’90s

Remember Stereolab? The band was one of the biggest stars of the 90s indie scene and, like so many of their peers, seemed as much interested in process -- refining the same idiosyncratic grooves over and over -- as in writing singularly great songs. As a result, any fan could come up with their own top 10, though Raymond Cummings omission of "Metronomic Underground," which was a mainstay of Stereolab shows before they finally splintered in 2008, seems particularly careless. However, if you need a short primer to the band that made 60s French chanson cool again, this is as good as any.

This list is great. One could argue that there’s too much Chi Ali and not enough Queen Latifah, or that “Jazz (We’ve Got)” doesn’t belong in the top 10, or that the list would be better if they opened it up to Native Tongue “affiliates” such as The Beatnuts or Pharcyde. But, really, it’s fine. The tighter focus on the core Native Tongue members makes it more cohesive and gives the playlist a flow as it progresses from the rougher sketches that dominate the early tracks (the playlist is in reverse order) to the tighter, tauter “classic” songs in the top 20. Why this all only kind of works, and one of the great tragedies of the digital era, is that only 57 of the 100 greatest Native Tongues tracks are currently available on Spotify. This is largely, though not entirely, due to sample clearance issues around De La Soul’s catalog. De La does show up on “Fallin’,” their collaboration with Teenage Fanclub from the “Judgement Night” soundtrack. The song reminds us of everything we love about that group — their competing pull of whimsy and melancholy; the back-of-the-classroom absurdity that gives way to twilight-youth pathos and then comes full circle as that sadness loses focus and dissipates into fits of giggling.

Released on September 24, 1996, Illadelph Halflife marked a turning point in the Roots’ career from free-spirited jazz-hop players to soothsayers of doom. Much of rap music was obsessed with the Y2K apocalypse, the New World Order, and the presumptive demise of hip-hop – see De La Soul’s pivotal single “Stakes is High” – and the Philly ensemble was no exception. More than just Black Thought and Malik B launching cipher battles on “Uni-Verse at War,” and waging jeremiads against rapper “Clones,” the album sounds cloudy and introverted. The beats seem to mostly consist of organic bass, keyboards and drums, resulting in blue beats as sparse as a Wes Montgomery jam session, and moodily ominous vibes similar to contemporaneous works like A Tribe Called Quest’s Beats, Rhymes & Life, the Pharcyde’s Labcabincalifornia, and Slum Village’s Fan-Tas-Tic. When neo-soul and jazz guests like Raphael Saadiq (on “What They Do”), D’Angelo (on “The Hypnotic”), and Cassandra Wilson (on “One Shine”) appeared, they contributed pained vocals that contributed to the overall sense of melancholy.As a clear product of 1996’s pre-millennium tensions, Illadelph Halflife may have not aged as well as the band’s next album, the more successful Things Fall Apart. Its deeply rooted entropy is more suited for late-night listening, or perhaps the kind of contemplative smoke-out sessions the Black Thought, Malik and Bahamadia rhyme about on “Push Up Ya Lighter.” However, it established a theme. Led by drummer and group mastermind Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, the Roots have continued to assess cultural and political trends with skepticism and occasional hope ever since.

Subscribe to this Spotify playlist right here.Pavement’s wildest, wooliest LP sits squarely in the middle of its career. In the wake of 1994’s indie totem Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, conventional wisdom held that 1995’s Wowee Zowee would be the moment when this quintet broke through to the mainstream. Instead, a mischievousness impulse won out, one that our musical culture is all the richer for. Primary songwriters Stephen Malkmus and Steve Kannberg dug deep into influences old and new, emerging with the scuzz-rock equivalent of a moth-eaten Choose Your Own Adventure book. Much of Wowee Zowee’s charm lies in its looseness, its abject lack of seriousness, the constant sense that things could fly off the rails at any moment; the album shares this DNA with the catalogue of Memphis’ The Grifters, a group frequently recorded by Wowee producer Doug Easley. Meanwhile, the gauzy, pedal steel-soaked “We Dance” recalls the woozy grandeur of “Quicksand,” from David Bowie’s Hunky Dory. Zig-zagging rager “Flux=Rad” cops attitude from “Let’s Lynch the Landlord,” a classic barnstormer by the San Francisco punk outfit Dead Kennedys. The freewheeling back end of “Half a Canyon” salutes Germany’s krautrock originators by way of Pavement’s 1990s peers Stereolab (“Exploding Head Movie”), while the nagging tug-o-war guitars powering the point where “Fight This Generation” crests can be traced back to key influence The Fall (“Jawbone + the Air-Rifle”). Olympia, Washington’s Bikini Kill celebrated an anti-corporate ethos that “Serpentine Pad” emulated, but as “AT&T” demonstrates, Pavement certainly weren’t above polishing a Nirvana-grade melody until it shone like a slacker anthem. Few albums have been quite so willing and eager to lead everywhere at once. -- Raymond Cummings

It’s been 20 years since Wilco’s Being There seduced me in my roommate’s Ford Escort. This happened in the fall of 1996, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, just two hours northeast of Chicago. So yeah, the place was crawling with Midwestern college students all earnest and modest and way into Wilco, Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt, The Jayhawks and any other artist camping out halfway between alternative and rootsy. A fan of noisy underground rock, I tended to dismiss these bands — that is until I started borrowing Rob’s Escort to run errands: laundry, the bank, record stores, Smirnoff. The super generous dude said I could take it anytime, and I did. (I also devoured a lot of his groceries — sorry, man.) Why exactly I began listening to his copy of Being There — which had been out only a few weeks — and not one of the dozen other CDs strewn across the floor has been lost time. I’d love to say that I started the ignition one day and became instantly intrigued once the gargantuan, Flaming Lips-like feedback of the opener, “Misunderstood,” drenched the car. But that would be the kind of apocryphal crap music critics love foisting upon readers. Nevertheless, I started listening to the record and gradually became obsessed. It’s never left me. I know it forwards and backwards. I can recite the track list from memory. I appreciate other Wilco albums, but none even come close to blowing my mind like their second.From the little I’ve read about the album (I’m not lying when I say I haven’t read much about Wilco), Jeff Tweedy, Jay Bennett (RIP), and the rest of the crew harbored lofty themes about the complex relationship between rocker and fan when they began recording the sprawling double album in late 1995. You can hear them grapple with this idea on “Misunderstood,” written from the perspective of a fan, as well as “Sunken Treasure” and “The Lonely 1.” I didn’t know any of this when I first formulated my take on Being There, which is this: It’s an overly self-conscious rock album made by an overly self-conscious rock a band about rock, both its awesomeness and suckitude. It’s about how rock is totally weary, spent, and repetitive, yet at the same time utterly inescapable for those addicted to it. And since there is no escape, we might as well drink from that repetition — revel in it. As Tweedy sings on “Someone Else’s Song,” a slowly rolling folk number with a melody reminiscent of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” “I keep on singing/ You’re eyes they just roll/ It sounds like someone else’s song/ From a long time ago.”Wilco take the notion of singing someone else’s song as a license to wear their influences on their sleeves in a way that most bands would be too embarrassed to ever attempt. Many of these — early Little Feat, Neil, Gram, The Replacements, Big Star — are baked deep into the grooves. Others, in contrast, are shoved in listeners’ faces. Not only does “Misunderstood” lift The Lips’ uniquely groaning feedback, it actually contains lines — “Take the guitar player for a ride/ You see he ain’t never been satisfied/ He thinks he owes some kind of debt/ Be years before he gets over it” — lifted almost verbatim from Rocket From the Tombs’ proto-punk ballad “Amphetamine.” The rocker “Monday” boasts Keith Richards’ guitar tone from Let It Bleed and blaring horns from Exile On Main St. On the blurry-eyed ballad “(Was I) in Your Dream,” Tweedy sounds like a drunken Dr. John impersonator, while over the course of the fiddle jam “Dreamer in My Dreams” he mimics the raspy hellraising of Tex-Mex legend Doug Sahm (who recorded with Uncle Tupelo, incidentally).In addition to blatant plagiarism and mimicry, Tweedy works in all manner of historical references, some obvious, others oblique. In the folksy love ditty “Far, Far Away,” he slips in the phrase “on the dark side of the moon.” You can tell from his hesitant delivery that he totally knows what fans will be thinking when they hear him nick a phrase from Floyd. “Hotel Arizona” has to be a nod to “Hotel California” because the song doesn’t actually contain the phrase in the lyrics. Tweedy sings “hotel in Arizona” but not actually “Hotel Arizona.” Being There contains an “Outtasite (Outta Mind),” as well as an “Outta Mind (Outta Sight)”; both are basically different versions of the same song, just like how The Beatles included slightly different renditions of the title track on the art pop classic Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Ditto for Neil on Tonight’s the Night.)I freely admit that many of my references are wholly my own creation, and Tweedy probably would roll his eyes if he ever read this. Like a nutty conspiracy theorist with a wall full of photographs, pins, and yarn, I’ve constructed a map of the different rock coordinates that I’ve projected onto . The whistling closing out the richly melodic “Red-Eyed and Blue” is a nod to The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream.” “The Lonely 1,” a syrupy ballad about the rock ‘n’ roll life, is Wilco’s “Beth,” itself a syrupy ballad about the rock ‘n’ roll life. And best of all, the playfully walking piano chords opening “Outta Mind (Outta Sight)” are a secret love letter to the influence that “Sesame Street Theme” exerted on Tweedy as a child.Being There totally invites this kind of fanaticism, however delusional, from its fans. After all, only fellow rock fanatics — the kind that spent their teenage years picking apart every last lyric, riff, and fill on their favorite albums — could’ve recorded a set so absurdly referential. This is music by obsessives for obsessives. What started as a fling in a Ford Escort in the mid ’90s turned into a fascination spanning decades.

It may be that 2019 was the best year for ’90s metal since, well, 1999. Bands from the decade of Judgment Night re-emerged with new creative twists and tweaks: Tool stretched out into polyrhythmic madness, Korn bludgeoned with more extreme and raw despair, Slipknot added a new drummer (Max Weinberg’s kid!) who gave them a new groove, and Rammstein wrote an anti-fascism anthem that caused controversy in Germany (and hit No. 1 there too). Elsewhere, icons of the era returned in unique ways: Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor scored a superhero TV series, Primus’ Les Claypool teamed up with Sean Lennon for some quirky psych rock, and Faith No More’s Mike Patton made an avant-decadent LP with ’70s soundtrack king Jean-Claude Vannier. Finally, the soaring voice of Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington returned for a moment thanks to Lamb of God guitarist Mark Morton, who released a song they recorded together in 2017.

Taking a look at the playlists for my show on Boston’s WZBC might give the more seasoned college-radio listener a bit of déjà vu: They’re filled with bands like Versus, Team Dresch, and Sleater-Kinney, who were at the top of the CMJ charts back in the ’90s. But the records they released in 2019 turned out to be some of the year’s best rock. Versus, whose Ex Nihilo EP and Ex Voto full-length were part of a creative run for leader Richard Baluyut that also included a tour by his pre-Versus outfit Flower and his 2000s band +/-, put out a lot of beautifully thrashy rock; Team Dresch returned with all cylinders blazing and singers Jody Bleyle and Kaia Wilson wailing their hearts out on “Your Hands My Pockets”; and Sleater-Kinney confronted middle age head-on with their examination of finding one’s footing, The Center Won’t Hold.

Italian guitar heroes Uzeda—who have been putting out proggy, riff-heavy music for three-plus decades—released their first record in 13 years, the blistering Quocumque jerceris stabit; Imperial Teen, led by Faith No More multi-instrumentalist Roddy Bottum, kept the weird hooks coming with Now We Are Timeless; and high-concept Californians That Dog capped off a year of reissues with Old LP, their first album since 1997. Juliana Hatfield continued the creative tear she’s been on this decade with two albums: Weird, a collection of hooky, twisty songs that tackle alienation with searing wit, and Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police, her tribute record to the dubby New Wave chart heroes (in the spirit of the salute to Olivia Newton-John she released in 2018). And our playlist finishes with Mary Timony, formerly of the gnarled rockers Helium and currently part of the power trio Ex Hex, paying tribute to her former Autoclave bandmate Christina Billotte via an Ex Hex take on “What Kind of Monster Are You?,” one of the signature songs by Billotte’s ’90s triple threat Slant 6.

The great irony about the MTV Unplugged phenomenon of the 1990s is that the performances were often less stripped down than gussied up. Sure, the series provided a forum for rock artists to reimagine their riffed-up repertoires as campfire fare, but it also gave them license to crowd the stage with string players, woodwind sections, and other auxiliary personnel. Even a punk-conscious band like Nirvana weren’t immune to this when they sat down for their now-iconic Unplugged taping in November 1993 (released a year later as MTV Unplugged in New York), as they brought along a cello player and a couple of Meat Puppets. But the band’s quietest performance ever proved to be their most intense, no more so than on Kurt Cobain’s traumatic excavation of the Lead Belly standard “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.”

That song didn’t just become a key part of Nirvana’s legacy; it set the gold standard for acoustic-administered emotional exorcisms, clearing the bar set by white-knuckled strummers like Bob Dylan and Richie Havens. The other performances collected on this playlist may not approach the same soul-wrenching extremes, but they each document a revelatory moment in a career (such as a young David Bowie finding his flamboyant voice in Jacques Brel’s “Port of Amsterdam” and the early Jane’s Addiction showcasing their range with the harmonica-honked anomaly “My Time”), or they capture a legend in their purest, most primal state (see: Lauryn Hill’s epic freestyle on “Mystery of Iniquity” and Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum stretching the physical limits of his voice on the haunting “Oh Comely”). The casual nature of acoustic performances has also presented artists with a forum for making other people’s songs their own, like Wings’ dramatic reading of Paul Simon’s “Richard Cory” (in which Macca cedes lead vocal duties to Denny Laine) and Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson’s arresting rendition of Led Zeppelin’s “The Battle of Evermore” (released on the Singles soundtrack under their Lovemongers alias). And no survey of quality acoustica is complete without oft-overlooked hair-metal outsiders Tesla, whose Five Man Acoustical Jam record actually predated the first proper MTV Unplugged release by six months.