90s Modern Rock Ranked!

So Shawn Mullins is playing a gig in LA. He feels out of place, as does a girl in the crowd who grew up in Hollywood, possibly in one of the houses Bob Seger wrote “Hollywood Nights” about. The girl is very pretty, but as Shawn says, “She’d be a whole lot prettier if she smiled once in a while,” which girls just love to hear. He writes her a song called “Lullaby,” which features the term “Rock-a-bye” but not the word “Lullaby.” It’s significantly worse than “Hollywood Nights.”

This song is a call for unity (good!) but the lyrics question affirmative action and “Discrimination, now on both sides” (bad! very bad!).

Staind’s depression-packed post-grunge was at the very least more compelling than the little-bit-screamy, little-bit-rappy shit performed by most of their nu metal peers, but for the past decade or so, singer Aaron Lewis has stopped loathing himself and started loathing immigrants and liberals. You can hear all about it on his most recent album, which is actually called Give My Country Back. Or, if you’re not a piece of shit, you can simply not do that.

“How can all that shit you said ever make any sense? Where did you run to bitch, while I was holding my breath?” Lovely, guys. Just lovely.

Men’s Health Magazine named this the 44th best Heavy Metal Workout Song of all-time. In case you were curious.

According to a Google search, 520 million hours of Friends gets watched every year. Which means that every 22 or so minutes over the course of those 520 million hours, someone hears 30 seconds of this song. Which also means that it’s entirely possible that human beings have heard a portion of this song more times than every other song on this list combined. Having an opinion on it is like having an opinion on dirt. It’s just kind of there, and that’s how it is. Clap-clap-clap-clap.

The obvious joke here is, “The Why Store called. They asked why your band is called The Why Store?” But when the band your band most resembles is Big Head Todd and The Monsters, you probably have dumb band names on the (big) brain.

In the fall of 1997 I wrote a column for my college newspaper about how none of the other hit songs of the moment could hold a candle to Hanson’s “MMMBop,” referring to this AOR hippie jam along the lines of “sounds like Blues Traveler minus the harmonica and guitar solos, the only things that make Blues Traveler interesting.” I stand by it. Also, I stand by “MMMBop.”

Mae Moore wrote Loverboy’s “Heaven in Your Eyes,” which means she’s almost definitely the only person to write one of these 1,638 songs as well as one that appears on the Top Gun soundtrack. So that’s a win. “Bohemia” on the other hand, features Moore gently and awkwardly rapping about how cool and superior city life is. It’s the early 90s equivalent of a social media post from someone who just moved to New York declaring how it’s the best place in the world because they have vintage stores and numerous places to wait on line for a $16 slice of pizza covered in hot honey.

Silverchair weren’t just teenagers when they broke big wth “Tomorrow,” they were closer to being tweens than they were to twentysomethings. “Pure Massacre” is proof of that. The song tries to say big things about bad things (“Families being torn apart, doesn’t have to be this way”), but clunkily does so in the way only a 15-year-old boy can. Also this song was on a CD we played at the record store I worked at, and one of my coworkers would scream, “Veal Mastercard!” every time the chorus hit, and I definitely can’t un-hear that.