Annivyrsary: 1999

ISSUE #45

We narrowly avoided this being the single worst playlist I've ever put together, just by how crazy pop music had become in 1999. Maybe Y2K had us losing more of a grip than we thought; whatever the reason, it was a year that a lot of the lamest songs of all time were released. I'm talking real affronts to nature. Most of them I was able to wrestle off the list: Creed's one-two grunt of "Higher" and "With Arms Wide Open"; bizarre whitewash rap like "Summer Girls" by LFO and "Butterfly" by Crazy Town; Vitamin C's "Graduation (Friends Forever)"; "Every Morning" by Sugar Ray; "Mambo No. 5"; "Livin' La Vida Loca"; there are just so many cringers to look back on. I couldn't stave them all off, though—I had to be true to the spirit of the times, and a few of these songs are the hot garbage I just can't shake, the fast food you know is bad but still has you making excuses to hit the drive-thru again. You know what I'm talking about.

Pop music had gobbled up the new sounds of the nineties and cannibalized itself with excess, and the ripples of twenty years ago are only just now being shaken off today. This was a banner year Max Martin's songwriting career, with "...Baby One More Time" becoming his first song to debut at No. 1, a feat he'd repeat twenty-two times over the next twenty years, including five from Katy Perry's Teenage Dream album, and three from Swift's 1989. The Martin penned "I Want It That Way" came out this year as well, but I couldn't keep it on in good conscience—I've been pushed past too many times when that song hits at a bad bar to forgive it any longer. "...Baby One More Time" has a perfect bridge though, so I had to keep it. As for "Genie in a Bottle," I wish I could have included this killer mash-up instead.

By now Space Jam had come and gone, and nineties commercialism had crystallized enough to raise a generation that will forgive any line coming from a corporation as long as we're pleased. This, many decried, is because punk had "died." These were alarmists, of course; it hadn't died, it just dug back into the earth to form the bedrock of emo that would rule the next decade. This was the year of two of emo's early classics: the debut of American Football, the album that became the meme, and Jimmy Eat World's sparkling Clarity. Furthermore, there were The Get Up Kids, The Ataris, and, everybody's favorite permateens, Blink-182. The only lasting bit of punk's "fuck it" ethos may have rested with Eminem in the The Slim Shady LP, but even that's more shock rock than statement.

Even the non-emo genres were starting to feel emotional: essential albums by Fiona Apple and Wilco and Bonnie "Prince" Billy softly came out this year, proving once again that the album is still strong as an artistic statement. For some, I couldn't narrow it down to a single song, luminaries like The Soft Bulletin and Sigur Ros's Ágætis byrjun, that wouldn't betray the entire album—pieces of a puzzle can look strange before they form the whole picture. Most of these albums glimmer and shine and are vulnerable, if not bemusing, in lyric. For all this softness, though, there was still an edge to be found out there: with the swirling and masterful Keep it Like a Secret, Doug Martsch proved that guitars never died, merely Spilled.