one problem. It was written by Mary Schmich in the Chicago Tribune in 1997, and not Kurt Vonnegut!
“What I said to Mary Schmich on the telephone was that what she wrote was funny and wise and charming, so I would have been proud had the words been mine.” said Vonnegut to the New York Times in 1997. This led to the 90s variation of Fake News when fans claimed it was the set up for his next novel – ironically the exact sort of world view owned by folk Vonnegut tore into in his majestic takedown of the Bush Administration, Man Without a Country.
Schmich went on to make substantial royalties from this song, publish books based on the theme, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011. I’d say there’s no harm in being compared to one of the greatest writers to ever live (Vonnegut is sadly no longer with us, so it goes) but then other work has also been misattribute to Eleanor Roosevelt! The writer’s life for you…
And poor old Mary Schmich that, on reading the original email, Baz Luhrmann thought it was Vonnegut. But he quickly discovered the true author, because he did his fucking research, and Schmich gave permission for her words to be use as lyrics to this charmingly 90s song. The lyrics are narrated by Lee Perry. It is entirely different from everything in this list, but it is the most reassuring (I hesitate to use “feel good”) you’ll find here. Even if you accept the lack of an actual link between Schmich and Vonnegut, it’s no surprise that fans of the latter pick up on the words of the former. They share the same world philosophy and heart.
“Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.”
Mary Schmich, Wear Sunscreen
Karaoke belting classic return to form from the 70s music behemoths. Debbie Harry sings better at 55 than I ever did. It was a UK number one hit, the bands first in nearly 20 years. Jimmy Destri’s casual riffs complimenting Harry’s voice very well. They returned older but somehow as good as they ever were, and how many bands do that? In a normal year, Maria would be my undisputed number one for the entire year. It’s a smash hit, words I rarely use. Harry waltzed back into the scene in 1999 and won every teenagers heart, no matter their gender, as effortlessly as she once did in the late 70s. Hell, she still could too. But then this year, and I speak of 1999 and 2020 and indeed 1965 and 1865 and all other years you might reference alongside it were not normal. And so even Debbie Harry, as great as she is (and at 75, she’s still great in my book), has to take 2nd place to the moment that is:
1. Tupac Shakur - Changes
Arguably one of the most important song of the 90s. A spiritual successor to a 60s legend, it arrived in the charts posthumously, and has only remained more timely as the years pass, which gives the song extra credence. Tupac Shakur speaks against prejudice, explores the past, foresees the future, and proves that rap music can be art, and beauty. Which, as with all genres, should be a “we take these aims to be self-evident” statement, but then, rap has had its critics from day one (some more deliberately virulent than others).
I was slow to moving towards Tupac Shakur, as the cool kids at school loved him, and thus there was a contrarian's disconnect. By the time Changes came out, I was out of love with the charts, which is a shame as the song reached 3rd place.
Rap is reliant on the sample. For an example of how not to do it, look at any song by Vanilla Ice. We‘ve seen how Eminem used a riff by Chas Hodges to launch into the mainstream, and in 1997, Stewart Copelands riff for Every Breathe You Take was taken wholesale for the B.I.G. tribute. Here, Tupac samples The Way It Is by Bruce Hornsby, keeping the piano intro and parts of the chorus. This rather cleverly warps the entire context of the original, and gives it a higher purpose than the throwaway 80s original.
For this is the counter-piece to A Change Is Gonna Come by Sam Cooke, read through the cynicism of the 1990s. And boy, is it angry. Right from the start, Shakur plays with what we would expect from a song called Changes. “I see no changes”, he says, before wondering if the state of everyday racism in the US is so bad, that he should just kill himself. Starting cheery, and going downhill, before the chorus kicks in, we have the War on Drugs, black opioid stings and police brutality, assassinations and crass black stereotypes. Tupac calls out all of this inequality, and then says “we gotta start making changes” and that’s when the title comes into sharp focus. So as he focuses on a dead friend, and in cuts the chorus, “that’s just the way it is” has never sounded so threatening and nihilist.
Verse 2 has such stand out moments as “I see no changes, all I see is racist faces”, and the killer bit:
“Although it seems heaven sent, we ain’t ready to see a black President, it ain’t a secret, don’t conceal the fact, the penitentiary’s packed and its filled with blacks.”
Which we know is true, even today. Hell, large parts of America were so unready for a black President, they immediately reverted to Donald fucking Trump as a comfort blanket.
The third verse goes to the personal, Shakur noting both his own run ins with the law – both for crime and for the crime of breathing while black – and his own personal enemies, linking himself back to Huey Newton in the first verse. Foreshadowing his own early death, though he was probably smart enough to know how the movie he was making ends (especially after being shot in 1994). And you know, there’s probably folk thinking - as has been stated on TV before - “Well, boy, they were wannabe gangsters and they got shot.” Fuck out of here with that shit. Tupac Shakur was 25 when he died. John Lennon was fucking 40 and we talk all the time about his ability to change as a person before the gunman took his growth as a person away, and I know I’m so much different now to what I was aged 25. There are genuinely bad marks on him (the rape conviction) but there are lousy marks on a whole range of white musicians who were allowed to get old and forgiven: Don Henley, Jimmy Page, etc. Other brushes, such as that which led directly to his death, seemed to be a case of mingling with a bad influence, which surely would have been axed from the mix as Shakur got older and wiser. Only he never got the chance, becoming one of the statistics from his own song. Like Sam Cooke before him.
In the 20+ years since Changes was released, ask yourself: does the black welfare stereotype still exist? Are American prisons still full of black people, many of them there on light crimes like possession of drugs? Do the cops still “pull the trigger, kill a (n)”? (He can use that word, I can’t, for obvious reasons.) Do black lives matter? Hell, look at the police response to the protests following George Floyd’s killing, and the chorus looms right back at you: “that’s just the way it is.” But why should it be? Shouldn’t the ability to live without the risk of being shot or killed just for who you are be normal? And yet here we are in 2020, talking about a song from 1995, which references a song from 1965. It’s been a long time coming, and we’re still waiting for the change that’s gonna come.
Really, all you need do is turn on the news any given day and you’ll see Tupac’s rage is just as relevant in 2020 as he was in the 1990s. I see no changes…
And so next time - who knows what year will take the fancy. All that's left to say is...keep safe, one and all. It's a messy, virus filled year out there.
Near Omissions List: Turn (Travis), Dear Mama (Tupac), Rock is Dead (Marilyn
Manson), Strong enough (Cher), Right Here Right Now (Fatboy Slim),
Electric Barbarella (Duran Duran), U Don’t Know Me (Armand van
Helden), Baby its Cold Outside (Tom Jones/Cerys Matthews), Erase/Rewind
(Cardigans), Turn Around (Phats and Small), That Dont Impress Me Much
(Shania Twain)
If we can take the art over artist bit as read after last time, a brief reminder. This is, in my opinion, the 40 best songs to appear on the UK Top 40 between January 1st and December 31st 1999. The 90s were harder to piece together lists on that criteria and 2007 onwards looks even harder, but it is what it is.
Onwards...
40. Catatonia
– Dead from the Waist Down
Not as well known as their two big hits from 1998, this is Catatonia in far more chilled mood. A top ten hit in 1999, Dead from the Waist Down came from the Welsh band’s third album. Guitarist Mark Roberts had come up with the general riff and basic lyrics during the bands tour of America. And yet what is the song about? People unable to sleep with each other, either through tiredness (of touring?) or because the relationship has gone beyond that point in saving. It might be lighter in tune, but that doesn’t mean the Catatonia claws are any less sharp. Also, at this point I really should point out that Cerys Matthews and Tom Jones cover of Baby Its Cold Outside really ought to be in the top 40 for 1999 on artistic merit. However, I am aware that the song now has a different context for many readers, and regardless of my own views on history, I have chosen to take it out so as not to dillute the overall message.
39. Monster
Magnet – Powertrip
I’d have liked to put Live for the Moment in the 2002 charts, but it never charted, for some reason. So here are Monster Magnet a few years earlier with a lesser tune, but to be honest, if you’ve heard one Monster Magnet song, you’ve heard them all. All their songs lead to the Dave Wyndorf yelled chorus which need not make much sense. “I’m not going to work another day in my life, the Gods told me to relax” he roars. For a band cosplaying as Lemmy in between Hawkwind and Motorhead, I guess that’s not too bad. Although they have their fans, they still tour (when there isn’t covid), they still release albums, and the use of songs by the likes of WWE, JC jeans and Electronic Arts mean steady royalty income for the band 20 years on. They may have had one song, two guitars, a loud voice and a bunch of gusto, but it certainly worked for them. And in the UK, this song charted but Live for the Moment didn’t. Sods law, really.
38. Elvis
Costello – She
Elvis Costello’s cover of Charles Aznavour’s 70s classic reached the UK top 20 in 1999, and was my introduction to the song. Elvis covered it for Notting Hill, and both he and Charles made some healthy dosh off it. Charles Aznavour kept performing till his death, which is normally an exaggeration of sorts, but not in his case: his last public performance came on French TV in 2018, less than 12 hours before he died in his sleep of natural causes, aged 94.
37. The Offspring - Pretty Fly for a White Guy
Although the biggest issue with The Offspring is that their best single by far – Come out and Play – was released years before they made it big in the UK and so didn’t chart here. This is the song about the guy who tries to fit in but fails abysmally. I think we’ve all been there.
36. Christina Aguilera - Genie in a Bottle
Yes, this feels suitably late 90s. “You're lickin' your lips and blowing kisses my way but that don't mean I'm gonna give it away” sings Christina in another of those turn of the century tunes which uses sex appeal to tell us the singer is about more than sex appeal. Aguilera started off on the Mickey Mouse Club on US kids TV, before her big US music break singing on the Disney film Mulan. This lead to her teen pop phase, and a song which was, frankly, fucking huge on both sides of the Atlantic, with more number one success than Pete Waterman had to declare in his taxes in the late 80s. Genie is somewhat similar to SAW tracks in that the tune, lyrics and track were put together before the singer was assigned, and Aguilera got the gig off Mulan. At the time she was considered a Britney clone, having followed the same career path, but she managed to carve out quite a successful path in music, winning 5 Grammies over her career. As for Genie in a Bottle, the success is partly Aguilera’s voice (confident and alluring) and the beat in the background. They combine to lure in the listener. Add in a memorable chorus and you’re practically on Bingo on the KLF’s how to make a number one hit. Christina Aguilera went on to use her fame to give her generation much needed Aesops, but we’ll cover that in greater detail in future years. As it is, Genie wants to have its cake and eat it, but is a bit too much on the “come hither” stance and less of the independent women bit. Which is a shame. Better was to come. Catchy bloody tune though.
35. Nine Inch Nails - We're in This Together
Ah, Nine Inch Nails. Either the industrial rock pioneers of the 1990s, or an emo kid singing about things which had no meaning in experience, depending on your point of view. There was a point in time when I would have called NIN one of my top five favourite bands, and this was when I was an emo kid writing about things had no meaning in experience. Lots of poetry that rhymed mire and funeral pyre, and thought that clever. There is another train of thought that Trent Reznor writes songs which can become great songs in the hands of better singers, and the architects of that view tend to point to Johnny Cash’s cover of Hurt as their prime example. Which is a fair point, tempered only by the fact that Johnny Cash was a once in a lifetime emotive music genius who could sing the London Monopoly board nd make it majestic. (Admit it, you can hear him now: “Old Kent Road, community chest...”) I think the truth lies in the middle of the great debate: that Reznor was a bit of his time, but the band did produce some pretty good songs which have stood the test of time. And if other people can pull them off better, why, that just makes it an even better accolade for the songwriter to have written it in the first place. We’re in This Together has all the elements that made NIN work: a dance floor filling electronic synth beat, repeat lyrics which sounded vaguely meaningful but didn’t really mean much, and a headbanging chorus which spoke to the crowd and the individual in the exact same way. You might well say that the fact I look down on the club favourites of the 80s (Jive Bunny) in the same way I forgive the club favourites of the 00s is a bit hypocritical. Well, it is, but I contain multitudes, as a wise man once said.
34. ATB - 9pm Till I Come
German electronic dance music which reached the top of the pops. Suggestive instrumental electronic jazz hybrid.
33. Levellers - One Way
Typical feel good go your own way Irish 90s stuff from the band who still hold the record for biggest crowd at Glastonbury. “There’s only one way of life and that’s your own” sing the band who tried to mix centre left wing politics with easy to remember slogans. The Gordon Brown of 90s music? (Before you say what about Tony, I point to their chart positions...)
32. Jamiroquai - Canned Heat
LA blues rockers Jamiroquai, sort of a missing link between 70s Chic and the 00s dance electronica, were the hot act of the late 90s. Their regular top ten slots in the charts faded away shortly after the turn of the millennium, the press focused less on the music and more on lead singer Jay Kay’s excesses. The band continue to tour in some form or another but in 2020 they are shorn of the talents of keyboardist Toby Smith, whose beats are the bits people remember from their 90s hits like Canned Heat, and who left the band in 2002, got cancer, and then sadly died in 2017 aged only 46.
Canned Heat follows the Jamiroquai template – beat in place, catchy chorus, Jay dancing like a nutter all over the song. Canned Heat, canned top ten hit. If so many of these hits seem to be following a formula for success, well, that seems to be the story with 1999 in the charts so far.
31. Planet Perfecto/Grace - Not Over Yet
Trance music from the 90s by Paul Oakenfold, remixed by Oakenfold for re-release. The sort of thing to go and headbang to on a dance floor at 3am when wasted. The singer is Dominique Atkins who appeared on a number of dance tracks from the time.
30. Barenaked Ladies - One Week
Canadian alt-rockers produce this semi-humorous track about people trying to get the last laugh during a couples argument. Although if you’ve been fighting for a week because neither can say sorry, that’s a bit OTT. Mind my Gran’s second favourite bit of advice, given out at my wedding: never go to sleep on an argument.
Her favourite? “Never start an argument when your wife has a cast iron skillet in her hands, as your dear grandfather found out one day...”
It’ll still be two days till they say sorry, apparently. Get a room, guys! Oh wait, they already do, that’s part of the issue.
Weird Al’s homage to this about Jerry Springer is a good laugh too.
29. The New Radicals - You Get What You Give
Eddie Guerrero’s group hadn’t even debuted yet so how could we have New Radicals? Sorry, untimely reference to the old adage in wrestling that anything with New in the name is doomed to failure: New Blackjacks, New Rockers, New Originals. The exception is The New Age Outlaws, but that was part of the ironic echo pop culture of the late 90s which is now the standard nostalgia of the last decade. What was that folk were saying about the slow cancellation of the future again?
Much along with anything with New in the name, The New Radicals didn’t even last 24 months together, and produced one album and one charting hit of note: this. If you listen to it now, it is the epitaph for a year of music, if you hear the chords you know exactly when it was and probably what you were up to. I was just being introduced to the wit and wisdom of Mick Foley for the first time, which I quote above and which this band completely failed to take notice of. As such an iconic post it note, it deserves a place on this list, but its a testimony to undeserved excess as much as anything else. As they sing of smashing Mercedes Benzs and running miles in style, you cant help but think that is a bit of a put on, a try hard, looking to be noticed but not lasting in the spotlight.
The amusing footnote is their Call Out moment, which seemed the niche thing in turn of the century pop, where you call out contemporaries as not being all that to look cool and new. Here they call a number of acts fakes including Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson. Mansons response was to have no issue with being called a fake, just that he wasn’t keen on being lumped next to Love! And whilst Manson himself might be a bit of try hard in his shocking imagery at times (and in 2020 is a good two decades off his prime), he was often an eloquent advocate for the vulnerable and misfitting in society when interviewed, and produced more than one memorable tune. Which is why he remains fondly remembered, whereas the New Radicals were Marty Jannetty trying to look relevant by sticking to everything that once made them the future a decade prior.
28. Garbage - The World is Not Enough
Underrated opening theme to an underrated James Bond film. With lyrics by Don Black and music by David Arnold, it was just a case of slotting a band into place as usual with the Bond themes. Having written the song, they offered it to Garbage, and Shirley Manson – a lifelong Bond fan – jumped at the chance, making minor edits to the lyrics with permission. When she expressed her own doubts of carrying a Bond theme, she was told “you can’t do worse than A-ha!” Poor A-ha! Given what was directly around the corner with Bond, when a bonafide music A lister flopped in the lead music role, and the mediocrity we get nowadays, Garbage certainly hit all the right notes. It does what you’d expect from the song, and that’s not always the case with Bond songs. And in a year of such wildly differing quality of music, that’s more than enough for a spot on this list.
“The world is not enough
But it is such a perfect place to start.”
Says absolutely nothing about the film, mind you!
27. Robbie Williams - She's The One
Anthem filling pop rock by the chap mum claims is the heir to Tom Jones. This song is written by Welsh singer-songwriter Karl Wallinger, who you might recall as bassist on The Whole of the Moon, or later as singer-songwriter of Is It Like Today? Yep, Robbie Williams was covering the World Party! And in fact he had the musicians for World Party on the song, which is why both versions sound very familiar to each other. But the one person who wasn’t told, who didn’t get to go to the Brits, and didn’t get the acclaim over the hit single? Karl Wallinger. It’s no shame in finding an obscure track by an underrated artist and covering it to greater success. There is in hiding away your citations so that the due respect never reaches the poor sod you are covering.
26. Britney Spears - You Drive Me Crazy
Oh look, here is the unstoppable pop behemoth of the time period. Britney Spears went from kids TV presenter to biggest star in the world in such a short period of time, the average persons head was left spinning, let alone the poor singer who seems yet to fully mentally recover from the blitzkrieg. Of all of Britney’s big hits, this is the most basic teen pop song of them all, and so the weakest. But because a force of nature is involved, it stands up. It doesn’t matter there's auto-tune diluting the song or background singers taking the strain off – if there’s one thing you can’t teach, its charisma, and Spears had it in spades from the moment the camera laid eyes on her. Add in another catchy tune, lyrics that seem meaningful but say little, and you have a top hit. Any more of those in this countdown and I’m subscribing to Bill Drummond’s email newsletter for hope of a quick buck!
25. Goo Goo Dolls - Iris
Another alt-rock song from the year that was used in a film. In this case City of Angels. Like many of these cases, arguably the song is more recognisable now than the film.
24. Eminem - My Name Is
Oh here we go, and with the aide of a beat taken off Chas and Dave (via Labi Siffre), the myth, the man, the legend Eminem is born. As an introduction to all things Marshall Mathers, this ticks all the boxes. As many meta-references to other music acts, some reverent, others piss taking? Check. Reverence to Dr Dre? Check. Dodgy lyrics about female singers? Check. References to real world issues before hiding away in juvenility? Check. Right at the genesis of a musical icon that pretty much still is one of the main talking points in modern music two decades later, you can see all the bits where he’d make more of in later songs. His attention seeking violence lyrics, more than not, would be fashioned into a cause. The inner turmoil of being the rap Scrappy Doo who becomes popular well beyond his expectations and tries to use that fame to save his own friends from the prejudices of society. The man who can’t diss people for two verses without bringing up how much he loves being a dad and how his daughter is his favourite person, and how twenty years on that’s still the strongest relationship in his life. The man who lives on the excess of his genre, and yet openly lampshades the white privilege that made him a millionaire. (There is, as he points out, no matter how much Dre and co love the guy, not that much difference between his route to money and Pat Boones in the 1950s…) The man who wants to fight prejudice, yet has often said the most outrageously prejudiced things, sometimes to deliberately shock, sometimes to be ironic (the last defence of 2020, so far), and sometimes because he’s not thinking. There are comments on homosexuality in early Emimen works that current Eminem would run a mile from, because, he’s allowed himself to mature somewhat. And so you often get the best and worst of music in his stuff. Sometimes in the same goddamn verse. But right at the beginning this was all to come. All we see are the fault-lines that will trigger a music revolution.
23. Travis - Why Does It Always Rain On Me?
Is it because I live in bloody Scotland?
This was at the time Fran Healy’s biggest hit by far, and it’s spent 21 year having the piss ripped out of it by mean spirited sods like me. There is no correlation between the rain and lying when you are 17. But then there’s no correlation between a free ride when you’re already late, and irony, and the public lapped that up anyway. (“Unfortunate” is what Ed Byrne called it – personally I call a free ride when already late a Hail Mary pass on a bad day…)
Anyhow it sold because it had a catchy tune like so many songs this year, but is that a fault?
They also released the equally goofy Turn, but I think one Travis song is enough leeway as it is….
22. Red Hot Chilli Peppers - Scar Tissue
Typical 90s Chilli Peppers song. John Fruiscante and Flea’s guitar work over self-analysis by Anthony Kiedis. By this point, Keidis was out of his manic Give It Away phase, but still in his addiction phase. The singer had become addicted to drugs in his teens through family links to the trade, and even the death of close friend and band mate Hillel Slovak in 1988 couldn’t shake the vice. Here, Scar Tissue is not so much a shout to the world but a singer-songwriter asking himself to get a grip on his own life. In that respect, it worked, Kiedis kicked his habit in 2000 and is still going. His book on the subject was also called Scar Tissue, and has been credited with helping others kick the habit. This is by far the most mournful of all RHCP songs, as it feels like the one that is on the verge of giving up. But without it existing, we might never have survived to the point where the club classics of the 00s came out, and Keidis and the Peppers found new life. As a result, its hard to knock its importance.
21. The Divine Comedy - The Pop Singer's Fear of the Pollen Count
Joyous life fulfilling pop about hayfever. What’s not to love? The Divine Comedy do not threaten the charts as often as their talents would deserve.
“Laugh at the tears you're crying
Smile while your head explodes
why' don't have to take this lying down
So blow your nose baby
And just get your fingers clicking
To the rhythm and the rhyme
Otherwise you'll just be kicking around
And that's a crime.”
To which this heavy hayfever sufferer writes: Atchooo!
20. Lenny Kravitz - Fly Away
Another familiar 90s rocker by the funk rock singer-songwriter from NYC. A song that came into being after an amp check gave Kravitz the idea for a chord riff, this was a UK Number One in 1999. Note the synthesizers working with the guitar riff as part of Kravitz’s attempts to make the music futuristic.
19. Madonna - Beautiful Stranger
Song linked to the Austin Powers franchise. Working with musician William Orbit, Madonna writes and performs another UK Top 5 hit and international best seller. Makes it all look ludicrously easy. This is sort of 90s version of Nobody Does It Better by Carly Simon, written by Marvin Hamlisch for the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. “To know you is to love you” even feels like a tribute to Hamlisch’s style of songwriting.
18. Fatboy Slim - Praise You
Annoyingly catchy tune with stupidly memorable music video with folk dancing. In fact it’s a magpie piece, the chorus (complete with Praise You), comes from Camille Yarbrough (Take Yo Praise), but they add JBL Sessions “Balance and Rehearsal” stock music tune to it too. Through sampling and mixing this is the sort of thing anyone could have done, but could anyone have made it so memorable? Well, it is what it is.
17. Texas - In Our Lifetime
Melancholic almost funereal song by Texas standards. Yeah, even by the one about bullying and abuse. “Time has such a puzzling grace” purrs Sharleen Spiteri and you wonder if you are at a wake.
16. Britney Spears - Baby, One More Time
Disturbing debut single by Britney Spears that was to become one of her trademarks. In the hands of an older gent, Hit me Baby is somewhat perverse. In the voice of a young woman, its hard to see it as anything other than deeply sinister. The song is about someone whose terrible relationship is falling apart and how begs for forgiveness, clearly completely consumed by the gaslighting aspect. Everyone from Rolling Stone to Britney herself call it the best song of her career, however. The defence is the lyrics mean “hit me up on the phone” not punch me, and there’s a language translation error, but, Death of the Author makes it one of the most memorably dark songs of the era. Johan Carlberg and Thomas Lindberg’s guitar work effortlessly compliment Max Martin’s audio mix.
15. Sixpence None The Wiser - Kiss Me
“Oh, kiss me beneath the milky twilight
Lead me out on the moonlit floor
Lift your open hand
Strike up the band, and make the fireflies dance
Silvermoon's sparkling
So kiss me...”
Oh hell, sometimes you just like a song which is so entirely uncynical about being in love. There’s plenty of cynicism going around, let’s have this moment. The Grammy nominated song was by far the Texas bands biggest hit.
14. George Michael/Mary J Blige - As
Take one lesser known Stevie Wonder track off an acclaimed album, bring in one of the most famous singers in the world and a well regarded blues singer, and mix together for a UK Top 5 hit. Right as Michael’s back catalogue was giving new life to the younger generation, so George proved he could breathe new life on forgotten tracks by the masters. It should have been a hit in America, but was pulled by Jay Boberg of IRS Records after George Michael’s public outing as a gay man. The man even overruled Sony. After George’s premature death in 2016, it was revealed that all the royalties from the album and single went to the Terrence Higgins Trust.
13. Lou Bega - Mambo No 5
A serial killer confessing to all his victims. Or a 90s love song. The line there is so hard to judge sometimes. Of course, the memorable tune here is the work of the Cuban composer Perez Prado, who died in 1989 but saw new found fame in the 90s after his mambo version of Guaglione was used in a successful Guinness advert campaign. Up beat mambo, a sort of instrumental Tito Puente, was his stock calling card used here. Sans Prado’s work, Lou Bega became the very definition of a one hit wonder. Still, he had the money, money, yeah yea… no, wait, he got stuck in a legal battle with the Cuban great’s estate, because the silly sod, despite being protected by German law (riffs aren’t copyrighted in Germany) sought an agreement with the Prado estate and then went over it, thus allowing for an 8 year court case which he wound up losing, even though the lyrics are his and much of the skeleton piecing together the sample. Did nobody learn anything from Bittersweet Symphony? OH well, at least he had a little bit of Rita, it’s all he needs…
12. Ricky Martin - Livin La Vida Loca
Seductive and sly, this track by Draco Rosa sold over 8 million copies and was one of the biggest Latin hits of the 1990s. The crazy life, indeed.
11. Foo Fighters - Learn to Fly
Memorable song by a band that grew out of Nirvana.
10. KoRn - Freak on a Leash
One of those songs on the list I actually remember from when they came out. There was a lot of buzz around this song, aided by an animated music video. Try hard emo rock, as Jon Arnold once put it. It might be music for whiny teens, but then, when it came out I was a whiny teen. KoRn songs are primarily about two things: being bullied as a kid, or sex. This is the raison d’etre that made them so popular with teenage boys at the time. Now, nearly a quarter of a century on, their sex songs are a bit embarrassing to say the least. (Although, even, the clues in the title All Day Long I Think About Sex, it’s thinking about an action rather than achieving it…) And the bullied kids one were more sort of a slightly older brother telling countless kids they weren’t alone, and would get through it, and apparently saved a number of lives, so you know, there’s no knocking that. Even if you aren’t going to get much textual reading from me on “I can see, I can see, I'm going blind”, if it actively helped vulnerable teens, cool.
Freak on a Leash is sort of the middle child in the midst of all this. It’s neither one type of KoRn song or the other, though it references both, and as a result it was one of their biggest hits. ADIDAS got a higher ranking in the charts, but then in the UK you could name a song Sexy Sexy Sex Time, put a drum beat over it, and collect your number one royalties. (If anyone does this, keep in mind your pal Michael after the first million, thanks…) In fact, their biggest number was Here to Stay, but I’m sure we’ll get round to discussing that one at a later date…
Freak on a Leah is a deconstruction of the good guy trope, long before I’d even heard of it. The character bemoans how his great romance has been ruined by “life always messing with me”, but even as he bemoans that “you and I were meant to be”, the mask slips and refers to the other (never defined as a man or woman) as a “cheap fuck”. What follows is the person continually trying to reassert his status as a heroic figure undone by their own fate, not even seeing that they are monstrous.. They moan about being misunderstood and having a bad life, and all the while Jonathan Davis is putting just the right stresses on words as if to say “listen to this jerk”. One thing that set Davis apart from the other singers of that ilk in the time period was the ability to add tone to his voice, so that the reading of lyrics might not be what comes across on the page. It gave an added nuance that, say, Limp Bizkit lacked. He mumbles all the references to sex too, as if they are disguised from the narrator too. On paper we see what a horror he was, but in his own mind, it’s blurred. It also gets that shit past the censors.
On the instrumental section, James Shaffer and bassist Reginald Arvizu are almost at war with each other, duelling guitars as the song delves further and further into a damaged psyche. And when we cut into what academics have called Davis’s “gibberish nonsence-utterances” phase, that mind is very damaged. As Lyricfind puts it: “Boom na da noom na na nema, Da boom na da noom na namena.” And I think we can all agree with that. “Melodic elements don’t play a part” said Elias Pamplank in a critical reading, but that misses that the “melodic” bits are as important as the ranting bits. It all reveals the whole of the man.
Or you could believe it ‘s about the band’s sex life. But I think you’ll find the inner truth more interesting…
9. The Divine Comedy - National Express
I’ve never taken the National Express, even when my life was in a mess, but I hear it’ll make you smile. And for £20 to London, single travel, I guess that is quite good. Outwith the glib, The Divine Comedy are one of the great musical acts of the last 30 years, and if their flirtation with the UK charts is a rarity rather than regularity, that is the public's loss and not theirs. Well, I suppose it is their royalties loss, but you know what I mean. National Express is their most famous song, if you discount the theme tune to Father Ted, and whilst there are better examples of their work, there is no better example of their impact in the charts. Even a weaker but catchy TDC tune is better than most of its contemporaries.
8. Blur - Coffee and TV
Somewhat more quiet and thoughtful song than Blur’s earlier hits. This lacks the in your face style of Parklife, the loudness of County House or the repetitive nature of Girls and Boys, but in those quieter moments it holds up even better. The coffee and TV is what guitarist Graham Coxon used to recover from alcoholism. This feels like a call back to 80s Kinks work rather than the Britpop Blur, and it also shows how much better the band could be , stripped from that era of laddishness. But then Coxon was the least interested in the Britpop Battle, and this song – complete with “take me away from this big bad world so we can start over again” - can be seen as his riposte of the era. Jarvis sneered at it and told us the nostalgia was based on false memory, Blur here seem depressed and done in by the superficial state of music. And while Blur were soon to pack up, and Graham Coxon to spend time in the Priory, it seems apt that this track of all Blur tracks seemed to linger longest in the mind of Damon Albarn when he formed Gorillaz a few years later.
Incidentally, Coxon now works as a composer in his own right and did the music for teen Netflix/Channel 4 smash hit The End of the F***ing World, and also helped to get other musicians to recover from their alcoholism, including Pete Doherty. So perhaps this one moment of introspection in the long run was worth a thousand Country Houses, even if I know which song we all sang in school.
7. Macy Gray - I Try
Gravelly voiced soul singer Gray had her biggest UK hit with this song which sounds like someone added a soul backing track to the channelling of the spirit of Patti Smith.
6. The Offspring - The Kids Aren't Alright
“Now the neighborhood's cracked and torn
The kids are grown up but their lives are worn
How can one little street
Swallow so many lives”
The Offspring work best when Noodles and Greg’s guitar work gets to overplay on each other complimentary. Their far bigger hit this year uses the guitar to get from A to B, but here its part of the social critique. From an instrumental jam point of view it might be their best example of the guitars being as much a seething lyric as the actual lyrics themselves. Its about a whole generation who got told they were in the best position anyone could be, only to graduate and find all the promised jobs had fucked off. As someone who graduated in the midst of the biggest recession since the 30s, I can sympathise with that one. The title is of course a reference back to the Who song, who was a rather idealised message for its time: that teens drank and fornicated and the like but usually turned out OK so the moral panic was OTT. This isn’t the flip of that, in that the Offspring, being of the generation they sing about, aren’t asking their elders to understand. They’re asking where all the supposed normal stuff has disappeared to, as if a ladder has been hoist up away from the younger generations. In that, the song only becomes more timely as we move further in time, and face yet more crisis. Dexter Holland notes he looked around his hometown in the late 90s in California, seeing all the old shops boarded up and gone, and all the old escapes from real life diminished, and getting so depressed he sat down and wrote this. At the time it seemed too depressing for chart success. Everyone wanted to be fly for a white guy instead. But time is vindicating this stance as more and more find common cause in the song, and it is now one of The Offsprings most streamed tunes. And as the sense of belonging to a place and time which is increasingly disconnected from the modern rush to popularism increases, I can only see this anthem out of time becoming more of the song that people to go to when they think of The Offspring in decades to come.
It’s also used in the opening scenes of The Faculty, an underrated horror flick from the time which also has been gaining appraisal as time marches on. Serendipity!
5. Tom Jones and The Cardigans - Burning Down The House
The Talking Heads version of this song just fits them to a T. As new wave funk, it fits David Byrne’s vocals and world outlook. (The song stemmed from a Tina Weymouth jamming session.)
So then Tom Jones decided to take the song, give it a Tom Jones upbeat tempo, couple with the Cardigans who are a different style entirely, and absolutely smash into the UK top 10. This entire mixture shouldn’t work, and yet it does, because Tom Jones is the closest the UK came to Johnny Cash in terms of someone who could just take any song and make it his own. 1999 was the year of cover songs clearly, but this one blows away most of the rest. It’s not unusual, I gather.
No idea if Tom would sing the Monopoly board though.
4. Texas - Summer Son
“Thought I had a dream to hold
Maybe that has gone
Your hands reach out and touch me still
But this feels so wrong “
John McEhone’s guitar work screams at you in this song, carrying Sharlene Spiteri’s voice to bitter levels you’d yet not expect. It’s the louder, angrier, in your face companion to Big Country’s Chance.
3. Baz Luhrmann - Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)
So the funny thing about this song and its links to Kurt Vonnegut. The article around which this song is heavily based circulated the internet at the turn of the century in chain emails, citing the SF legend as its source. And it’s very easy to see why. The entire thing reads like Kurt Vonnegut. It has his use of language, and hope, and misdirection, to inspire.
“If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it
A long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists
Whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable
Than my own meandering experience, I will dispense this advice now.”
I mean, admit it, you’re reading this in Kurt Vonnegut’s voice. I read it in his voice! Incidentally, if at this point you are saying to yourself “who is this Kurt Vonnegut?” then go immediately to your place you get books or ebooks, look up Slaughterhouse Five, and thank me later.
It got to the point where Vonnegut’s agents were being sent requests for permission to publish the article. His wife Jill even saw it and thought it was her husbands words. There was only one problem. It was written by Mary Schmich in the Chicago Tribune in 1997, and not Kurt Vonnegut!
“What I said to Mary Schmich on the telephone was that what she wrote was funny and wise and charming, so I would have been proud had the words been mine.” said Vonnegut to the New York Times in 1997. This led to the 90s variation of Fake News when fans claimed it was the set up for his next novel – ironically the exact sort of world view owned by folk Vonnegut tore into in his majestic takedown of the Bush Administration, Man Without a Country.
Schmich went on to make substantial royalties from this song, publish books based on the theme, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011. I’d say there’s no harm in being compared to one of the greatest writers to ever live (Vonnegut is sadly no longer with us, so it goes) but then other work has also been misattribute to Eleanor Roosevelt! The writer’s life for you…
And poor old Mary Schmich that, on reading the original email, Baz Luhrmann thought it was Vonnegut. But he quickly discovered the true author, because he did his fucking research, and Schmich gave permission for her words to be use as lyrics to this charmingly 90s song. The lyrics are narrated by Lee Perry. It is entirely different from everything in this list, but it is the most reassuring (I hesitate to use “feel good”) you’ll find here. Even if you accept the lack of an actual link between Schmich and Vonnegut, it’s no surprise that fans of the latter pick up on the words of the former. They share the same world philosophy and heart.
“Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.”
Mary Schmich, Wear Sunscreen
2. Blondie - Maria
Karaoke belting classic return to form from the 70s music behemoths. Debbie Harry sings better at 55 than I ever did. It was a UK number one hit, the bands first in nearly 20 years. Jimmy Destri’s casual riffs complimenting Harry’s voice very well. They returned older but somehow as good as they ever were, and how many bands do that? In a normal year, Maria would be my undisputed number one for the entire year. It’s a smash hit, words I rarely use. Harry waltzed back into the scene in 1999 and won every teenagers heart, no matter their gender, as effortlessly as she once did in the late 70s. Hell, she still could too. But then this year, and I speak of 1999 and 2020 and indeed 1965 and 1865 and all other years you might reference alongside it were not normal. And so even Debbie Harry, as great as she is (and at 75, she’s still great in my book), has to take 2nd place to the moment that is:
1. Tupac Shakur - Changes
Arguably one of the most important song of the 90s. A spiritual successor to a 60s legend, it arrived in the charts posthumously, and has only remained more timely as the years pass, which gives the song extra credence. Tupac Shakur speaks against prejudice, explores the past, foresees the future, and proves that rap music can be art, and beauty. Which, as with all genres, should be a “we take these aims to be self-evident” statement, but then, rap has had its critics from day one (some more deliberately virulent than others).
I was slow to moving towards Tupac Shakur, as the cool kids at school loved him, and thus there was a contrarian's disconnect. By the time Changes came out, I was out of love with the charts, which is a shame as the song reached 3rd place.
Rap is reliant on the sample. For an example of how not to do it, look at any song by Vanilla Ice. We‘ve seen how Eminem used a riff by Chas Hodges to launch into the mainstream, and in 1997, Stewart Copelands riff for Every Breathe You Take was taken wholesale for the B.I.G. tribute. Here, Tupac samples The Way It Is by Bruce Hornsby, keeping the piano intro and parts of the chorus. This rather cleverly warps the entire context of the original, and gives it a higher purpose than the throwaway 80s original.
For this is the counter-piece to A Change Is Gonna Come by Sam Cooke, read through the cynicism of the 1990s. And boy, is it angry. Right from the start, Shakur plays with what we would expect from a song called Changes. “I see no changes”, he says, before wondering if the state of everyday racism in the US is so bad, that he should just kill himself. Starting cheery, and going downhill, before the chorus kicks in, we have the War on Drugs, black opioid stings and police brutality, assassinations and crass black stereotypes. Tupac calls out all of this inequality, and then says “we gotta start making changes” and that’s when the title comes into sharp focus. So as he focuses on a dead friend, and in cuts the chorus, “that’s just the way it is” has never sounded so threatening and nihilist.
Verse 2 has such stand out moments as “I see no changes, all I see is racist faces”, and the killer bit:
“Although it seems heaven sent, we ain’t ready to see a black President, it ain’t a secret, don’t conceal the fact, the penitentiary’s packed and its filled with blacks.”
Which we know is true, even today. Hell, large parts of America were so unready for a black President, they immediately reverted to Donald fucking Trump as a comfort blanket.
The third verse goes to the personal, Shakur noting both his own run ins with the law – both for crime and for the crime of breathing while black – and his own personal enemies, linking himself back to Huey Newton in the first verse. Foreshadowing his own early death, though he was probably smart enough to know how the movie he was making ends (especially after being shot in 1994). And you know, there’s probably folk thinking - as has been stated on TV before - “Well, boy, they were wannabe gangsters and they got shot.” Fuck out of here with that shit. Tupac Shakur was 25 when he died. John Lennon was fucking 40 and we talk all the time about his ability to change as a person before the gunman took his growth as a person away, and I know I’m so much different now to what I was aged 25. There are genuinely bad marks on him (the rape conviction) but there are lousy marks on a whole range of white musicians who were allowed to get old and forgiven: Don Henley, Jimmy Page, etc. Other brushes, such as that which led directly to his death, seemed to be a case of mingling with a bad influence, which surely would have been axed from the mix as Shakur got older and wiser. Only he never got the chance, becoming one of the statistics from his own song. Like Sam Cooke before him.
In the 20+ years since Changes was released, ask yourself: does the black welfare stereotype still exist? Are American prisons still full of black people, many of them there on light crimes like possession of drugs? Do the cops still “pull the trigger, kill a (n)”? (He can use that word, I can’t, for obvious reasons.) Do black lives matter? Hell, look at the police response to the protests following George Floyd’s killing, and the chorus looms right back at you: “that’s just the way it is.” But why should it be? Shouldn’t the ability to live without the risk of being shot or killed just for who you are be normal? And yet here we are in 2020, talking about a song from 1995, which references a song from 1965. It’s been a long time coming, and we’re still waiting for the change that’s gonna come.
Really, all you need do is turn on the news any given day and you’ll see Tupac’s rage is just as relevant in 2020 as he was in the 1990s. I see no changes…
And so next time - who knows what year will take the fancy. All that's left to say is...keep safe, one and all. It's a messy, virus filled year out there.
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