OH MY GOD ANOTHER LIST: The 101 Hottest Hits of the 90s (part 6)

Thanks to my diarrhea of the typing fingers, I’ve broken down the the top 10 into sections, and then I swear after we get to number one I’m not going to do any countdowns for a long time. Anyway, in this round we’ve got someone happy to be in love, someone sad about being in love, someone sad about not being in love, someone who gets breat up for being in love, and one happy adulterer. That about covers the depth of human emotion, I guess.

10. Janet Jackson, Love Will Never Do (Without You) (1991, #1)

The greatest thing about Janet Jackson’s Control and Rhythm Nation 1814 albums is the unstoppable beat that pumps through both of them. No matter what she’s singing about, whether it’s nasty fruit or going on an escapade or how now it seems your dancing feet are always on her couch, the beat’s always there, and more or less always at the same speed. Even on the Rhythm Nation record, where it was constantly interrupted by lots of social issues meaningful channel-changing interludes, the beat never stopped, as if to say that life is just one big party train and if you don’t jump on now you’ll be lonely forever. It’s most apparent on this track, the album’s seventh (!) single.

Love Will Never Do starts slow, maybe tricking you into thinking it’s a ballad, then eases into a first verse where her voice sounds deeper than usual, a little more echo-y and lower in the mix. The chorus is catchy, but the song doesn’t really take off until the second verse, when her giggly voice is brought to the forefront. The song builds and builds, more like an elaborate musical number than an R&B song. In its final two minutes, her infatuation is suddenly supported by an army of backup singers, and then a different army of backup singers, then it teases you into slowing down before the trumpets come in and Janet ironically repeats the line over and over about how they said it wouldn’t last. And if that wasn’t enough, at about the 4:20 mark, there’s one more glorious chorus, just in case you didn’t get the point yet, before the party train chugs off to its next stop.

I think the obvious choices for the video would have been about 600 dancers, some hula hoops, and maybe a man on stilts holding sparklers, but Herb Ritts’s minimal beach party is a lot smarter than that. Not only does Miss Jackson look the best she’s ever looked, but when Ritts points his camera at her he focuses mainly on her smile. It’s pretty unusual for a pop video to focus more on male bodies than on the hot female singer, but this suggests that the song itself, much like its narrator, is basically nothing without a hot love interest dude. (Or, you know, dudes, since we get Antonio Sabato Jr and the muscly black man on the wedge thing.)

9. TLC, Creep (1995, #1)

Adultery never sounded like much fun until T-Boz came along in 1995 and confided that she likes to cheat on her boyfriend any time she gets the chance. Of course, she says he’s cheating too, but should we believe her? She lies to his face and clearly likes the creeping, so could she be lying to us too? I’m inclined to say yes, just because of the way the song starts to end but then comes back at about 3:35 because she’s just not done telling you how much she likes doing it.

It could be the saga of a relationship deteriorating or it could just be an ode to the joys of being a slut. It doesn’t matter which one you believe, really, but it’s one of the best things about Creep, the group’s first single off their kajillion-selling CrazySexyCool album. Dallas Austin’s jazzy production, with that one trumpet that wanders in and out through the duration of the song, gave the trio a more sophisticated sound than on their 1992 debut. Though they were never too proud to beg and always knew to use condoms, it wasn’t until they ditched the crazy outfits that TLC came across as sexually confident women who knew what they wanted and got it. They inspired a whole bunch of wannabes, but would the only R&B girl group in the decade to have major success over the course of three albums.

8. Weezer, Buddy Holly (1994, #17)

In Francine Prose’s beautiful novel Household Saints, and later in Nancy Savoca’s equally lovely film adaptation, a shy Brooklyn loser named Lino Falconetti becomes obsessed with Puccini’s M Butterfly and dreams of someday meeting an Asian woman himself. He does, she introduces him to Chinese opera, and things end very badly.

There’s an M Butterfly allusion in Weezer’s El Scorcho, a song that many people (including myself) hated when it hit airwaves in the fall of 1996, and one wonders if the half-Japanese girl that Rivers Cuomo is cursing is Puccini’s Cio-Cio San, or if it’s the girl with the slitty eyes that he was so enamored with in Buddy Holly. I sure hope it’s not the latter, because Buddy Holly, for all its strange nerdiness, is one of the most romantic songs ever written.

Its love-conquers-all charm is thematically similar to Love Will Never Do (Without You). But whereas Janet Jackson had a whole Rhythm Nation to back her up, Rivers Cuomo just has three bandmates that are even nerdier than he is. A big part of Weezer’s appeal is that no matter how many fancy Spike Jonze videos or stories about Harvard or breakdowns or whatever we see, they still sound like young and confused.

(But not whiny. The main difference between Weezer and most emo (and I’m totally not going to get into whether Weezer are emo or not) is Cuomo’s voice. For a little guy, his voice is deep enough that he almost never sounds like he’s whining, even when he is.)

The narrator of Buddy Holly probably gets picked on a lot. The “homies” who “front” and try to “diss” him don’t care about love, irony, or the old pop cultural references that he decides to sing about almost at random. No, the homies just want to make fun of him. Maybe because he’s nerdy, or because he’s happy, or because he’s dating an Asian.

In the bridge, they both get beat up, and he ends up feeling blue before going back to the chorus again to assure us listeners that he’s not having second thoughts, and that’s how we know that, like in almost very movie about teenagers ever made, they’re going to overcome all odds and stay together.

The shortest of the 101 songs on this countdown, Buddy Holly tries to come up with metaphors for the relationship but can’t. Mary Tyler Moore is totally lovable, but I’m not sure what about her is like the girl in the song. With Holly himself we have a better idea, but only if we picture the guy in the song as looking like Cuomo himself*. But it doesn’t matter. This song is for star-crossed lovers anywhere, and it doesn’t really matter who they’re like at all.

(*For the record, Rivers isn’t even wearing glasses in the Buddy Holly video, or the videos that followed it for Say It Ain’t So and El Scorcho. And, for a different record, he was actually pretty hot in those videos, especially El Scorcho. But back at the beginning he only wore the glasses–and a terrible bowl cut–in the Undone video, and didn’t bring them back until Pink Triangle, a pretty boring video that most people didn’t see anyway.)

7. Chris Isaak, Wicked Game (1991, #6)

Chris Isaak’s kind of a weird guy. Like a west coast Lyle Lovett, he sings hokey C&W songs, but then shows up and acts weird in crazy movies by famous directors. Goofy, charming, but also kind of milquetoast, it makes sense for both David Lynch and John Waters to put him in their movies. But still, if David Lynch and John Waters like you, you’ve got to be pretty special.

Wicked Game, from Isaak’s 1989 Heart-Shaped World album, appeared two years after its release in Wild At Heart, a movie I mostly remember for the part where Diane Ladd goes crazy with the lipstick. Although the movie was too violent and weird for most people to get, the song became a runaway hit in 1991, thanks in large part to another one of those delightful Herb Ritts beach videos. In it, Isaak and a topless Helena Christensen make pretty faces at the camera and at each other; once again Ritts chose to focus mainly on the lover’s body and not the singer’s, which surely has a lot to do with the video’s enduring popularity. (Seriously, though–dude’s been in at least two beach-themed videos and we’ve never even seen his chest.)

But the song, not just the video, oozes with sex. The guitars smolder as Isaak chastizes a woman for making him love her. And the best part of the song is the way that you have to listen really closely to hear if he’s saying he doesn’t want to fall in love, or if he’s actually saying he does. Men aren’t often very vulnerable in the Top 40, and the way he sings you can’t really blame the woman for trying to seduce him. Isaak doesn’t give us much information; the song’s as vague as it is seductive. But then the finale, where the song stops and he says that nobody loves no one, sounds so bleak that it’s hard not to feel bad for the hopelessly sad sexy surfer man, even if you don’t know why.

Isaak would play the heartthrob and show off his manly arms in more videos throughout his career, but he only hit the top 40 one more time after this.

6. Radiohead, Creep (1993, #34)

Whether it was a cuckoo libertine or a little squirrel who slammed her bike down the stairs, the lyrics of my favorite rock songs in ‘93 almost never made sense to me. I liked them at the time because they were different, edgy but still catchy, and often had pretty female singers. I could watch them on MTV and not have to worry about my parents liking them; they were mine.

But not Creep. Creep was different. The lyrics weren’t mysterious, and the singer wasn’t female. The song was direct. I’m a creep, Thom Yorke said. I’m a weirdo. At about the same time, Beck said that he was a loser, which is similar, but he also said something about dog-food stalls with the beefcake pantyhose, and lots of other things that don’t make any sense. Not to say Loser is a bad song (it’s not), but when you’re twelve and pimply and fat and confused, sometimes directness is better.

I liked Radiohead from the get-go even though the noisier of the alternative bands still scared the living daylights out of me. Maybe it was Thom Yorke’s hair, which wasn’t gross, or maybe it was because they were British, and I had just discovered what a great show Are You Being Served? was. I don’t know. But Creep really spoke to me, because I knew plenty of girls (and boys) whose skin made me cry, and I wanted them to notice when I wasn’t around. I had a shitty body and thought I had a shitty soul.*

Everyone can relate to Creep, probably even pretty and popular people. Which reminds me of Labor Day Weekend, 1993, when my aunt had a cookout. My cousin, who was maybe in grad school at the time, was with some of his friends talking about how he liked this song, and then they started talking about other songs that were out at the time, and he said that he didn’t like Shaggy’s Oh Carolina because it was too poppy. I jumped in, smart-ass nerd that I was, and said that I had just listened to the American Top 40 that morning, and that Creep had been on there but Oh Carolina wasn’t, so clearly Creep was the more poppy song.

Radiohead would never hit the Top 40 again, despite becoming one of the biggest album acts in the country. Maybe because never again did they write lyrics so direct, so universal, or so moving.

(*I was just starting Catholic school.)

(PS: If you feel any deep philiosophical thoughts about Radiohead coming on, click here.)