Ultimately the conflict between a loud rock band and a co-frontman that eventually departed to do his own thing yielded, against the odds, the band’s best album. Heatmiser never wanted to be a grunge band-by their account, they aimed closer to Fugazi, which you can sort of hear in 1994’s “Bastard John.” But as the band’s career began to wind toward an end, singer Elliott Smith began cultivating a sound all his own, inspired more by The Beatles and Alex Chilton than Ian MacKaye. America was unprepared: Urban Dance Squad’s early rap-rock/nu-metal formula, trading notes with Living Colour and presaging the Limp Bizkits to come, was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Indian sitar, samples of a Hosanna anthem, and an impossibly dense rhythm section (both live and synthesized) support Rudeboy Remmington’s laid-back rhymes and his bandmates’ choral responses. Second album Life ‘n Perspectives of a Genuine Crossover supplied no proper follow-up-a true shame, because this closing track totally could have served that purpose. consciousness with Mental Floss for the Globe and “Deeper Shade of Soul” as the 1980s became the 1990s. Urban Dance Squad – “ Bureaucrat of Flaccostreet”įrom Life ‘n Perspectives of a Genuine Crossover (1991 Arista) So, without further hype, here it is: True Alternative-The Top 100 Songs of the ’90s Underground. So we hope you’ll read through and discover something for yourself. (And listen along to the songs on our Spotify playlist.) Because as bold and weird as the ’90s seemed on the surface, there’s a lot more nuance and variation to be heard when the decade’s popular-music landscape is excavated just a bit further. A few of us probably even discovered a new genre or sub-genre, tucked away in the ever-expanding library of Trends That Didn’t Quite Stick. We all discovered new favorites, and learned more about some of our old stand-bys. The greatest thing about working on this list was that, even as music writers (many of which very closely identify with ’90s music on a personal level), we all learned something from the experience. Many of them have grown to be cult classics, but more than a few were lost in history. Once we had a massive list of contenders, we got down to voting and whittled them down to a fresh 100. The rules were a means to an end and varied a bit on a song-by-song basis but, generally, these songs didn’t chart well, if at all, at the time of their release. But this time around we wanted to tackle a more specific question: If some truly oddball music was topping the charts in the ’90s, then what was the underground like ? So we set off to create our own left-of-the-dial playlist of sorts, choosing songs that captured our hearts but never quite hit mainstream success for one reason or another. In 2008 we published a list of the Best Albums of the 1990s, and we dove deep into the decade’s Top 100 Hip-Hop Albums just two years ago. We’ve been here before-to the ’90s, I mean. We also noticed a healthy resurgence of music we associated with the ’90s-post-hardcore, sludge-metal, trip-hop, house and shoegaze-and sought to re-acquaint ourselves with the inspiration for these aspiring acts. But we’d noticed that the word “alternative” had been tossed out an awful lot in the past 20-25 years, and we began to question what exactly it meant to be truly underground or alternative in a musical era that we tend to romanticize for being against the grain. Looking around at the current hotbed of ’90s nostalgia surrounding us, we found ourselves pleasantly filthy in listicles and retrospective pieces on the decade, some of which we’d published ourselves. It was a stupidly ambitious idea, but not an uninspired one.

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