50 Memorable Songs Of The Late 1990s That Apparently Only You Remember, Even Though They Were Totally On The Radio And Stuff

In the mid to late 90s, between the ages of 11 and 14, I made a series of VHS tapes featuring all the songs I liked on Musique plus and Much Music. I'm pretty sure there are a couple of tracks from Local H's As Good as Dead on them… Some memories are best repressed forever.

some dude gave us "Mas Tequila" upthread, and I can't believe that "Bound For The Floor" is really forgotten.... but y'all have reminded me to add "Eddie Vedder" to the playlist along with "Flip the Switch" which I'm not sure I've ever heard before. I had a friend who repped for Bridges to Babylon for about... a week I think.

I got Nine Lives as a castoff from the same guy and I remembered "Falling In Love" being a little more exciting than it now seems. Something really doughy and sluggish about it despite the horns and other signifiers of energy and fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsV500W4BHU

Powerman 5000 - When Worlds Collide

(can't imagine anyone who's ever heard this mess has forgotten it, but it had a pretty brief moment in radio rotation and it's another one where the entire genre is sort of out in the cold right now)

^ an ice hockey dressing room smash

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kXiLeBXzG4

Jamiroquai - Alright. Third single off the album led by "Virtual Insanity." I remember it, like "Cosmic Girl," getting at least token airplay (maybe even with more of a 'rock' remix? can't find any proof of that existing)... and then it was gone. I suspect they're thought of as one-hit wonders in the US even though "Canned Heat" topped the dance charts and the video was around for a minute.

Surprised to realize Metallica hasn't come up here yet. Between Load (1996), Reload (1997), Garage Inc. (1997) and S&M (1999), they were constantly pushing new product (twelve singles!) in the late 90s, a period capped off in 2000 with substantial hit "I Disappear" off the Mission Impossible 2 soundtrack. I won't list them all, and a few of them like "Fuel," "Until It Sleeps" and their cover of "Turn The Page" are surely not forgotten... but when was the last time you heard Mainstream Rock chart-topper "No-Leaf Clover" or the covers of "Die, Die My Darling" and "Whiskey in the Jar"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd9ohpDDCRU

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDTqxn6KCNs

I don't know if The Tuesdays ever made an appearance on US radio in the late 90s, but they come off as a rigorous attempt to craft a Bangles for that era--something that 1997 probably wasn't looking for, but I still think its kind of a shame that they never had more of a career. I had pretty much forgotten about them until I found their self-titled (and only?) album among my CDs a few weeks ago. On the whole, its a bit too ballad-heavy, but in their better moments, they come up with some irresistible sugar-rush pop songs like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljV0KM5zZOk

Doesn't ring any bells with me. It's nice though! The Beatlesy backing vocals are cute. Agreed that it doesn't really feel like a US pop single in 1997. Maybe countrify it more and you have a viable Dixie Chicks alternative, or make it a lot poppier and glossier, and the positive-vibes message would get you into a Vitamin C kind of space.

Stretch Princess, whose s/t album came out in 1998 and who had songs featured in She's All That, Teaching Mrs. Tingle, Buffy and Smallville, were a British three-piece who glenn mcdonald perfectly describes "sound like an extremely meticulous pop archivist has gone through the catalogs of 'til tuesday, Sarge, the Sundays, the Bangles, the Rose Chronicles, Grace Pool, the Cranberries, Veruca Salt, Emm Gryner, the Go-Go's, Paula Cole, Lush, the Primitives and Marry Me Jane, extracting only the purest moments of glossy melodic passion. I don't know if they did anything on US radio, but their soundtrack credentials are as late 90s as they come. "Sorry" (the one from Teaching Mrs. Tingle) was my fave, but if this is anything close to the kind of thing you like, I strongly recommend the full album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OqzWDsNthM

No memory of that on US radio myself, but you're on the money with the soundtrack lineup. To my ears, the sound is just little bit of a throwback to a couple years before in terms of grunge/post-grunge guitar and vocals; it doesn't quite sound like what I was hearing in 1998.

I had a friend in high school who saw Stretch Princess open for...I want to say Creed (back when Creed still toured clubs), and was raving about them the next morning in gym class.

Hmmm, plausible - they were on the same label (Wind-Up) it seems.

I'm doubting that Creed story now. I genuinely don't remember the headliner was.

ANYWAY, no track to share. I've got a rental car this week that doesn't have a CD player. So I've been listening to the area Alt. Rock station and they just played the discussed upthread Flys: "Got You Where I Want You", which was unexpected to say the least.

man "me wise magic" sucks, huh

was roth going for early scott weiland on the verses?

i think i voted for that song in the vh poll

the chorus has at least something headsticky to it but the verses are sludge, and the intro sounds like a frightening harbinger of "kryptonite" by 3 doors down before then going into an incredibly awkward portamento transition. also i can't shake the suspicion that "me wise magic" is dave's idea of voodoo-shaman talk or jamaican patois or some other area i really don't want him troping into. an event reunion single that feels much more like the last gasps of a dino-rock act before breaking up. maybe serious VH heads dig eddie's solos though?

really pleased to see yvette michele mentioned here. the single that i remember more vividly, besides the funkmaster flex mixtape favorite 'everyday & everynight' (which is also awesome), was 'dj keep playin' (get your music on)': https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IGXsXU79RRE that was a full force production too, iirc.

her whole album was really good and one of the only r+b records i liked from that era.

I loved and still do love that first Stretch Princess album. Went through a period in 1998/99 where it was chiefly all I'd listen to for days at a time.

xp "Me Wise Magic" is insane and shouldn't exist

but i actually came here to post this lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qTESaoSU_8

do you actually remember it??

not at all

oh great now i have "meeeee wise magic" stuck in my head again

don't fight it. that 9/8 intro mmm

I loved that Reply All podcast but did not at all imagine Evan Olson as a Neil Patrick Harris clone

the evan olson song is a flight of conchords thing right

Oh my God, this was such a ride!
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx/158-the-case-of-the-missing-hit for those that haven't heard it

yeah it's wild! i wish they'd followed up with more of their sources once they reached the conclusion. but super entertaining listening.

pretty entertaining detective story (i h8 podcasts and managed to make it through), but with the reveal of what the song was it's clear that the extent to which the song had been 'erased from existence' or 'scrubbed from the internet' or however they kept putting it was quite a big exaggeration. it may have seemed that way initially when the song's lyrics were apparently ungooglable, but the track (w/ its parent album) seems to have been on youtube and digital download stores for a decade now, probably much longer?

searching thru radio & records issues from the time shows it got some play at a handful of top 40, hot ac and (to a lesser extent) alternative stations, but never secured enough play to crack even the bottom of those formats' charts. the track got mentioned in billboard's heatseekers column, which was meant to highlight music breaking regionally, before the album's originally planned release. it's unclear when it actually came out, because i don't think it ever ended up making even the heatseekers chart, but at least it did get released! like, here's billboard's amusingly hyperbolic review of the followup single that probably ended up getting played by approximately zero stations.

as the sources interviewed in the podcast said, it seems to have been quite a common fate for artists scooped up while the industry bubble was at its largest. it's no surprise that many of them ended up pretending to be undiscovered talent on american idol a few years later.

on a related note: this is from the early rather than late 90s, but what strikes me about it is that it actually charted on billboard, but i'm not sure if it actually ever came out. it's "let's get into something sexy" by erik hicks, which got just enough airplay to hit the bottom rungs of billboard's chart for the rhythmic top 40 format for two weeks (and the hot 100 airplay chart for one week).

finding this song + him on discogs reveals ZERO releases by this artist other than this one song on a promo cd. (however he does have numerous production, writing and session credits on other artists' releases.) so despite getting some minor (but not negligible) airplay, he never got to put an album out, and it's possible the single never got released to retail either. googling the song leads to a small number of hits, including forum posts from collectors struggling to find it. it's not even on youtube (tho apparently another recording of the same song is??). TRULY erased!

i recall having seen a couple other similar examples but i think they were country artists so there's no way in hell i'll remember them

actually just to be a horrible contrarian i'm going to put my tin foil hat on and insist that those podcast people actually knew of evan olson's tune all this time and just concocted this whole saga/detective story knowing it would be excellent podcast material. the rolling stone folks suspecting a viral marketing hoax were onto something!!

Somehow youtube algorithm recommended me to listen to Eve 6 after almost two decades of forgetting about them.

“Inside out” and “leech” were sort of popular on alt radio. Does anyone remembers them at all? The Leech video doesn’t even have 1M views so I guess not. Inside Out is definitely more popular with 18M views.

https://youtu.be/TB_g3KYs2QM

Oddly enough I think Leech is the catchier song despite being less popular.

"inside out" was very big, "leech" not so much so.

yeah dyl i agree the "vanished from the internet" thing was both overstated and vaguely defined. i expect it just genuinely never occurred to the hosts to use print resources to try and narrow down the title/artist. which is kinda lame! weird that they got as far as talking to veteran radio promo people, but not to that point.

their faked-up versions of the song (tho delightful imo) also may have muddied the waters by losing all the sonic tags of a '99-era would-be hit, which the song undoubtedly shares with half the playlist.

man that fake U2 chorus tho. not a lot of people out there going that directly for bono's gold. tho i think it helped me realize how much collective soul wanted to be in that space (see: the guitars and drums in "heavy," now seems very obvious to me as an attempt to pump the Achtung Baby sound up to late 90s compression and attack standards).

Is there a comparable thread somewhere for obscure '80s hits? I keep coming across these older songs whose artists and titles make me shrug but as soon as I hear them I'm like 'ohhhhhh yeah!'. It's like stumbling upon a Riunite commercial on YT.

as far as this "series" goes, i've only made the late 90s and early 00s one (and really should launch the late 00s one) but i would not be surprised if there's some other thread that fills this role for the 80s!

Does anybody remember this song?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRC-X0twti0

I only really know of it because I googled music videos directed by McG, and MAYBE I heard back in the day, but I came across it again inspired by that Evan Olson song by going through old Mainstream Radio Promo CD playlists from that era on Discogs and finding songs that didn't show up on Lyrics Websites. However, lyrics were posted for this in a Yahoo Answers question.

wow, no, never heard this before but WHAT a time capsule. the main guitar thing in the verse sounds almost like a slowed-down sample of "Scar Tissue" and that video is like typical McG aesthetic crossed with "Steal My Sunshine" framing/editing. plus random turntable scratches.... the hyper-saturated blue track jacket versus bleached blonde hair.... just needs Supercat dropping in halfway through. total 1998-2001 interzone pop-rock.

not on Spotify tho

yeah, never heard that before, but it's an impossibly perfect example of the genus

for posterity in case of bum youtube link, we are discussing "Destiny" by "Mister Jones."

Been thinking a bit about this one lately, John Squires' Britpop move from '97.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVzUFNWIYM0

Seahorses: "Love Is The Law"

The album version had a long jam at the end.

John Squire, that is.

"Love Is The Law" actually racked up some decent Alt-Rock airplay for a month or so that summer. This follow-up, while having a much splashier video, didn't fare as well, although I do remember hearing it (alongside loads of other forgotten also-rans) on Muzaks at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv3J4HTThpQ

Seahorses: "Blinded By The Sun"

yeah dyl i agree the "vanished from the internet" thing was both overstated and vaguely defined. i expect it just genuinely never occurred to the hosts to use print resources to try and narrow down the title/artist. which is kinda lame! weird that they got as far as talking to veteran radio promo people, but not to that point.

I think the issue was that the song is called "So Much Better," and those words don't actually exist in the lyrics. So if all you have is the lyrics and they're not on online anywhere, it's hard to get to the title/artist.

(But yeah, the song was out there, so it's not like it had totally vanished.)

That “Destiny” song is surprisingly good

(canceled on arrival, tho, for the f’d-up shot in which the “fat chick” twirls around and turns “hot”)