#1,632: “Cleopatra’s Cat”

Before 1994, the Modern Rock chart had only faint traces of hippies. An Edie Brickell tune here, some early Lenny Kravitz over there, and that was it. Was it the surprise popularity of hippie-adjacent Counting Crows the gateway drug for the likes of Dave Matthews, Phish, and Blues Traveler to take up space alongside Hole and Soundgarden on the Modern Rock chart as the decade moved on? Perhaps. As for the Spin Doctors, they had two massive hits before Adam Duritz made the Modern Rock world safe for dreadlocked white guys of the non-aggressive variety. So while we won’t be seeing “Two Princes” or “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” on this list, we will see this nonsense.

The Spin Doctors were quite adept at writing Steve Miller Band-esque crunchy catchy pop songs that sound great on the radio, but “Cleopatra’s Cat” was very much not one of them. This jam leans heavily into the cringey, jazzy, scat singing tendencies the band was mocked for, and throws in a brief interlude of the Middle Eastern melody that school kids once used as a basis to sing about underpants. “Two Princes” may be playing at your local grocery store as we speak, but this is one song you’ll never hear at Whole Foods.