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The 69 Best Alternative Rock Songs of 1999

30. Sugar Ray – “Someday”

After “Fly” became an unexpected hit, Sugar Ray wanted everyone to know that they didn’t care if you thought they were cool. “We know what we’re doing,” frontman Mark McGrath told OC Weekly in 1998. “We’ll pull out our Sebadoh records if you want us to. We’ll talk indie, but it doesn’t interest us.” The title of their subsequent album, 14:59, joked that the band was past its sell-by date. But there’s nothing defensive or ironic about this beachy number, which rolls along on a sunny acoustic guitar part as McGrath muses wistfully about the future. — KEITH HARRIS

29. Kid Rock – “Cowboy”

On the song that established “country rap” as a pop-viable signifier with baggage, Robert Ritchie concocted a gun-slinging alcoholic pimp character “straight out the trailer” who hates sheriffs, cusses like a sailor, and drives his truck from Detroit to California to start an escort service on the Four Seasons roof and purchase a yacht with a flag reading “chillin the most.” The absurdity is hip-hop, if nothing else. And now Kid Rock supports Donald Trump. — TOSTEN BURKS

28. Counting Crows – “Hanginaround”

Whether or not it was intentional, “Hanginaround” made stasis sound pretty chill. Sunny looped piano, shakers, tambourines, handclaps, and diet Beach Boy harmonies lent Adam Duritz’s sofa malaise all the anxiety of a barbecue—at which, in the right company, it still holds up. Duritz said the song was about “thinking I had not future, wondering what the hell was going to happen” during his stoned mid-20s. The earnest pop arrangement offered burnouts hope. — TOSTEN BURKS

27. Moby – “Bodyrock”

“‘Bodyrock’ was the song both of my managers tried to get me to take off the record,” Moby told Rolling Stone in 2009. “They thought it was really tacky.” “Bodyrock” is indeed a splendid tackiness, released in the era when moms nodded along to Fatboy Slim. But in the spirit of his Mission of Burma cover three years earlier, “Bodyrock” upset expectations about what exactly constitutes a “Moby track” anyway, banging along like a Big Beat song with samples of Spoonie Gee and the Treacherous Three. Play and Moby would earn their reputation for bluestronica tracks like “Natural Blues,” and “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?” eventually getting the LP to double platinum certification. But “Bodyrock” is a great anomaly, and the highest charting Play track on the U.S. Dance charts. — ALFRED SOTO

26. Creed – “Higher”

Creed’s breakthrough single spent a whopping 57 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 and practically changed the course of rock radio in its wake—a “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for an era loosened from underground didacticism. The song refashioned everything cool about ’90s flannel-and-Docs counterculture into a husky, full-throated appeal to the transcendent power of rocking out, as frontman Scott Stapp sang about golden streets and Earthly sacrifice. In their 2000 SPIN cover story, Stapp explained the song is about lucid dreaming: “You’re physically asleep, but you’re awake in your mind.” After teaching himself how to lucid dream and writing the song, Stapp said he rid himself of a reoccurring nightmare. — ROB ARCAND

25. The Offspring – “The Kids Aren’t Alright”

Following the success of “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)” and “Why Don’t You Get a Job,” the first two singles The Offspring’s 1998 album Americana, “The Kids Aren’t Alright” felt like a much smaller song at the time. But while the gimmicky nature of those first two tracks – the Beatles-aping of “Job”; the cringeworthy lyrics of “Pretty Fly” – may have had more initial appeal, “The Kids Aren’t Alright” has grown into one of the band’s biggest songs, with current day streaming and YouTube numbers topping any of their other ’90s hits. It’s easy to see why: The familiar driving punk vibes and hopeless lyrics evoke feelings of adolescence that are more timeless. — TAYLOR BERMAN

24. Goo Goo Dolls – “Black Balloon”

Buffalo’s finest had quite the run in the mid- to late-’90s. Starting with 1995’s “Name” and peaking with the inescapable “Iris” from the City of Angels soundtrack, Johnny Rzeznik and Co. had nine songs hit the Modern Rock charts between 1995 and 2000. The fourth single from 1998’s Dizzy Up the Girl, “Black Balloon” appeared near the end of the streak. Rzeznik’s ode to a romance doomed by heroin addiction is classic Goo: somber, over-produced and saccharine half-nonsense that’s also remarkably catchy. — TAYLOR BERMAN

23. Everclear – “One Hit Wonder”

By the time they released this single, Art Alexakis’ post-grunge trio had dodged the dismissive pop tag the title refers to: Their third album, So Much for the Afterglow, alone had already birthed three modern rock hits. The Everclear frontman was characteristically acerbic about his industry-skewering song. “They said, ‘Don’t do that, that’s bad luck,” is how Alexakis summed it up to SPIN in 2017. “This song is kind of a ‘fuck you,’ so a ‘fuck you’ is always kind of bad luck. But sometimes you’ve just gotta live with it and go with it.” And, yep, that’s a young Christina Hendricks in the video. — KEITH HARRIS

22. Limp Bizkit – “Nookie”

Misogynist, unsubtle, ridiculous, and completely unforgettable, “Nookie” will forever be the “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” of nü-metal. The lyrics—leader Fred Durst raging about being under the spell of a cheating girlfriend—apparently come from real life. The slick beat, however, came from a jam session: DJ Lethal had a groove that guitarist Wes Borland told SongFacts was “sampled off of an Italian porn movie from the ’70s or something,” and the title came before the lyrics. — CHRISTOPHER R. WEINGARTEN

21. Live – “The Dolphin’s Cry”

This indisputably ridiculous power ballad imagines love as some sort of airborne hallucinogen, emanating outward from a woman’s “rose garden of trust” and working on singer Ed Kowalczyk’s senses until he hears marine mammals weeping and sees roads hovering in the middle distance. He moves from the bedroom in the second verse (“You wrap your legs around me / All I can do to try and breathe”) to the geopolitical stage in the bridge, observing as, “This phoenix rises up from the ground / And all these wars are over.” Unbelievably, his dumb-man’s-Leonard-Cohen schtick kinda works, thanks to Kowalczyk’s messianic devotion to his own blather. With a little suspension of disbelief, you may find yourself convinced that getting laid is the key to achieving world peace. ANDY CUSH