Anthems 90s

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Like Roberta Flack’s heartbreaking original in the ’70s, ‘Killing Me Softly’ sat at Number One in the UK charts for five weeks. In England, Oasis and the rest of the Britpop lot left nearly as big a mark as Nirvana and the other Seattleites.

At 47, will I have a fabulous nostalgic evening or will I be trampled by uni students enjoying 90s night the way we used to go to 70s nights? History has boiled it down to grunge and gangsta rap on one end, boy bands and Britney Spears at the other, but it’s the stuff in the middle and on the fringes that makes the period difficult to sum up. Yeah, ‘ Organ Donor’ is great and everything, but this supremely mellow number has stood the test of time far better. Beating off stiff competition from half a dozen superb Björk tracks, ‘Big Time Sensuality’ makes this list for its groundbreaking sonics (which did for house music what Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ had done for disco), the iconic video (which instantly made Björk the world’s most interesting pop star) and its sheer effervescent joy in the face of life’s chaos: ’I don’t know my future after this weekend, and I don’t want to. This is their coming out party to the bigger musical world, and all anybody could do in response was throw their hands in the air and wait for the duo to take over the world.Stephen Malkmus’ navel-gaze stream-of-consciousness diatribe pissed Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan off to no end thanks to a pithy back-handed reference, but ‘Range Life’ is more than a stoned-out diss track. Released on his Chicago imprint Cajual Records, the imprint that eventually gave birth to Circuit Records and Relief Records, Cajmere (aka Green Velvet) released the globally renowned 'Percolator' in 1992. The Pumpkins’ epic two-disc followup to their breakout ‘Siamese Dream’ included several chart-bothering singles, but ‘1979’ is ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’ at its most endearing and enduring. A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface.

Kurt Cobain’s mumbled poetic fragments certainly felt meaningful, but for kids who were in junior high the year pop-punk broke, Billie Joe Armstrong whining about having nothing better to do than wank himself into oblivion proved far more relatable. A great album, like a few other reviewers have said, there's a few not so good tracks, and the first two CDs are the best, but overall it's still an amazing and uplifting album.We asked '90s ravers from San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York to tell us their favorite underground anthems.

We could have picked a whole crop of Chems tracks: the club-dominating ‘ Hey Boy Hey Girl’, or their Britpop moment ‘ Let Forever Be’ or the endlessly funky ‘ Block Rockin’ Beats.

It’s all there in the title track, a primal howl of electrified blues-rock that’s equal parts lovesick wail and feminist stomp. It's one of those rare tracks that feels like it can play for an eternity without anyone batting an eyelash. The biggest single from Kim Deal’s post-Pixies rockers, ‘Cannonball’ is a bona fide indie anthem complete with seesaw verses, etch-a-sketch guitars and headbanging chorus.