Pitchfork: The Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s: 20-01

also "non-event" is hyperbole

All I know is I bought SPIN in March or April '92 and the Beasties were already cover stars with the headline "Best Album Ever?"

also "non-event" is hyperbole

Okay: "total fucking flop" is more accurate.

croup, "Pass the Mic" was massive as the lead single on MTV. Twinned the rise of street skating and the toughening of rap, moving away from the club.

I def think you have to make a distinction between "the people who you knew" and "the people I went to high school with."

True. After I posted that, it occurred to me that there could have been wide swaths of people listening to Biggie in '94 and I wouldn't have necessarily known. Although, as I believe I mentioned upthread, I do remember my friend Chris quoting "Big Poppa." Not sure I realized who it was by at the time, I just thought "lol rap" (or rather "lol at the incongruity of this pale skinny Converse All Star-wearing smart kid reciting mainstream hip-hop lyrics"). (Actually, haha, Chris was a big Beastie Boys fan.)

The thing I've always wondered about is how Check Your Head immediately got to be a big deal if Paul's Boutique wasn't. Was it just that MTV got behind it in a big way or was Paul's Boutique already getting more love in the interim?

― da croupier, Tuesday, September 14, 2010 2:42 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Basically after rap fans abandoned em, they fit snugly into the new post-Nirvana Alternative Nation thingy

"Hey Ladies" charted higher than "Pass the Mic" but I never, ever heard the former on the radio while the alt-rock station in the Twin Cities played the shit out of both "Pass the Mic" and "So What'cha Want"

You must be talkin' about GARUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNGE

nah

"So What'cha Want" fit in beside "100%" and "Lithium" a lot more comfortably than "Hey Ladies" did around Richard Marx and Skid Row.

I think another problem faced by Paul's Boutique is that it strongly embraced sampling of various funky 70s tunes at a time when folks were still trying to forget that the 70s had happened. It seems hard to believe now, but 70s nostalgia was kind of a bizarre notion in 1989.

'Twas something Mike D said to Tabitha Soren when she tip-toed around "post-Nirvana Alternative Nation thingy", Whines.

Moodles diamond-tip otm

Well, it's sorta true. 1989 and 1990 were also the peak of house crossovers, which pilfered seventies disco left and right.

I don't really know for sure but I think maybe it took a few years for "juicy" to become like the default/best-known b.i.g. song. I'm 31 and I heard "hypnotize" and "big poppa" way before I heard "juicy," but I think maybe for the dudes on here in their 20s, "juicy" had become one of the canonical b.i.g. songs by the time they were seriously into music and/or going to parties like this. just a theory.
xpost

― congratulations (n/a), Tuesday, September 14, 2010 7:04 AM Bookmark

is otm, as it did take a while for it to become biggie's legacy song ahead of his bigger hits, but deej and lex are right about "juicy" getting played at all types of parties. it peaked at #27 btw, not #72.

i'm totally on deej & lex's side re: "juicy" (also re: gucci mane -- whiney lives in williamsburg, let's remember this) -- seriously everyone i knew in high school would instantly know that "it was all a dream" was the opening line of "juicy", or at the very least a song by notorious BIG -- and i went to a not very diverse high school

must be an age thing? i have no idea -- & all my friends then just listened to the strokes

i think it might also be because i (and presumably you and deej) never actually hung out exclusively with people who shared our music taste in school or university

i think theres some history rewriting going on if ppl think juicy is a canon biggie song only in retrospect or something

It depends on where you were when the canon was being compiled.

first off, none of my friends listened to the Strokes, J0rdan...in fact I don't think I hung out with people who listened to the Strokes until prolley 2004-2005, by then of course they were past their prime: so it goes...

I told my good friend/recent neighbor that I only heard Juicy for the first time a few days ago and he nodded, unsurprised, noting that I was white and that I never went out. I'm sure he was reaffirming in his head that Biggie was neither obscure nor European nor active musically in the 70s (as per his usual dogging on me...)

It depends on where you were when the canon was being compiled.

― Gucci Mane hermeneuticist (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, September 14, 2010 6:32 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark

i guess if you werent listening to the 'rap canon' when the 'rap record in question' was being released then you might somehow have missed one of its 'biggest artists' 'biggest songs'

not sure why i went all out w the scare quotes there

OK so now we're arguing about what kind of bros we befriended ten or fifteen years ago.

it seems totally reasonable to think that there are tons and tons of people (young people, old people, people in between) who still haven't heard juicy

arguments like this are totally infuriating because people conflate "EVERYONE IN MY HIGH SCHOOL" with "everyone that I actually hung out/talked to in high school"

and then when I introduced the word "diverse" to describe my high school, I meant "including a huge cross-section of cowboys and skaters who didn't give two fucks about biggie" people immediately started using diverse to mean "lots of blacks and latinos went to my high school"

Also, remember that entire reign of BIG, from the premiere of "Juicy" through his death occured WHILE I was in high school, so these weren't yet "rap classics," they were "songs on the radio"

ie, like J0rdan said, it might be an age thing

my hs was about 2% black. :/

ppl mostly listened to like...limp bizkit and eminem, except for the younger kids who all seemed to listen to emo

'Twas something Mike D said to Tabitha Soren when she tip-toed around "post-Nirvana Alternative Nation thingy", Whines.

― cee-oh-tee-tee, Tuesday, September 14, 2010 3:02 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

Ha, yep. Whenever grunge comes up I almost always get a little "You must be talkin' about GARUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNGE" earworm from that clip. God knows how many years later it is now. Damn you, Mike D!

even the fucking nerds sitting around listening to talking heads at the age of 12 knew what "it was all a dream/ i used to read 'word up' magaine" is from is what i'm saying

that's like the most iconic line rap music, or so i thought

Stereotypes of a white indie male misunderstood
And it's still all good

and then when I introduced the word "diverse" to describe my high school, I meant "including a huge cross-section of cowboys and skaters who didn't give two fucks about biggie" people immediately started using diverse to mean "lots of blacks and latinos went to my high school"

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Tuesday, September 14, 2010 7:26 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is not what i meant weirdo. at my h.s. white ppl were really really into rap too .... u couldnt throw a wallaby w/out hitting a white dude who bought 'wu tang forever' the day it was released

and at my college, white frat dudes all listened to / knew biggie songs!! esp juicy!! as did ... everyone?? its a totally standard obvious rap classic

it was a single! with a video! from one of the most well known rappers of the nineties! his first crossover hit!

man, you really travel in some circles full of not exceptionally diverse white people then

is that it? are we all the same to you, deej?

at my h.s. most of the white ppl were not really really into rap and those that were were really really westcoast-centric. more likely to talk up brotha lynch than biggie.

j0rdan's post is weirding me out tho. i never even heard of talking heads til i was in college (although i knew "genius of love" at that time)

i was mad into Talking Heads in like 7th grade

man, you really travel in some circles full of not exceptionally diverse white people then

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Tuesday, September 14, 2010 7:46 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

how does that compute? yr 'pulling a whiney' itt

i don't remember hearing biggie on the radio at all until "hypnotize", although i do remember seeing "big poppa" on mtv at the time. only east coast rap i remember hearing on the radio here at all from like 94-late 96 (coincidence w/ tupac's death or no?) is ll cool j.

whiney has a point, dude. i knew tons of white ppl in hs that didn't f/w rap.

i know those ppl exist -- obv they lived in caves w/ jaymc until they were rescued by girl talk in 2006 -- i was just responding to his weirdo interpretation that i was telling everybody how many black & latino ppl were at my high school

with my headphones slammin playin iron maiden
sleepin in the lobby of the days inn

^ most iconic line in rap music

u couldnt throw a wallaby w/out hitting a white dude who bought 'wu tang forever' the day it was released

A school full of white Wu-bangers and wallabys...I'm going to assume this school's class of 2010 is being filmed in 3D.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XI1AJWnt7s

i know those ppl exist -- obv they lived in caves w/ jaymc until they were rescued by girl talk in 2006

Hey I never heard "Carry on My Wayward Son" before Night Ripper either!

Also never heard "Don't Stop Believin'" until the movie Monster in 2003. FYI.

xp i did but only because my workplace played a classic rock station

I'll notate when I first heard the songs in Pitchfork's top 20:

Wu-Tang Clan - "Protect Ya Neck": Don't remember ever hearing this, but it looks like I downloaded it when it made the Pitchfork 500 a couple years ago and listened to it once then. 2008.

Pulp - "Common People": My guess would be 1997 or '98. One of my best friends in college was a girl who was born in England and still very much an Anglophile, and I'm reasonably certain she owned Different Class.

My Bloody Valentine - "Only Shallow": 1999. And the reason I know with such certainty is that there was a campus-band festival on the quad, and a friend of mine assembled a few of us to play in an ad hoc band, and we covered this.

Björk - "Hyperballad" - 1997. Knew people that bought Homogenic the day it came out.

Aaliyah - "Are You That Somebody?" - 2003 or '04. Almost certainly downloaded after having read about the song on ILM.

Beck - "Loser" - 1994. Heard it on Q101.

Neutral Milk Hotel - "Holland, 1945" - Tough to say. I bought NMH's On Avery Island in Jan. '97 because I'd read a good review in Magnet or whatever, but I didn't much like the album, so I never bothered with In the Aeroplane. Only a few years later did I realize that it become this huge cult classic. I own the album now but only because I think someone included it on an mp3 CD with a bunch of other tracks they gave to me. Sometime in the mid-00s, although when 0:02-0:05 was sampled on Night Ripper, I didn't recognize it.

Daft Punk - "Da Funk" - Possibly 2002. I was performing a one-man show at a small theater in Chicago, and one day, the producer-director showed up early and put on Homework while we were getting things ready. I remember giving him shit about it, since at the time I had an unfortunate kneejerk reaction toward anything resembling house music. He shrugged and said, "I dunno, it's actually really good." I'm pretty sure he got into the album when he was on study abroad in France. I bought it used two or three years later.

Depeche Mode - "Enjoy the Silence" - 1990. Heard this shit on the radio in 7th grade. My friend Jon was a big Depeche Mode fan, IIRC.

Mazzy Star - "Fade Into You" - 1994. Fairly sure this was played on Q101.

Aphex Twin - "Windowlicker" - 1999 or 2000. My roommate Eric in college was a big Warp records nerd, and he'd play the video for this on his computer. Not sure if it was embedded on the CD or if he'd downloaded it or what. I thought it was hilarious and awesome.

The Notorious B.I.G. - "Juicy" - 2007? Maybe before, who knows.

Pavement - "Gold Soundz" - My friend Chris bought me Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain for Christmas 1995.

Nirvana - "Smells Like Teen Spirit" - 1992. Hmmmm, I don't remember it being played much on the radio stations I listened to (mostly top 40 and "urban"), but I have a hazy memory of having heard it not long after it was released and being intimidated by its dark moody noise but also surprisingly impressed.

Dr. Dre [ft. Snoop Doggy Dogg] - "Nuthin' But a 'G' Thang" - 1993. Most likely on WGCI, the "urban" station.

DJ Shadow - "Midnight in a Perfect World" - 1996 or 1997. Chris bought this not long after it came out, and I think I dubbed it off him during winter break of freshman year. But I'm not sure I entirely trust that memory, since I also vaguely recall him not liking the album and me buying the CD off him, along with a Dirty Three record.

Radiohead - "Paranoid Android" - 2001. Probably I overheard it in college; one of my roommates was a fan. But even though I'd certainly heard "Creep" and "Fake Plastic Trees" and "Optimistic," I didn't actually get into Radiohead until 2001. After college I was hanging out a lot with my friend Matt, who had an enormous music collection and very catholic tastes, and I began to realize that my tastes had lately refined to the point where they were becoming a dead end. Since a few other friends of ours were Radiohead fans, I decided they were a band I should really check out. I'm pretty sure Matt burned me the CD.

Belle and Sebastian - "The State I Am In" - 2001. I'd heard The Boy with the Arab Strap and If You're Feeling Sinister in 1998-99 and Fold Your Hands, Child, You Walk Like a Peasant upon its release in 2000, but I don't remember having heard Tigermilk before 2001 or so. I might have dubbed it from my friend Colin.

Weezer - "Say It Ain't So" - 1995. On Q101, undoubtedly.

OutKast - "Spottieottedopalicious" - 2007 maybe? Whenever I bought Aquemini. (This is why I wish I'd been able to preserve iTunes metadata when I upgraded my computer two years ago.)