10. Hole – “Awful”
“I am not there to be their Patti Smith. That is Polly Harvey’s job,” Hole leader Courtney Love told SPIN in 1998. “I’m going to make music for the people.” The band’s third album, Celebrity Skin, indeed featured their biggest singles, but it was also Fleetwood Mac-gone-Big-Black, a pop confection about the crumbling and decaying of the L.A. myth. Third single “Awful” is Love basically saying teenage angst does not exactly pay off well if you’re a woman, a world-weary thirtysomething looking back at punkier, more optimistic days after being put through the wringer of life and the music industry: “And they royalty-rate all the girls like you / And they sell it out to the girls like you.” — CHRISTOPHER R. WEINGARTEN
9. Foo Fighters – “Learn to Fly”
The Foo’s biggest hit from their most dramatic decade earned its MTV spins with the help of Tenacious D, but it earned its radio play with one of the band’s stickiest hooks, a punchy backbeat, and characteristic soft-verse-loud-chorus structure that didn’t alienate anyone in either direction. The lyrics were centrist, too, but more memorably strained between extremes: angels and devils, salvation and complication, flight and death. In the end, Grohl made his way back home for answers. — TOSTEN BURKS
8. Red Hot Chili Peppers – “Scar Tissue”
The first single from 1999’s Californication, “Scar Tissue” represented a commercial comeback for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Returning from the bleak, Dave Navarro-assisted/hindered years of the mid-’90s, the group was reunited with John Frusciante, guitarist on the band’s landmark 1991 album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik. As with many great Chi Peps tunes, Frusciante provides a cover for all of the band’s worst instincts here: His guitar and background vocals manage to make Anthony Kiedis’ lyrical gibberish ring true and forlorn, transforming the track into a classic of late ’90s rock ballads. “Scar Tissue” spent 16 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Modern Rock Chart and broke the Top 10 on the Billboard 100, propelling the band to a new level of commercial success they’ve largely sustained in the two decades since. — TAYLOR BERMAN
7. Lit – “My Own Worst Enemy”
Pen15 musical supervisor Tiffany Anders described the coming-of-age show’s use of Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy” as “stepping into the next level of growing up.” It’s perhaps the only time someone has used “growing up” to reference a song about getting debauchedly punted onto the lawn, a song that the band self-admittedly “just burped out,” a song recorded with one guy naked in the studio. “Can we forget about the things I said when I was drunk?” A. Jay Popoff sings with whining-pleading snottiness. Crucially, the song never specifies what exactly was said – not just because the singer probably has the functioning memory of a hard drive dunked in Jägermeister, but because it lets the listener project their own desired levels of assholery onto the guy. By the second verse, as he breaks the meter to curse himself out, he’s almost sympathetic – though a large guitar riff and soaring melody go a long way toward provoking emotion. The whole thing sounds thoroughly and irremovably of its alt-rock time, but perhaps not. The song predates a lot of fratire that is very much still around, and these days Lit are making country, a genre more than amenable to large riffs, soaring melodies and tales of kicking the living shit out of oneself. — KATHERINE ST. ASAPH
6. Beck – “Sexx Laws”
Five years after Beck turned slide guitar, a hip-hop beat and stoned-soul lyrics into a Top 10 single, he still seemed impossible to pin down. Fans awaited the official follow-up to 1996’s double platinum Odelay; Beck gave them an art-damaged white funk album called Midnite Vultures in which he lavished songs called “Peaches and Cream” with falsettos so transparently ridiculous that no one, not even a lesbian, screamed. The video for “Sexx Laws,” directed by Mr. Hansen himself, depicted a charming hookup between a hot oven and a dashing refrigerator: Is this what Comte de Lautréamont meant when he defined surrealism as the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table? The chance meeting between Beck’s weedy vocals and the Stax-indebted horn hooks produced its own weird, wonderful result. — ALFRED SOTO
5. Fatboy Slim – “Praise You”
This ecstatic slice of dance-pop has a lot of moving parts. The vocal’s sampled from Camille Yarbrough’s “Take Yo’ Praise,” the piano bit’s lifted from a JBL-released album intended to help you test you stereo equipment. There’s also snippets from the Mickey Mouse Disco LP and the Fat Albert theme percolating in there as well. With “The Rockefeller Skank” having established Norman Cook among the best-known proprietors of Big Beat in the U.S., the cheeky British producer enlisted Spike Jonze to direct a video. Jonze commandeered an L.A. street for a memorable flash-mob style free dance performance. Word is that the clip only cost $800 to produce, but helped the single break the pop Top 40. — KEITH HARRIS
4. Len – “Steal My Sunshine”
Toronto siblings Marc and Sharon Costanzo had, with the help of some pals, put out a couple of alt-rock records under the moniker Len in the 1990s. For their third album, You Can’t Stop the Bum Rush, the collective shifted to what Marc Costanzo called “some white boys from Canada hip-hop” in a 2016 interview with Stereogum – the result of a trip to Nova Scotia where he met local rap outfit Hip Club Groove. “Some of it’s terrible. A lot of it’s terrible,” Marc said about Bum Rush, but hit single “Steal My Sunshine” was huge with fans and critics alike. It spins a sample from Andrea True Connection’s disco-era jam “More, More, More” into a fuzzed-out backdrop for the siblings’ syllable-heavy, altered-mind ruminations (“My sticky paws were into making straws out of big fat slurpy treats / An incredible eight-foot heap”) and a brain-Velcro chorus that proved irresistible, hitting the Top 10 on both the Hot 100 and Modern Rock Tracks charts. — MAURA JOHNSTON
3. Eminem – “My Name Is”
This, by all measures, should not be here. Thanks to America’s long love affair with both novelty songs and internalized racism, the one non-Beastie rap song to chart in the Modern Rock Top 40 in 1999 was—surprise!—by a white guy. The year wasn’t exactly lacking in great rap and R&B singles that felt “alternative” (Mos Def, Common, the Roots) or quirky (Rahzel, Busta Rhymes, Quasimoto) or angry (Dead Prez, Public Enemy, Kelis). But Em was, of course, a sensation. Plus, he name-checked Primus and Nine Inch Nails and had an alt-rocker’s sense of self-deprecation. “[F]or it to become a rock and alternative thing, they just let the song lead, they let the energy lead,” ex-Interscope staffer Joe Greenwald told Detroit Free Press. “And when they saw there was potential at those outlets, [the company] pushed us hard. Sometimes when a rocket ship takes off, you just kind of hang on.” For Eminem’s part, on next year’s single “The Way I Am” he was already lyrically grousing about being “pigeon-holed into some poppy sensation / To cop me rotation at rock ‘n’ roll stations.” — CHRISTOPHER R. WEINGARTEN
2. Blink-182 – “All the Small Things”
“Ramones-style song” is how an early demo referred to the bratty pop-punk trio’s first Modern Rock chart-topper, maybe because of its nonsensically unforgettable “na na na” chorus. It was a last-minute addition to Enema of the State – with that album poised to break the band to a wider audience, Tom Delonge knew what he had to do. “The label’s gonna want a song for the radio – so here’s one,” he said of writing this sunnily unpunk celebration of domestic romantic contentment. But the band soon realized they were dealing with more than a trifling commercial toss off. “We knew [it] was going to be a gigantic thing,” according to Delonge. “I don’t know how, but we just felt it straight away.” The inspiration was his longtime girlfriend Jennifer Jenkins – whom he’s been married to for the last 18 years. And yes, she really did leave him roses by the stairs. — KEITH HARRIS
1. Fiona Apple – “Fast As You Can”
The lead single from Fiona Apple’s second album takes the tension that made her 1996 debut Tidal a sensation and shoves it into the listener’s ears. “I wanted to explore different moods, the ups and downs of a relationship,” Apple told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1999. Frantic drumming (courtesy of journeyman drummer Matt Chamberlain), precision-grade sonic detailing by producer Jon Brion, and Apple’s full-bodied wail, create the sort of claustrophobic atmosphere that resembles a consciousness-altering lovers’ quarrel – until the bridge, which is marked by a heavy groove that doubles as a fleeting reminder of romance. “When you get to the middle [of the song], that spell of confusion takes you out of the element for a minute, which is, of course, what happens emotionally,” Apple said. “But the beat never changes.” Neither did Apple’s commitment to throwing all of her energy into her art – a work ethic that makes this song sound like a live wire until its keyboards sputter out. — MAURA JOHNSTON
