The musical decade of the 1990s came in with CDs and went out with Napster. The ’90s brought us the “Rachel” haircut, Nintendo, rollerblades, Beanie Babies, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The musical trends included rap, grunge, country, alternative, R&B, Britpop, pop, ska, and swing. We’ve selected one song to represent each of those categories and celebrate the spirit of the ’90s.
Videos by American Songwriter
1. “911 Is a Joke” by Public Enemy (1990)
Public Enemy frontman Chuck D said in That’s the Joint, “The music is in key, but the agitation is that Flavor is not! On ‘911 Is a Joke,’ Flav is out of key purposely! When you put him in key, it gets syrupy – too close to music. See, when you add noise on top of noise, you gonna tune everybody out. But with Flavor, he becomes the noise because he is annoying!”
2. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana (1991)
Drummer Dave Grohl told Mojo magazine in March 2011, “’Teen Spirit’ definitely established that quiet/loud dynamic thing that we fell back on a lot of the time. It did become that one song that personifies the band. But the video was probably the key element in that song becoming a hit. People heard the song on the radio, and they thought, ‘This is great,’ but when kids saw the video on MTV, they thought, ‘This is cool. These guys are kinda ugly, and they’re tearing up their f–king high school.’ So I think that had a lot to do with what happened with the song.
3. “Chattahoochee” by Alan Jackson (1993)
Co-writer Jim McBride told AOL, “Sydney Lanier was this poet who had written a poem called ‘Song of the Chattahoochee’ that was in high school literature books. I was sitting in my home office one day, and I had just read a book about the Chattahoochee. I started playing a little melody, and then I got the first two lines of the song. By that time, Alan was a big star so there was no more writing on 16th Avenue anymore – we wrote on the road. I’d go out with him on his bus, and we would write out there. I kept a separate notebook, and any time I had a song idea I thought Alan would like, I’d put it in that notebook… so I showed the song idea to him. I sang the first couple lines, and he was all over it. We started working on it in Tallahassee, and then we finished it the next afternoon in Thibodeaux, Louisiana.”
[RELATED: The 8 Songs That Perfectly Celebrate the Spirit of the ’80s]
4. “Basket Case” by Green Day (1994)
In 2014, Rolling Stone’s David Fricke asked songwriter Billie Joe Armstrong if the song was about panic attacks, “Basket Case” became this loser national anthem. But to say it’s about panic attacks is limiting. It’s about going through total confusion. I think of a song like ‘American Idiot’ as feeling, OK, there is a lot of chaos in the world, people getting murdered. There is no way to make sense of a world like that. You feel like a victim of it. ‘Basket Case’ is the same way.”
5. “Creep” by TLC (1994)
In 2015, Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins told Billboard about the “Creep” creep, “You know what? When I see him, I’m gonna be like, ‘Guess what — this song was about you. People can relate to when a person is not showing you attention, and it’s easy when somebody [else] is nice and doing the things you want them to do, to make you gravitate toward them.”
6. “Wonderwall” by Oasis (1995)
A one-hit wonder in America, Oasis had much more success in the rest of the world. Songwriter Noel Gallagher told BBC Radio 2 in 2002, ”The meaning of that song was taken away from me by the media who jumped on it… And how do you tell your Mrs it’s not about her once she’s read it? It’s a song about an imaginary friend who’s gonna come and save you from yourself.”
7. “Wannabe” by Spice Girls (1996)
Melanie “Mel C” Chisholm told E News in 2022, “We were just being silly in the studio… and the writers we were working with really wanted to capture the energy that we had. They molded this craziness into a song.” The song hit number one all over the world.
8. “The Impression That I Get” by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones (1997)
Frontman Dicky Barrett spoke of the sudden success of the song to the Cleveland Scene in 2018, “It was double-edged, really. It was great, but at the time, I didn’t properly enjoy it the way I should have. I thought the sky was falling in, and it was the end. I thought, ‘Oh my god, everyone knows who we are.’ We were rude boys from Boston, and we weren’t supposed to be popular. All of a sudden, we were. I didn’t want us to be known as sellouts.”
9. “Jump, Jive an’ Wail” by The Brian Setzer Orchestra (1998)
Setzer told the Orange County Register in 2017, “When the swing revival came, it put me on that wave, and it was a great thing for me because it got the sound out there, and all of a sudden, I turned around, and oh my gosh, everything was just huge. It wasn’t the first time for me, so I kind of knew what to expect, but it was a bit of a double-edged sword because there was some backlash in the press and that kind of silly stuff. Then there was the other side of it, where people were going crazy for the music. I wasn’t riding my first wave so I kind of knew how to dodge certain things or to take things with a grain of salt, but man, we were flying and selling out shows all over the country.
Photo by Frank Mullen/Getty Images
No.6 was my favorite song.