It’s been said that the defining sounds of a particular decade don’t truly take hold until the midway point, be it Motown and psychedelia in the ’60s, punk and disco in the ’70s, or hip-hop and hair metal in the ’80s. However, the ’90s turned that theory on its head. Its big-bang moment—Nirvana’s Nevermind—occurred very early in the decade, sending shockwaves through the mainstream and underground alike, and transforming “alt-” into an all-purpose badge of outsider cool that could be affixed to anything from country to hip-hop. Kurt Cobain punched out in ’94, but the ripple effects that his band triggered continued to cascade in his absence, and 1995 was the year the alt-revolution hit its peak.

It was the moment when Dave Grohl discovered there was life after Nirvana; Radiohead realized they could be so much more than a post-grunge U2; iconoclasts like Björk and PJ Harvey dropped defining works; Alanis Morissette and Garbage pushed edgy feminist pop into the Top 40; and Oasis, Elastica, and Pulp provided the soundtrack to Britpop’s halcyon days. It was also arguably the last era when certified weirdos like Royal Trux, Mercury Rev, and Mike Watt could be given free rein on a major-label budget, and the last moment when one could credibly hold on to the sincere beliefs that Pavement had crossover potential and Sonic Youth was a logical Lollapalooza headliner. It was also a particularly glorious moment for one-hit wonders that wouldn’t have broken through in any other era, like Hum’s “Stars” and Spacehog’s “In the Meantime.”

But there was ample evidence that grungy guitar rock’s dominance of alterna-culture was on the wane: The debuts of No Doubt and blink-182 signaled a shift toward more palatable pop-punk; The Pharcyde, The Roots, and the Wu-Tang were inspiring teens to trade their flannels for backpacks; and the likes of Moby, The Chemical Brothers, and Goldie were turning stage-divers to ravers. In hindsight, the year portended the era of fragmentation we currently inhabit, as what initially felt like a generational movement became corporatized or broken down into subcultural niches. But with this playlist of 95 from ’95, we present a virtual mosh pit where freaks of every stripe are forever welcome.

You read that right: This is 90s "alt-pop," not "alt-rock." If alt-rock represented the commercialization of 80s indie-rock, then these artists represented the commercialization of alt-rock. These are the diluted descendants of Nirvana, Green Day, Beck, and other legit underground-to-mainstream crossovers, artists who didnt have to worry about selling out, because, with few exceptions, they had no indie cred to begin with. They were "alternative" only by virtue of existing in the 90s, when any rock act that wasnt Aerosmith was ostensibly "alternative." Theyre the artists who made Kurt Cobain roll over in his grave more vigorously than most.But if each of these songs represented a nail in the coffin of the freak-scene utopia that Neverminds success briefly promised, today they function as a portal to an equally distant and inaccessible realm: i.e., a more innocent pre-9/11 era, before our hearts were perpetually filled with despair over the state of the world, before social media was clogging our brains with a 24/7 dose of aggravation. Lets go back to a world where our sunshine never got stolen.

For a song proclaiming its desire for eternal youth, Alphaville’s 1984 signature single “Forever Young” has a way of making you feel pretty old. Certainly, the essential, inescapable ’80s-ness of the song—the sunrise-summoning synths, the slick gated-reverb drum sound, the lighter-waving chorus line, the Cold War context—has a way of making those of us who came of age in that era feel all the more attuned to the passage of time. And the song’s very lyrical conceit presents a cruel paradox: With its yearning plea to return to the innocence and ecstasy of adolescence, “Forever Young” also underscores the fact it must come to an end.At the time “Forever Young” was released, rock ‘n’ roll was reckoning with its own lost youth. Twenty years after The Who’s Roger Daltrey famously declared “I hope I die before I get old,” the original classic rockers were starting to become aware of, if not their mortality, then their fading relevance. Rod Stewart seemed particularly preoccupied with the subject: While he tried to align himself with the New Wave kids on 1981’s synth-powered new-generation anthem “Young Turks,” by decade’s end, he had fully accepted his dad-rock fate with the parentally themed serenade “Forever Young” (which shares only its title with the Alphaville song; in fact, Rod’s “Forever Young” is an interpretation of Bob Dylan’s namesake 1974 deep cut). Other veteran artists, however, defiantly embraced their inner child, like Tom Waits on “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” his ramshackle folk-punk repudiation of the adult world and all the responsibilities and disappointments that go with it.So while Alphaville’s “Forever Young” may strike many as an ‘80s synth-pop artifact, permanently frozen in the Reagan era, it really belongs to a broader tradition of pop and rock songs that celebrate the state of being young and/or recognize how fleeting that moment really is. This playlist repositions “Forever Young” in its true natural habitat, amid a set of songs that embody all aspects of being young: the feelings of invincibility (Oasis’ “Live Forever,” Skid Row’s “Youth Gone Wild,” fun.’s “We Are Young”), the celebrations of immaturity (Supergrass’ “Alright,” Wilco’s “Just a Kid”), the compulsion to live for the moment and seize the day (Japandroids’ “Younger Us,” Constantines’ “Young Lions”), and emergent anxieties over getting older (Lana Del Rey’s “Young And Beautiful”). “Life is a short trip,” Alphaville’s Marian Gold warns us on “Forever Young”—but this playlist represents a bottomless fountain of youth where you can relive and savor the best days of your life just a little longer.

In 2009, a viral video made the YouTube rounds called “Beatles 3000,” a short mockumentary that imagined how The Beatles would be remembered in the next millennium. Its answer was: not very well. But more than just playfully prodding a sacred cow, the video serves as a cogent commentary on how significant historical details are compacted and distorted over time, and how much of what we consider fact today is likely the product of a prolonged game of broken telephone. In “Beatles 3000,” various talking heads from the future make the authoritative claims that Scottie Pippen was a member of the group, that their list of hits included “Don’t Stop Believin’” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and that they won the Super Bowl at Shea Stadium in 1965. But as absurd as that all sounds, we’re arguably witnessing the earliest stages of The Beatles’ legacy being slowly dismantled.

Sure, 50 years on from their breakup, The Beatles are arguably as popular as ever—they generate billions of streams, have their own dedicated satellite-radio station, and provide inspirational fodder for Netflix cartoon shows and Hollywood rom-coms. And their influence can still be heard in countless rock acts, from The Flaming Lips and Foo Fighters to Tame Impala and Ty Segall. However, when you look at the field they once dominated so thoroughly—the top of the pop charts—it can seem as if they never existed. Not only is the Billboard Hot 100 bereft of any bands that sound like The Beatles, it’s largely bereft of any bands, period. The dominant sounds of popular music today—trap, R&B, Latin pop—bear none of The Beatles’ DNA and speak to vastly different cultural experiences; in fact, the only time you really see The Beatles mentioned in relation to modern pop is when an artist like Drake eclipses their chart records (or gets a tattoo to celebrate such a feat), or in Migos memes. And lest we forget, the unanimously violent reaction to Gal Gadot’s recent quarantined-celebrity sing-along of John Lennon’s “Imagine” strongly suggested that the utopian peace-and-love platitudes of the Beatles generation provide little assurance to a more anxious younger generation that is worried more about how they’re going to pay for their next meal.

And yet: If you look and listen closely, you can still sense The Beatles’ lingering presence in contemporary pop. Beyond singers like Dua Lipa and Miley Cyrus taking a crack at covers, there are myriad rap and R&B artists who have paid their respects through subtle melodic lifts (see: the echoes of “Here, There and Everywhere” on Frank Ocean’s “White Ferrari”), shout-outs (Kehlani’s “All You Need Is Love”-referencing “Honey”), and tributes both direct (Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles”) and indirect (Post Malone’s “Stay,” which he originally planned to name “George” in honor of its Harrison-esque guitar solo). What we’re hearing now is The Beatles being held up less as a direct musical influence than as a more abstract aspirational emblem of artistic freedom, pop-cultural ubiquity, and us-against-the-world camaraderie. In other words, the biggest pop stars of today may not sound like The Beatles, but they still want to be The Beatles.

This post is part of our Psych 101 program, an in-depth, 14-part series that looks at the impact of psychedelia on modern music. Want to sign up to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. Theyll thank you. We thank you.Since its release on June 1, 1967, The Beatles Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band has been so overrated, its practically underrated. The albums reputation doesnt so much precede it as supersede it: Like the monoloth that periodically appears in 2001: A Space Odyssey to mark the crucial turning points in the evolution of human civilization, Sgt. Pepper has come to represent this massive, immovable talisman that looms untouchably over the course of modern pop history. Its emblematic of so many Big Events—the Summer of Love, the elevation of rock n roll into art, the embrace of the studio-as-instrument, Chris Martins more dubious wardrobe choices—that its easy to forget its a relatively compact, 39-minute record comprising 13 pop songs, only two of which go beyond four minutes, and some of which are pretty goofy.Sgt. Peppers oft-cited standing as rocks first concept album is somewhat overstated—its more like the blueprint for one, establishing the template (the opening vignettes, the scene-setting sound effects, the character role-play, the reprises, the grandest of finales) that contemporaries like The Pretty Things and The Who would later flesh out with proper narratives on S.F. Sorrow and Tommy, respectively. And for an album thats considered a watershed moment in psychedelic rock, Sgt. Pepper can be a stridently buttoned-up, old-fashioned record—for one, if its opening lyric is to be believed, its an album pining for the glory days of 1947. Many of its signature sounds—from the orchestral crescendos and harpsichord flourishes to the sitar drones and tabla grooves—were produced by instruments that have existed for hundreds of years. It’s an album full of loving odes to police officers, the eldery, and circus sideshows. Its most pointed examination of teenage rebellion—“She’s Leaving Home”—is sung from the perspective of the weeping parents who’ve suddenly turned into empty nesters.But Sgt. Peppers great achievement is how it made such quaint sources and subject matter sound utterly surreal. It’s a postcard portrait of a bygone England as rendered by Dali. And thanks to its cinematic 360-degree sound design, it was the closest you could get in 1967 to strapping on a VR headset. While Sgt. Pepper may have presented The Beatles as a surrogate band—granting successors like David Bowie and Elton John the license to create their ownalter-egos—the album didn’t so much teach other artists how to step into character as how to step outside their prescribed roles and processes. It showed rock bands they could still exist as rock bands even after they got bored of making rock music.And yet, for all the fundamental sea changes that Sgt. Pepper’s represents, it’s an album that has been perpetually plundered for simple musical ideas as much as grand philosophical ones. It’s actually the rare record that was already influential before it was even completed: While making their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, down the hall at Abbey Road, the members of Pink Floyd listened in as The Beatles recorded “Lovely Rita” and imported some of its sonic techniques to “Pow R. Toc H,” which plays like an abstract instrumental remix. Following Sgt. Peppers release, pretty much every ’60s rock band of note was hiring an orchestra, polishing off a trumpet, or learning the sitar to embellish their own magnum opus. Soul singers like Otis Redding and Stevie Wonder were inspired to leave traditional R&B behind to explore more musically expansive and emotionally introspective songwriting. And outsider acts like The United States of America were pushing Sgt. Pepper’s sound-collage ethos into more avant-garde terrain.By the early ‘70s, Sgt. Pepper’s ornamental essence could be felt in the theatrical prog of Genesis, the avant-glam of Brian Eno and Sparks, and the chamber-pop detours of iconoclasts like John Cale and Big Star’s Alex Chilton. And though punk momentarily put a moratorium on lavish rock records, Sgt. Pepper’s ideas would be imported into the alternative-rock arena through art-pop eccentrics like the Soft Boys and XTC. In the ’90s, Sgt. Pepper spawned the most bloated of Britpop anthems, gave lo-fi dreamers like The Olivia Tremor Control the confidence to go widescreen on a Super-8 budget, and led grunge stalwarts like Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots on a yellow-bricked path to the pop charts. And around the turn of the millennium, Sgt. Pepper’s heady textures and lockstep Ringo rhythms began seeping into the dance tent thanks to artists like the Chemical Brothers, The Avalanches, and Caribou.At this point, it’s hard to even think of Sgt. Pepper as a Beatles album. It’s a readymade toolkit for any band that’s attempting to go “serious,” whether it’s the New Kids on the Block hot-stepping around trilling trumpets on “Tonight” or Panic! At the Disco outfitting their arena-sized emo with bouncing-ball piano lines on “Nine in the Afternoon.” But Sgt. Pepper is so overflowing with ear candy that its tiniest details have been spun into songs by artists who aren’t even attempting to make their own Sgt. Pepper. While the lift-off section of Bowie’s “Space Oddity” is clearly modeled after the symphonic tornado of “A Day in the Life,” Elliott Smith’s “Colorbars” keyed in on the windswept, shuffling piano chords that The Beatles used to lure us into the storm. The clipped one-note guitar stabs of “Getting Better” power Sloan’s “Everything You’ve Done Wrong” and Ween’s “Even If You Don’t,” while the same song’s droning fuzz-chord finale reverberates through both the pristine power pop of Badfinger’s “No Matter What” and the mouldy-basement murk of Guided by Voices’ “2nd Moves to Twin.” Even songs coming from completely different worlds gradually reveal their debt—Nine Inch Nails’ “Disappointed” may begin as tense minimal techno, but it eventually opens up to accommodate wondrous string-section sweeps that harken back to George Harrison’s sitar-spun Sgt. Pepper centerpiece “Within You, Without You.”Fifty years on from Sgt. Peppers release, its nigh impossible to imagine another rock album ever being so central to the pop-cultural conversation again. And in the 21st century, the standard for masterpiece records has shifted away from Sgt. Peppers studio-sculpted perfection to sonically chaotic, emotionally fraught albums—be it Kid A or To Pimp a Butterfly—that grapple with the anxieties of modern life rather than provide a fantastical escape from them. But while the impact of Sgt. Peppers glorious collision of rock n roll, classical, psychedelia, Indian music, barnyard sounds, and proto-Pro Tools tape-splice construction is felt less acutely today, it nonetheless continues to reverberate out into distant realms. This playlist reveals at least 50 ways that Sgt. Pepper taught bands to play, riding the ebb and flow of its influence from the late-60s to today.

Over the past few years, 1990s nostalgia has assumed many forms: Twin Peaks reboots, Trainspotting sequels, Tupac holograms, the ubiquity of A Tribe Called Quest and The Pharcyde on hipster-taco-joint playlists. But while we’ve grown accustomed to 20-year retro cycles reviving the sounds and iconography of our youth, there’s one seemingly outmoded 1990s phenomenon that’s made a surprising comeback: All your favorite indie-rock bands are signing to major labels again.The great promise of the internet was it rendered the traditional music industry unnecessary and irrelevant. Independent bands could mobilize their audiences online, while small labels could get music out to wider audiences than before. Certainly, the early-2000s ascent of bands like Arcade Fire and Spoon seemed to reinforce the idea that ambitious artists no longer had to trade up to a major record label in order to connect with a mass audience. The internet—and all the alternative media and new distribution channels it introduced—could provide a back road to stardom that allowed bands to bypass the usual soul-destroying music-industry machinations.Fast forward to 2017 and it seems that line of thinking has gone the way of the mp3 blog. Arcade Fire’s latest album, Everything Now, was released through Columbia Records, whose roster also now includes ex-indie darlings LCD Soundsystem, Vampire Weekend, and Amber Coffman (formerly of Dirty Projectors). The War on Drugs’ A Deeper Understanding bears the Atlantic Records logo. Death From Above 1979 just released Outrage Is Now!, their second record for Warner Bros. Grizzly Bear left Warp Records for RCA. So why are established indie acts more willing to make the leap these days? The most plausible explanation is these artists need major-label resources to retain visibility in the streaming era, just as their 90s forbears needed them to land rack placement at Walmart. But if the end goal—greater exposure and, ideally, revenue—is the same as it ever was, one aspect has changed: These days, when a beloved indie-rock band signs to a major label, no one bats an eye—if they even notice at all.Thirty years ago, signing to a major label wasn’t a mere gamble; it was an ideological purity test. By its very definition, indie rock drew a line in the sand between those who were committed to a self-sustaining musical ecosystem free of corporate interference, and those who were willing to ingratiate themselves to the marketplace. In courting a wider audience through a major-label deal, an aspiring band would effectively have to say goodbye to a chunk of their core fanbase, who would reflexively write them off on principle. Tellingly, writer Michael Azerrad’s ’80s indie-rock-history bible Our Band Could Be Your Life concludes the chapters on its major-label-bound subjects once they trade up, reinforcing the widely held belief those artists made their best music while on indies.However, Sonic Youth’s 1990 signing to DGC effectively heralded a new era where upgrading to a major came to be seen as a savvy, insurrectionary career move (and Steve Albini will never forgive them for it). Among the bands to follow their lead was, of course, Nirvana, and after their 1991 DGC debut, Nevermind, became the biggest rock album in the world, the hand-wringing over corporations co-opting the underground only turned more intense, as more and more major-label A&R reps infiltrated clubs to hand out business cards—and more and more indie bands actually called them back. To read the alternative-music press in the 1990s was essentially to be subjected to an endless series of articles featuring artists mulling over the choice between selling out or staying put. Before long, holdouts like Fugazi, and Superchunk were vastly outnumbered by the peers who signed on the dotted line. And if the majors couldn’t sign Pavement, they’d just scoop up a band that sounded exactly like them (hello, Sammy!).Sure enough, none of these ‘90s major-label hopefuls came close to putting up Nirvana numbers. And predictably, many of their stories proved to be cautionary tales—following their one ‘n’ done stints on a major, bands like The Jesus Lizard and Archers of Loaf unceremoniously returned to indie-land and never regained their footing, before eventually petering out. For the likes of Superdrag or Hum, the best they could hope for was to score their 15 minutes on 120 Minutes (or 30 in the case of Urge Overkill). Others, like Texan psych-rockers Sixteen Deluxe, simply went from obscurity to, well, even more obscurity.But in hindsight, there’s as much reason to celebrate the ‘90s major-label feeding frenzy as bemoan it. The moment yielded generational touchstones (Hole’s Live Through This) and cult classics (Drive Like Jehu’s Yank Crime) alike. It saw bands acquiring the means to boldly embrace their true calling—see: Cornershop’s evolution from Merge Records noise merchants to the sitar-psych visionaries of Woman’s Gotta Have It, or Shudder to Think stepping out as a math-rock Queen on Pony Express Record. For the likes of The Posies and The Melvins, it provided just enough over-ground exposure to nurture loyal fanbases that have stayed with them for decades. Or in the exceptional case of The Flaming Lips, it led to a long, wildly unpredictable evolution that continues on Warner Bros. to this day.This playlist is a chronological collection of 50-plus major-label dice-rolls from ‘90s, perhaps the last moment in music history when A&R reps gazed upon artists as inherently strange as Ween and Daniel Johnston with dollar signs in their eyes. (Alas, some of the more curious artefacts of the era—like Boredoms’ Pop Tatari, or Royal Trux’s Thank You, or The Geraldine Fibbers’ Lost Somewhere Between the Earth and My Home—aren’t available on Spotify.) The songs here span Sonic Youth’s Goo to Modest Mouse’s Sony debut The Moon and Antarctica—which technically came out in 2000, but feels like a perfect capper to the ’90s era that birthed them (and a prelude to the early-2000s web-abetted indie uprising that spurred their biggest success). So now, with all due respect to Sebadoh: gimme corporate rock!

"Everybody hates a tourist," a wise, skinny man once sang. So lets leave "Wonderwall" at the karaoke bar and rediscover some quality overlooked choons from the Britpop era, which, in our unscientific opinion, begins with Suedes self-titled 1993 debut and stretches all the way to 2000, if only to remind you that Gay Dad and Elasticas The Menace werent all that bad. (Really!) Were also abiding by a fairly liberal definition of Britpop here, because tracks like Spiritualizeds "Lay Back in the Sun" and Shacks "Natalies Party" are as eternally splendorous as anything produced by their NME-mugging peers.After listening to this playlist, youll be left wondering why Oasis "Hey Now" wasnt as big as "Supersonic," why the Boo Radleys werent as big as Oasis, why Pulps "Sylvia" isnt considered Jarvis Cockers career-defining performance, and why the only way to experience Echobellys "Insomniac" on Spotify is through the Dumb and Dumber soundtrack. Youll also be reminded of that fleeting moment when Ride went mod-rock, The Stone Roses turned into Led Zeppelin, and Radiohead were just a bunch of alt-rock chancers who named their first album after a Jerky Boys sketch. And if 2018 brings us a Catatonia revival, then our work is done.

Elvis Costello famously opined that once rock ‘n’ roll dropped the “‘n’ roll” part of the equation and just became popularly known as “rock,” something vital was lost—all “the sex and swing,” as he put it. A similar observation could be made about indie rock, which has, over time, largely shed the “rock” half of the term and is know just casually referred to as “indie.” For old-school underground denizens, that minor semantic shift is indicative of a greater identity crisis: A sound that, 30 years ago, represented an abrasive affront to and stern ideological rebuke of mainstream pop has become so diluted, sanitized, and co-opted that many of its modern-day adherents are pretty much indistinguishable (musically and beard-wise) from the ‘80s dad-rockers that indie rock initially set out to overthrow. However, seen from a different angle, indie rock’s evolution into “indie” isn’t so much indicative of what the genre has lost as what it’s gained: an explosion of aesthetics that has opened up wide swaths of the underground for artists other than scruffy, wool-toqued white dudes with guitars and fuzzboxes.At this point, indie has become so sonically eclectic that finding commonality among the countless artists huddled under its umbrella requires some Cliff Claven-in-Final Jeopardy logic. But amid the buzzing, infinitely-tunnelled ant farm that the underground has become, the 100 artists in our Best of 2018 indie revue rise above by exuding a certain fearlessness, be it a willingness to lay their eccentricities, vulnerabilities and peculiar curiosities bare; a burning need to speak truth to power; or an unfettered eagerness to blow it all up—expectations, traditional song structures, the world itself.That restless spirit manifested itself in all sorts of wonderful ways this past year. It’s in the ripped-off-BandAid lyricism of Snail Mail and the rousing motorik protest-punk of IDLES. It’s Jeff Rosenstock racing through the most epic, exhilarating song ever about paralyzing ennui (“USA”). It’s U.S. Girls reminding us that the problem with American politics goes way deeper than 45 on “M.A.H.” It’s Khruangbin turning Middle Eastern surf-funk into the new psychedelia on “Maria También” and Beijing duo Gong Gong Gong administering hypno-therapy via primitive drone blues on “Siren.” It’s Let’s Eat Grandma setting out to make a bright synth-pop record and ending up with the dark prog album that Lorde has yet to grace us with. It’s Father John Misty stepping out of his head and showing us his heart on “Just Dumb Enough to Try.”It’s former Dirty Beaches drifter Alex Zhang Hungtai closing his latest record with a 20-minute church-organ-summoned slow-motion apocalypse. It’s Sandro Perri opening his with a 24-minute electro koan (“In Another Life”). It’s Zeal & Ardor welding chain-gang chants with heavy-metal muscle to forge a modern soul music. It’s former Pipette Gwenno using her blissed-out psych-pop reveries to resuscitate the lost language of Cornish. It’s the reformed Daughters rendering their brutal industrial post-punk with heavenly grandeur on “Satan in the Wait.” It’s Deafheaven making arena rock for burning hockey rinks (“Honeycomb”). It’s MorMor turning a bedroom beatmaking exercise into a personal exorcism on “Heaven’s Only Wishful.” It’s lapsed hardcore crew Fucked Up dropping some E and stepping onto dancefloor on “Dose Your Dreams” (and going ‘til the break of dawn with their promising New Order-esque offshoot Jade Hairpins).It’s Kaia Kater and Odetta Hartman uprooting folk music from the earth and letting it drift into the great beyond. It’s nêhiyawak addressing Indigenous cultural erasure through spoken-word poetry and scabrous shoegaze on “page.” It’s Tommy and the Commies making the passing of Pete Shelley a little easier to take with the Buzzcockerific “Devices.” It’s the traditionally sardonic Stephen Malkmus delivering a poignant state-of-the-union on “Middle America.” It’s the outsized swagger and ardor of nouveau gender-agnostic glam phenoms like Hubert Lenoir, Ezra Furman, Art D’Ecco, and Christine and the Queens. It’s Kurt Vile achieving peak Kurt Viledom on the nine eternally zen minutes of “Bassackwards.” It’s Japanese tricksters CHAI making manic roller-derby disco like an old issue of Grand Royal come to life. It’s surly survivors like Mudhoney and Jon Spencer proving there’s no expiration date on good ol’ punk-spewed haterade. And there’s something equally special to be savored in the other 70 tracks featured here.Sure, “indie” may no longer represent the ideological badge of honor it once was. But from a pure aesthetic-exploration standpoint, its defining value—independence—has never felt truer.

As was the case with most 60s-rock survivors, the 1980s were not kind to Paul McCartney. Despite ushering in the decade with a pair of blockbusterduets, by 1986s Press to Play, hed hit a commercial and critical nadir, and an artist who once set the pace for rock n roll innovation was stalled in the middle of road. But McCartney eventually wiggled his way out by reminding himself of a lesson that served him well during his Beatles years: He always does his most inspired work with a foil.For 1989s Flowers in the Dirt, he tapped the songwriting smarts of Elvis Costello. Alas, Costello proved not to be Maccas new Lennon—plans for a full-album collaboration were eventually whittled down to a handful of co-writes. (The trove of stripped-down, Elvis-assisted demos featured on Flowers 2017 reissue reveals the album that couldve been.) But the Costello experiment seemed to open McCartney up to more collaborations that would push him outside his usual comfort zone. The most surprising of these was The Fireman, a union with ex-Killing Joke bassist Youth that began in the early 90s as an anonymous ambient-techno project, but reemerged on 2008s Electric Arguments as a cinematically scaled pop group that imagined an alternate 80s where McCartney started taking notes from U2. But The Fireman wasnt even his most outré detour—that honor belongs to Liverpool Sound Collage, a beat-spliced, found-sound curio created with members of Super Furry Animals. And then theres "Cut Me Slack," a 2012 one-off with the surviving members of Nirvana that pushed McCartney toward his "Helter Skelter" heaviest.Alas, these diversions may have been too sporadic to bolster McCartneys long-standing campaign to reclaim the "cool Beatle" status that has long been conferred to John Lennon. After all, in between these side projects, McCartney continued to release solo records of varying quality that captured him in his familiar modes: the piano balladeer, the farmhouse folkie, the Little Richard-schooled rocker. But even his most forgettable albums from the past three decades—like 1993s Off the Ground—feature displays of his melodic mastery (in that case, the golden, slumberous serenade "Winedark Open Sea"). And occasionally, hes let his eccentric streak bleed into his proper albums, like on the epic Driving Rain blowout "Rinse the Raindrops," or the art-pop oddity "Mr. Bellamy" from Memory Almost Full.It says a lot about McCartneys enduring songcraft and capacity for curveballs that his most popular single ever—judging by the nine-digit Spotify streaming numbers, at least—came more than 50 years into his incomparable career. Sure, having both Rihanna and Kanye West sing on it will help boost the stats. And yet, that unlikely but carefree collaboration perfectly crystallizes the latter-day work of an artist whos still pulling from a bottomless well of pretty tunes, but is always four, five seconds from wilding.

Released in August 1997, Be Here Now was Oasis very own Titanic—a too-big-to-fail colossus that ultimately turned Britpops leading light into a sinking ship (one that was no doubt weighed down by nine laborious minutes of "All Around the World"). Granted, eight million copies sold worldwide hardly constitutes a disaster, and the band would continue to fill arenas and headline festivals worldwide until their 2009 dissolution. But after the world-beating triumphalism of 1994s Definitely Maybe and 1995s Whats the Story Morning Glory?, the infamously coke-bloated Be Here Now marked the moment when Oasis ceased to be a dominant pop-cultural force, precipitating a decade-long slide through a series of increasingly formulaic, interchangeable albums. Seemingly bereft of any inspiration beyond Abbey Road, the band spent their last decade cloning their old warhorses into inbred offspring ("Stop Crying Your Heart Out" is essentially "Slide Away" given the "Wonderwall" treatment), and at a certain point, it seemed like they couldnt even be arsed to come up with fresh song titles (Ill see your "Roll With It" and raise you a "Roll It Over"). Unlike their one-time peers in Radiohead and Blur, there was never a concerted attempt at reinvention, never an embrace of outré influences that could steer them into a new creative phase. Oasis were arguably the first massive, generation-defining rock band to become an oldies act by their third record.But while songwriter Noel Gallagher effectively played all his chips on the bands first two albums (and their equally top-notch B-sides) like a Vegas gambler who thought his luck would never run out, the bands post-Morning Glory catalog still yielded a handful of keepers in between all the lugubrious power ballads, bloozy filler, and Beatles Rock Band karaoke tracks. And rarely were these songs the lead singles—for all its overwrought, helicopter-powered bombast, "DYou Know What I Mean?" coasts on a repetitious, undercooked chorus that wouldnt passed muster on their first two albums, while on perfunctory would-be anthems like "Go Let It Out," "The Hindu Times" and "Lyla," Oasis sound like theyre content to just hit the first 30 rows of Wembley rather than the bleachers. Instead, this playlist focusses on those rare tracks where Oasis still exuded the hunger and swagger of a band that anointed themselves rock n roll stars on the first song on their first record ("I Hope I Think I Know," "The Shock of the Lightning"); the simple acoustic sing-alongs that stripped away all the ego and excess ("Songbird," "She Is Love"); and the tentative toe-dips into experimental psychedelia ("The Turning," "To Be Where Theres Life") that they sadly didnt pursue any further.On one of Be Here Nows superior tracks, Liam Gallagher declares, "Its getting better, man!"—and, unfortunately, as their post-1997 discography proves, it really didnt. But even if Oasis last five albums didnt yield nearly as many classics as their first two, there are definitely, maybe enough quality choons here to inspire a spritzer supernova.