I looked up at my uncle. He was staring out the window at the rain, his forty-six-year-old hands wrapped around a mug that said WORST. MILLENNIUM. EVER.
– “The song every outsider needed. Radiohead hated it. So did we, at first. Then we realized: that was the point.”
Then, the top five. The ink was heavier here, pressed down with conviction. top hundred songs of the 90s
I was twelve when the 90s ended. Old enough to remember the last gasps of grunge on MTV, young enough that my strongest musical memory was the Digimon theme song. Rick, on the other hand, had been seventeen in 1990. He’d lived it: flannel from Goodwill, Doc Martens held together with safety pins, a mixtape collection that required its own shelving unit.
The further I flipped, the more the 90s came alive—not as a nostalgic aesthetic, but as a chaotic, contradictory, beautiful mess. Page twelve: . Margin note: “We all hated this when it came out. We were wrong. It’s the perfect end credits song for the decade.” Beside it, Maya had drawn a tiny shrek head. I looked up at my uncle
The margin note was short. Not funny. Not argued. Just four sentences in Rick’s now-shaky handwriting:
Each entry had a margin note. “Bee girl costume at Hot Topic: $40. Worth it.” “This song is about depression, but sure, dance to it.” “Len broke up mid-tour because of this song. Still slaps.” So did we, at first
– “The decade’s last great dance anthem. Play this at 2 AM in a bad club and watch strangers become family.”