Last month, the Hot 100–the big cheese of Billboard’s singles charts–turned 50, and the publication’s been rolling out the red carpet in honor of that golden anniversary. But today, another Billboard milestone is passing by with a little less fanfare: the 20th birthday of the Modern Rock chart. The late-’80s college rock explosion resulted in more and more commercial radio stations playing a variety of young bands and singer-songwriters that didn’t quite fit into the Pink Floyd/Van Hagar-heavy format covered by the Album Rock Tracks chart (now known as Mainstream Rock) Billboard responded to that trend on Sept. 10, 1998, when it published the first Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart.

In the two decades since, the alternative rock format has exploded–in terms of both stations and listeners–and then shrunk some, all the while going through an aesthetic identity crisis seemingly every five years. I’ve occasionally implied that the chart may have outlived its usefulness, given the dwindling listenership and its increasing crossover with the Mainstream Rock chart. But those arguments are largely facetious, and I hope Billboard never takes my suggestion to heart. (I’d have a lot less to follow or write about.) Two months ago, the trade mag actually added a third rock singles chart, Triple-A (as in Adult Album Alternative); the music on that chart more resembles Modern Rock’s jangly early days. So with Triple-A at one pole and Mainstream Rock at the other, the Modern Rock chart is now, more than ever, effectively the center of Billboard’s rock charts and its most important one, which assures that it should be alive and well for as long as there’s terrestrial radio data to track.

A couple years ago, former Idolator regular Anthony Miccio counted down all of the Modern Rock No. 1s on a highly entertaining blog called modernrock4eva, which I’ve looked at from time to time as inspiration for this column, and to remind myself of just how silly and mercurial this chart has always been. For every No. 1 that could be praised as the harbinger of a new era along the lines of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” you have a handful of novelty hits, flukes, and bizarre mid-career diversions. I have no interest in honoring the canon, so I thought I’d go through the chart’s first 21 calendar years and pick one No. 1 from each: not the best song, but the one that was most likely forgotten, never heard, or be classified as a “surprising” hit:

1988: Siouxsie and the Banshees – “Peek-a-Boo”

This isn’t the most obscure of the five songs that topped the chart in its first four months of existence. But it was the chart’s very first No. 1, and I can think of no more auspicious a beginning for this institution than a bonkers dance-pop crossover full of backmasked accordion.

1989: Public Image Ltd. – “Disappointed”

There are some perfectly valid reasons that this band is revered by some much more than John Lydon’s other, more famous band. But this backup singer-aided ball of cheese, one of PiL’s last gasps before Lydon entered an endless cycle of Sex Pistols reunions, is most likely not one of them.

1990: David J – “I’ll Be Your Chauffeur”

Before embarking on this column, I had no idea that being a Bauhaus alum was apparently all it took to top this chart in its early days. Love And Rockets reached No. 1 in ‘89, and the next year both Peter Murphy and David J reached the summit as solo artists.

1991: U2 – “The Fly”

There were more obscure No. 1’s from this year, but this wins by virtue of being one of the least-known lead singles from an established band’s blockbuster album ever released. It’s kind of amazing, in retrospect, that U2 managed to release this song first with future Achtung Baby smashes like “One” and “Mysterious Ways” waiting in the chamber. In light of how well they got away with this gamble, it’s easier to understand where they got the balls to release “Numb” and “Discotheque” as lead singles later on.

1992: Lou Reed – “What’s Good”

1992 was, for many people and especially for my 10-year-old self, ground zero for the alt-rock explosion. It was also the year I became aware of the Modern Rock chart–MTV’s 120 Minutes would run through the top 10 before a commercial break each week. But even as some of the decade’s biggest bands were scoring their first hits, the chart was still being dominated by oldsters enjoying their final glimpses of serious rock airplay, including Peter Gabriel, The B-52’s, XTC, and ol’ Lou.

1993: Tears For Fears – “Break It Down Again”

It’s hard to compare this song to any of the Songs From The Big Chair megahits, but this one still sounds tremendous to me.

1994: Counting Crows – “Einstein on the Beach (For an Eggman)”

Their 1993 debut August And Everything After yielded three Modern Rock top 10 hits, but the only Counting Crows song to ever top the chart was this bouncy outtake, which was tossed on the DGC Rarities compilation.

1995: Red Hot Chili Peppers – “My Friends”

I may not particularly like the many, many power ballads RHCP has recorded since reuniting with John Frusciante. But they all beat the hell out of the one they did when Dave Navarro was in the band.

1996: The Cranberries – “Salvation”

The Cranberries’ metamorphosis from the winsome Irish balladeers of “Dreams” to the creepy doomsayers of “Zombie” and this peppy anti-heroin screed is one of the more fascinating transformations of the mid-’90s alt-rock era. Some of Rihanna’s fashion and artistic choices of late make me wonder if Dolores O’Riordan is her spirit animal.

1997: Live – “Lakini’s Juice”

Along the same lines as “Salvation,” this is a fascinating instance of an overexposed band becoming somewhat interesting at the exact moment that its career took a nosedive. It’s a shame Live’s ensuing commercial decline was full of more pap like “The Dolphin’s Cry” than riffs as fucking nasty as the one here.

1998: The Goo Goo Dolls – “Slide”

1998 was a truly dire year for Modern Rock: It began with the 15-week reign of Marcy Playground, who were succeeded by the seven-week reign of Fastball (you can probably guess the songs). Things didn’t get much better from there, and I can honestly say every single one of the 11 songs that topped the chart that year holds at least one unpleasant memory for me. And while this one isn’t as good as “Iris,” it’s still the least overplayed of these songs that I could choose.

1999: Limp Bizkit – “Re-Arranged”

Most of Limp Bizkit’s fun songs shoehorned in incongrously slow, serious bridges, so it was pretty shocking that they managed to make a whole song out of one of those brooding grooves that turned out to be one of their best hits.

2000: Green Day – “Minority”

Reminding myself that Green Day had such a popular “political” song shortly before American Idiot makes me marvel at how well they succeeded at selling that album as both a comeback and a change of pace.

2001: Sum 41 – “Fat Lip”

2001 was the year that Staind, Nickelback, Linkin Park and Incubus all became power ballad superstars, but at least one band was having some goofy, sloppy fun at No. 1 (well, two, if you count those guys that covered “Smooth Criminal”).

2002: Unwritten Law – “Seein’ Red”

Every time I read this song’s title and tried to remember what it sounded like before looking it up on YouTube, all I could think of was Chevelle’s “The Red,” which reached No. 4 at almost the exact same time that this song topped the chart, features a refrain of the phrase “seeing red,” and has remained a much stronger radio staple in the years since.

2003: Jane’s Addiction – “Just Because”

A perfunctory one-week chart-topper from a hollow, pointless reunion. And thanks to Entourage’s really, really annoying theme song, it isn’t even the best-known track from its parent album.

2004: The Offspring – “Hit That”

This seems to be about the point where The Offspring decided to back off from the antics of novelty hits like “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy).” But before getting fully serious with their recent hit “Hammerhead,” they had to wean themselves off the silly shit by making a song with farting ska horns, awkwardly deployed hip-hop slang, and a video starring an animated dog.

2005: Audioslave – “Be Yourself”

Audioslave was an ugly marriage of convenience always headed for an inevitable divorce, but this song marked one time they seemed almost convincingly compatible.

2006: The Foo Fighters – “DOA”

Even though it’s just three years old, it’s not even the 10th-most-played Foo Fighters song on radio now. A shame, since it’s just about their only recent single that follows through on the unfulfilled promise of muscular new wave glimpsed on early singles like “This Is A Call” or “Monkey Wrench.”

2007: Incubus – “Anna Molly”

“Megalomaniac” could’ve been their “Lakini’s Juice,” but instead these guys kept at it and made leaner, better hard-rock hits.

2008: Staind – “Believe”

I leave you with the current No. 1, partly to give symmetry to our journey, and partly because I hope someday soon we’ll all have long forgotten that gooey Diane Warren bullshit like “believe in me, ’cause I was meant for chasing dreams” ever topped a chart that’s championed much weirder, better stuff.

I didn’t quite realize it during the ’90s, but I now cop to being a staunch fanboy of Quentin Tarantino’s peculiar brand of movie mixtapes and esoteric music mash notes. But his most recent film, Death Proof, tested my faith. If you had told me beforehand that I would nearly walk out of a movie that coupled a soundtrack comprised of 45 sides from the likes of lifelong musical obsessions like Jack Nitzsche, Joe Tex, and T. Rex to loooong, sumptuous tracking shots of female posteriors jiggling in short-shorts, I might’ve sliced off your ear. And yet the first 7/8ths of Death Proof were some of the most boring hubris I ever sat through (God only knows how the two-hour “director’s cut” will be, but at least there’s the fast-forward button), while the last eighth was some of the most exhilarating footage ever committed to tape.

For those who did walk out (or didn’t even bother walking into the three-and-a-half hour twofer of Grindhouse), Death Proof’s great race hinges on four gals (played by Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thomas, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and stuntwoman Zoë Bell) happening upon–as Zoë and gearheads gush–an immaculate replica of an Alpine White 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T hardtop powered by a supercharged 440 cubic inch “Magnum” V-8 engine that was driven hard and put away wet in the ’70s cult classic Vanishing Point. The girls (and QT) are huge fans of the movie, and they’re not alone. (There was even a clueless Viggo Mortensen-Jason Priestley 1997 remake.)

Vanishing Point has been a touchstone for musicians like Guns N’ Roses (who sampled it on Use Your Illusion II’s “Breakdown”), Primal Scream (see 1997’s Vanishing Point), and Audioslave, whose video for “Show Me How to Live” shows the band puttering about in a Challenger amid hefty amounts of footage from the original movie:

(Editor’s note: This will be Idolator’s first and last posting of an Audioslave video.)

Like its similarly supercharged car-obsessed celluloid twin, Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop, VP exists in the median between the counterculture co-opt (in part due to the financial/ cultural successes of Easy Rider) and the instituting of the Interstate Highway System, which paved over the arid landscape of that old, weird America soon after shooting. It could be seen as the connective tissue between On the Road and The Dukes of Hazzard.

Its driver anti-hero, a Joe Namath-looking pill-popper named Kowalski, has quite the resumé: Vietnam vet, disgraced cop, demolition derby driver, dopehead, gearhead, screwhead, and–as his interstate chase with cops intensifies–counterculture hero. Kowalski’s co-pilot for the duration of the movie–who never sets foot inside the Challenger–is a blind deejay named “Super Soul,” played by Cleavon Little (better known as the black sheriff in Blazing Saddles). “Super Soul” uncovers some other roles of Kowalski: “the last American hero, the electric centaur, the demigod.” He in turn talks back to the radio (surely a result of being up for three days on uppers) and the enclaves of burnt-out hippies and Christians he encounters along the way embrace Kowalski as well. “Super Soul” mans a freeform FM radio station (conveniently with the call letters KOW) spieling about how Kowalski is a “soul hero in his soul mobile” trying to escape the “blue blue meanies.” KOW also, apparently, plays nothing but Delaney & Bonnie & Friends 24/7.

Conveniently, I’ve spent lots of time of late spinning Delaney & Bonnie’s 1971 masterpiece, Motel Shot (which Robert Christgau once deemed “a seamless delight, the most unflawed listening music I’ve heard in a long while”), especially their ramshackle top-twenty hit “Never Ending Song of Love.” That song doesn’t appear in the movie, but the couple’s vision of music-making permeates throughout; they even appear on a makeshift stage singing to a clutch of snake-handling faith healers under the moniker “J. Hovah Singers.”

Much like Kowalski, Delaney & Bonnie had a varied career, and wound up stuck in the no-man’s land between Stax southern soul and British blues-rock, straddling both yet never crossing over. Delaney Bramlett was the house guitarist on Shindig!, while Bonnie Lynn O’Farrell was the first white Ikette. Hitched out in LA, the couple cut a record on Stax and toured with their band of “friends,” which could include the likes of Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Duane Allman, Dr. John, Jim Dickinson, Billy Preston, Bobby Keys, and Leon Russell on any given night, before most of their backing band wound up as either Derek’s Dominos or Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen. The couple divorced by ‘72 and cut middling solo discs, both finding Christ somewhere out on life’s highway. Bonnie perhaps had the more noteworthy career, decking Elvis Costello after he dissed Ray Charles out on tour in the late ’70s before going on to play “Bonnie” on Roseanne in the early ’90s.

Much like Easy Rider did with its soundtrack of au courant acid rock and psychedelia, so too does Vanishing Point’s soundtrack reflect the sound of the post-’60s hangover, with a return to “roots”–soul, blues, folk, bluegrass, country, and gospel, with hard-rock pit stops like Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” and the J.B. Pickers’ roiling jam “Freedom of Expression,” which soundtracks this chase sequence.

Jimmy Reed and Big Mama Thornton appear, and you get the first recorded appearance of Kim Carnes, who appears on the Vanishing Point soundtrack under the name Dave & Kim. There’s also the Doug Dillard Expedition, whose quicksilver bluegrass breakdown soundtracks–what else?–a getaway scene. “Speed means freedom of the soul,” Super Soul portends as Kowalski speeds towards his fate. A man of few words, Kowalski would no doubt take the present-day advice of Rihanna to heart: “Shut up and drive.”

Cornell is permanently departing super-group Audioslave stating, “Due to irresolvable personality conflicts as well as musical differences, I am permanently leaving the band Audioslave. I wish the other three members nothing but the best in all of their future endeavors.”

With Audioslave done, might those “future endeavors” include taking the newly reformed Rage Against the Machine on the road for a full-fledged tour? And who will break the news to the band’s two remaining fans, who are currently doing leg squats in the Gold’s Gym in State College, PA.?