pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

although i agree w/ Whiney that *if* some sort of objective "songs of the '90s" list was possible, anything other than Smells Like Teen Spirit is kind of silly. obviously there are a handful of others that have an argument, but it sure ain't "Gold Soundz" which is one of my favorite songs by my favorite band ever!

although i agree w/ Whiney that *if* some sort of objective "songs of the '90s" list was possible, anything other than Smells Like Teen Spirit is kind of silly.

The entirety of 90s black music would like a word

Boyz II Men and TLC alone should be in the conversation, let alone Mariah, Michael Jackson, and Janet Jackson

I think Pavement and "Gold Soundz" are fine, but in the fall of '96, during their imperial phase - or as close as they would have to one - there was always something about their catalogue that just didn't hit me in the way it seemed to hit so many of my friends. I used to ask "What am I missing here? Maybe I'm the one whose wrong, and I just need to give them a few more listens." But when I wasn't playing Yes or Rush (old prog habits die hard), I found myself far more interested in this R&B station called "The Beat" (1530 AM!) because of the ridic wave of awesome that regularly appeared (I remember one God-Tier sequence featuring Aaliyah's "One in a Million"; Rome's "I Belong To You"; Toni Braxton's "You're Making Me High"; and 112's "Cupid"). How the hell are Stephen, Spiral Stairs, and Bob supposed to compete with that!?

They can't.

I mean that's a sort of a flattening of the field -- how can Aaliyah or Braxton compete with None So Vile or Brave Murder Day, absolute titans of '96? well, there really isn't any competition going on, they're making different kinds of music, it's a bit silly to say "the one that's more popular is better" or to cower behind "relevance." Genre fiction is good and literary fiction is good and popular fiction is good and experimental fiction is good, but pitting them against one another is adolescent shit

would enjoy Toni Braxton's rendition of "Slit Yer Guts" tbh

cosign

or Aaliyah's take on "Gold Soundz" for that matter

I just played “Gold Sounds” for my partner, who knew of Pavement but had never heard them, and he looked at with a level of incredulous disgust I would normally associate with someone who has had a stranger fart directly in their soup in a mid-tier restaurant

so the line "we need secrets" contains more mysteries than we knew in 1994

"minestrone tastes a little off today"

soup farts ahead of their time for '96 grindcore tbrr

I prefer only Michelin star farts in my soup. Fuck the mid-tier.

This is why I love this entire convo about the Top Spng of the '90s - in the '80s, any #1 contender on the alternative side would be far-too obscure, and for the 2000s, music got too splintered after "Hey Ya" (no more monoculture/mono-counterculture dichotomy). This leaves the '90s as the one recent decade where we can actually argue whether a alt-goes-mainstream song like "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or "Alive"; a big-but-still-indie song like "Paranoid Android" or "Windowlicker"; a hip-hop Pangaea like "Juicy" or "Supa Dupa Fly"; or the "how in the fuck does something this weird and askew become mainstream, guess I'm just gonna be thankful we live in that world" R&B like "One in a Million", "Tyrone", or "Brown Sugar" should be #1. And yes, the metal! While my knowledge is very tertiary - the Big 4 and Pantera; prog like Rush/Queensryche; and wherever the fuck you place Tool - I'm not well-versed enough to know what would qualify for a 'best of' list ("I'm Broken" or "Cut To The Chase" maybe).

The entirety of 90s black music would like a word

― the new drip king (DJP), Sunday, February 4, 2024 7:44 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

it should be said that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" had a marked effect on black music that's still being felt today

And an openly acknowledged influence *from* black music per Grohl admitting to borrowing the opening fill from the Gap Band

It should be, like, a tie for first between the two songs titled “Creep” (…with The Fall’s “C.R.E.E.P.” as #1 song of the ‘80s). Why not?

It might be a topic for another thread, but it's pretty much the right answer even if it's not iNtErEsTiNg for 2024 or whatever metric we use to square up a song's actual impact with its ability to scale a list economically for a website. It's not even my favorite Nirvana song, but come on now. Even rockism vs poptimism doesn't have a leg to stand on considering it's literally a radio pop smash that hit the Top 10.

whatever metric we use to square up a song's actual impact with its ability to scale a list economically for a website

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

you bite bite bite
all day long

sleeve so otm

"How Condé Nast bought and destroyed America’s iconic music publication"

https://www.semafor.com/article/02/04/2024/inside-conde-nasts-breakup-with-pitchfork

including the detail in the lede that CN bought P4k in 2015 only after David Remnick ("a music fan and Pitchfork reader") signed off

The entirety of 90s black music would like a word

you're absolutely right, and that's why i said there'd be some songs with an argument. but i shouldn't have said "anything else would be kind of silly" - my bad

Internally, I spoke to staff across GQ and Pitchfork who seemed depressed and embarrassed. Pitchfork has been further hollowed out: the publication now currently has around a dozen edit staffers left, including several employees who work across multiple titles. GQ editors and staff, I’m told, have been embarrassed and bashful towards their new colleagues. In a meeting with staff after the decision, GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch said that he was not the editor of Pitchfork, but couldn’t offer specifics about who would be running the site long-term.

so even gq don't really know what they're supposed to do with p4k yet lol

lol at all the stories of cn execs having no understanding of p4k, lol at p4k already moving towards a subscription model (a sensible move) which this has now disrupted

I still don’t think anyone has won me over that a pavement song, that Mariah song, or smells like teen spirit are interesting or fresh choices for the number one song of the 90s

I’m not saying they shouldn’t be on the list, but if the purpose of this is to create a new conversation they just all seem like kind of predictable arguments from different heydays / value sets of shit ppl have been arguing about forever …

You can argue I’m overvaluing “saying something new” but I’m ok with that. I would like to overvalue that, at this point in time

A fresh choice for the number one song of the 90s would be a song from the 00s

the greatest song of the 90s is the Chili Peps "Under the Birdge"

interesting or fresh choices

"fake bullshit for clicks"

I was at a friend's birthday party where the theme was ostensibly "the 00s" and the youtube video playlist was all music videos and commercials for the era except for the weird outliers where whoever added things to the playlist had some misconceptions about what happened in the 00s. Fair enough, decades on the calendar don't work that well as cultural bookends, but the one that threw me was Warren G's Regulate.

I would lose my mind

"regulate" is the best song of the 90s

from the semafor article:

Still, Condé’s messy move may create its own opportunities. The furor over Pitchfork’s public decline prompted interested buyers to approach the publisher, according to two people familiar with the situation.

gonna get bought by Paste

xxp there's definitely a case for it

the truth of casual music listening is that if you're only halfway paying attention, you associate songs with the time in your life when you first heard them or listened to them, not with a decade. my guess was that the partygoer who did the Warren G chronological flub first heard the song the most in the early 00s while in college, hanging out with friends who would play music that they knew along with new stuff, and it all blended together into an amorphous "music from college, which was the 2000s" blob

The G-Funk Era never ended

"Regulate"
"Jeremy"
"Longview" (or any of the other singles from "Dookie")
"Rhythm is a Dancer"
"I Like to Move It"

shit,
"Rhythm of the Night"

Twin Peaks theme
Protect Your Neck
Torn

Shook Ones but you shock everyone by choosing Part I

Chief Keef, born in 1995

I don't like

Lightning Crashes
Nookie
Send Me On My Way

lol Keyes

Shook Ones but you shock everyone by choosing Part I

― papal hotwife (milo z), Monday, February 5, 2024 3:16 PM (forty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol a+ joke for those who speak the dunn language

“All-Star”
“Semi-Charmed Life”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKncMmq5uNw

My serious answer is Crystal Waters, unfortunate title but prob the best of the decade