90s Modern Rock Ranked!

This band’s last.fm bio claims that “multiple critics” have likened their concerts to a “religious experience.” Sounds cool, but I just can’t get past how much this song sounds like Tool covering Wall of Voodos’s “Mexican Radio.”

The lack of a question mark in the song title is a giveaway. Scott Stapp isn’t pointing towards the heavens, asking “What’s this life for?” He’s pointing to the heavens and declaring that the guy up there is “What this life (is) for.” RIYL grunge gospel about living “under the reign of one king.” Not R for anyone else.

The three hit songs from the first Candlebox album were an acoustic power ballad (already covered that one), an electric power ballad (will get to it one day), and a midtempo rocker with power ballad lyrics (not modern enough for this chart, apparently). As with every hair metal band that struck it rich with a slow song, Candlebox felt the need to ROCK when returning with album #2, and delivered this (thankfully) brief, chorus-free grunge-by-numbers-ditty. There’s a reason you still hear “You” and “Far Behind” on Lithium radio, and an equally good reason why you don’t hear this one.

If you’re a Chris Farley completist, I’d like to direct you to the music video for this rap/rock Kiss cover featured in the movie Tommy Boy, as it includes the antics of a stage diving Farley. As for the song, the inclusion of a Chuck D sample was some foreshadowing of the title of the Junkeez next album, Fear of a Wack Planet. Which, as phar as puns go is pretty phunkin’ good.

The melody of the verses in this song (blah blah blah blah blah BLAH BLAH BLAH) combined with the singer’s highly nasal voice is tremendously irritating. In fact, it’s 3X as irritating as most songs, hence the extra bit in the title.

The idea of “selling out” was a huge deal in the 90s, but as the decade wore on, the term completely lost its meaning. Selling out wasn’t just about money (though the money didn’t hurt), it was about ditching your underground bonafides to join the mainstream and bask in the glow of capitalism. Green Day and Jawbreaker were viewed as “sellouts” for turning their backs on the ethos of the East Bay punk scene, but Reel Big Fish was a ska-punk band from Orange county. I find it hard to believe that UC Irvine frat boys were scolding them for signing to a subsidiary of Universal music – which makes this song more wish fulfillment than ironic scolding. Not to mention a lot of ska punk, including this song, just plain sucks.

The most streamed Deep Blue Something song that isn’t their only hit, or the low-fi 1993 version of their only hit, is an instrumental called “Gammer Gerten’s Needle.” The song sounds an awful lot like Cocteau Twins (we’ll have to wait a while until we get to them), which is surprising since “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” doesn’t one bit. Cocteau Twins are about as chill and dreamlike as pop music gets. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” has a chorus in which “AND I SAID WHAT ABOUT BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S SHE SAID I THINK I REMEMBER THE FILM AS I RECALL I THINK WE BOTH KINDA LIKED IT AND I SAID WELL THAT’S THE ONE THING WE’VE GOT,” is yelled with no break in pace or pitch over some open-mic-night-quality guitar strumming.

Still, it was a top-five hit, and the band’s only single to make the Billboard Hot 100. AND I SAID WELL THAT’S THE ONE THING THEY’VE GOT.

Smash Mouth had six hit songs, three of which were covers. The most popular being their version of The Monkees’ “I’m a Believer” from the Millennial touchstone Shrek, and the worst being this ska-fueled take on War’s “Why Can’t We Be Friends?,” which in this case provides an answer to its own question.

This piece of cheese sounds like it belongs in the training montage of a late 80s wrestling movie, and not the discography of a guy who was in Talking Heads and The Modern Lovers. The digitized drum beats in here sound like they came from the cheap Casio keyboard I messed around with in elementary school. Just an odd aberration in a very long, successful career of a musician and producer who was a key part of some unimpeachable classics.

For the last few years I’ve been teaching advertising classes, and one thing I always try to hammer home for anyone interested in pursuing being an ad creative (a real growth industry these days), is to avoid, at all costs, making ads that are wallpaper. People hate advertising, and it takes a lot to get them to pay attention, so if you’ve gotta make an ad, you might as well try to make an interesting one. If your ad just blends in to an already dull space, what’s the point?

Vertical Horizon is the wallpaper of music. These two songs exist to fade into the background while you’re browsing hemorrhoid remedies at CVS. Just look at the photo of those guys. Marilyn Manson might suck shit as a human, but at least you’d do a double take if you saw him at the DMV. Any one of these guys you’d just figure would be there to register a Hyundai Sonata, the wallpaper of cars.