Modern Rock #1 Hits of 1994

damn great list, you were cool in 94

The Billboard to which I linked has the following horrors on the top ten:

Big Mountain - Baby I Love Your Way (from "Reality Bites")
Jon Secada - If You Go
Elton John - Can You Feel The Love Tonight?
All 4 One - I Swear

mixed with:

Beck - Loser
Aaliyah - Back and Forth
Janet - Any Time, Any Place
Warren G- Regulate
John Mellencamp-Me'shell Mdegeocello - Wild Night

good list, clemenza. I often wonder whether that's my favorite Aaliyah song too.

(xpost) Thanks (he says as he ponders the deeper implications of that statement...)

P&J top 5 of that year:
1. Hole: Live Through This (DGC) 1552 (121)
2. Pavement: Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (Matador) 859 (77)
3. R.E.M.: Monster (Warner Bros.) 634 (66)
4. Nirvana: MTV Unplugged in New York (DGC) 552 (50)
5. Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Sleeps With Angels (Reprise) 520 (49)

one album by Cobain, one by his widow, and two albums with songs inspired by his suicide

and at least one more, Vitalogy, down at #25

^^ maybe the only recent P&J top five whose albums I still love

Was Cannonball 93?

yep

those Last Splash singles got plenty of blanket airplay on college radio through '94 though

Other notable '94 alt songs:

Archers of Loaf - "Web In Front"
Frank Black - "Headache"
Blur - "Girls & Boys"
Jeff Buckley's Grace singles
Candlebox - "Far Behind" and "You"
Collective Soul - "Shine"
all those other Counting Crows songs
Deadeye Dick - "New Age Girl"
Flaming Lips - "She Don't Use Jelly"
Frente! - "Labour Of Love" and "Bizarre Love Triangle"
Grant Lee Buffalo - "Lone Star Song" and "Mockingbirds"
a bunch more Green Day stuff
Jesus & Mary Chain - "Sometimes Always"
L7 - "Andres"
a billion other Live songs
Love Spit Love - "Am I Wrong?"
Lucas - "Lucas With The Lid Off"
Luscious Jackson - "Citysong" and "Here"
Mazzy Star - "Fade Into You"
Morphine - "Thursday"
Murmurs - "You Suck"
all kinds of NIN stuff from The Downward Spiral
Oasis - "Supersonic" and "Live Forever"
more Offspring songs
more Pearl Jam songs
Liz Phair - "Supernova"
Possum Dixon - "Watch That Girl Destroy Me"
more REM stuff from Monster
Rollins Band - "Disconnect" and "Liar"
Sebadoh's Bakesale (to the extent that those songs got MTV/radio play)
Shudder To Think - "X-French Tee Shirt"
Smashing Pumpkins - "Landslide"
Sonic Youth - "Bull In The Heather"
the singles attendant to Soundgarden's Superunknown
Sugar - "Your Favorite Thing" and "Believe What You're Saying"
Toad The Wet Sprocket - "Something's Always Wrong"
Tori Amos - "Cornflake Girl"
Urge Overkill - "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon"
US3 - "Cantaloop"
Veruca Salt - "Seether"
Ween's Chocolate and Cheese "singles"
Whale - "Hobo Humpin' Slobo Babe"

Soundgarden, NIN, Sugar, "Seether," "Landslide," "Cantaloop," and those Frente! singles def part of the fabric of my '94.

fuck you alfred, "i swear" is a classic

http://www.harrycutting.com/graphics/photos/children/serious-black-boy-crossed-arms-J178-07-619.jpg

a classic example of a terrible song

i can't hate on the soundtrack to me getting run over by people 5 times my size at the skate deck

ugh i swear

was boyz ii men/mariah 94 too? that song was a fucking plague.

who skateboards to all 4 one??

They skated by the light of the moon, the stars, and the sun.

I am dying over here

rollerskates not skateboards!

All the cool kids had roller BLADES

yeah but i was not one of the cool kids

cos you listened to all 4 one

ollie kickflip to the tune of "I'll Make Love To You"

Boys II Men ballads remain my biggest hurdle.

ahh Toad the Wet Sprocket, with one of the last of the jangle-pop #1's.

― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, May 21, 2012 9:40 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the really remarkable thing to me about them is that in 1995 they scored a moderate radio hit off of a gold-selling rarities collection. Dulcinea is a decent album btw.

alternate universe where jodeci and jon secada are thrasher covet stars

"End of the Road" was a great song but it really ruined them

I started to loathe them whenever they would win their 32456th award at the Grammys and would thank God so unctuously that I wished God had aimed a skateboard at their heads.

did they release anything uptempo as a single after "Motownphilly"?

"Vibin'", sort of?

also, "I Remember" sort of?

also "Can't Let Her Go"

the big problem was that in the wake of "End of the Road", no one gave a shit about their uptempo numbers, which encouraged them to sink deeper and deeper into the morass of treacly bullshit that led to "A Song For Mama"

abc > b2m

bbd > everything

all your alt-rock threads are belong to Michael Bivins

Yeah, I lost interest in Boys II Men so quickly after they morphed into the Mawkish Slow Jam All-Star Revue.

ABC >>> ABC

1995 through early '97 were my period of exile from the pop charts. I started paying attention again when boy bands and Hanson ruled.

I did not realize BIIM had a 2000 album called Nathan Michael Shawn Wanya

also didn't realize one of the dudes in BIIM was named Wanya

i knew that but it took me like 15 years to realize his name wasn't 'wayna'

wanya was the tenor with the really BIG voice iirc

i drive past wayna's house sometimes

it's big

he should've cut a solo single called "Wanyabe."

or a single called "Lemme Holla At Ya" which is just the screaming from the end of "One Sweet Day" looped for 5 minutes

"Water Runs Dry" is a rad song fuiud

"Water Runs Dry" only seems rad because it's surrounded in their catalog by "One Sweet Day", "A Song For Mama", "On Bended Knee", "4 Seasons of Loneliness" and two uptempo numbers that no one ever heard besides the people who bought Evolution

Other notable '94 alt songs:

I think I posted this somewhere else, but I recently made a Spotify playlist of songs from 1994 that's dominated by alt-rock stuff (just because it's what I was into at the time).

Seeing the video of "Longview" for the first time was one of my biggest WTF moments to that point, Green Day having been this squirrelly little punk band that breezed through my hometown once a year or so. A 7" band outside of the grunge scene on MTV…. it just seems so normal now.

Just drank a 40 of Mickey's and passed out in front of the NES. Thanks for the playlist, jaymc.