Best Song of the 90s

For roughly ten years, everyone heard the same songs at the same time. Then the radio stopped being the only way in, and it has not happened since.

The nineties chart is stranger than nostalgia lets on. Grunge and manufactured pop were not really rivals — they charted in the same weeks, often on the same stations, and plenty of people liked both without feeling any tension about it. Britpop was a British argument that America largely ignored. Girl groups were writing some of the decade's sharpest lyrics while being reviewed as a passing fad. Hip hop went from regional to unavoidable in about five years, and the people who called it a phase are still living that down.

There are fifty-two songs in it, and the thing being judged is the song itself. Not the video, not the band, not what the record meant to a particular scene at the time. Just whether it holds up when it is put next to another one.

A track everyone is slightly embarrassed to love will beat a critically canonised one more often than you would guess. That is not the bracket being unserious — it is the format asking what you actually want to hear rather than what you would put in a list you expected other people to read.