Pitchfork Completes ‘Best Songs of ’90s’ List, Hipsters Argue All Weekend

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Redferns

It was all a dream, I used to read Pitchfork online ‘zine, Smashing Pumpkins and The Breeders in the limousine.

Want to feel old? NewsFeed spent the entire decade of the 1990s in pre-school and elementary school! Still, that doesn’t mean we don’t have opinions about the decade’s music. And now Pitchfork has finished their Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s list to get us all worked up.

A rundown of how they see the decade’s trends: On Britpop their taste veers between shockingly correct (“Live Forever” as the best Oasis) and shockingly wrong (“Girls and Boys” as the best Blur.) On hip-hop, “Protect Ya Neck” is top at spot 5, edging out predictable favorite “Juicy” by nine spots. R&B is probably a tad underrepresented but as member of Pitchfork’s core audience we don’t know enough about the genre to be sure. On the site’s bread-and-butter, “alternative” rock, the taste predictably skews indie, with Neutral Milk Hotel (“Holland, 1945”) placing higher than Nirvana (“Smells Like Teen Spirit”), the band that normally tops mainstreamers’ lists like this.

But the selection that’s going to cause the most controversy is the top spot. NewsFeed doesn’t want to run it for you, so read it and then scroll down for spoilers. It is unexpected!

Seriously? “Gold Soundz” at #1? Really? A good song, certainly, and we wouldn’t begrudge it its place in the top 50 or even top 10 with a good explanation, but in our eyes it’s too slight of a song to be considered the best of a decade. There’s not enough there there. But NewsFeed does not pretend to speak for everyone. Readers: What are your thoughts?