Idolator

As part of Idolator's continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Jackin' Pop editor Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. After the click-through, he travels back to his least favorite year of the '90s, and said year's attendant Modern Rock Top 10:

My least favorite year of the '90s—while it was happening and in retrospect alike—was 1996. Here are ten reasons why:

Billboard's Top 10 Modern Rock Hits of 1996
1. Bush, "Swallowed" (Trauma/Interscope)
2. Primitive Radio Gods, "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand" (Columbia)
3. Oasis, "Champagne Supernova" (Epic)
4. 311, "Down" (Capricorn)
5. The Cranberries, "Salvation" (Island)
6. Sublime, "What I Got" (Gasoline Alley/MCA)
7. Butthole Surfers, "Pepper" (Capitol)
8. Alanis Morissette, "Ironic" (Maverick)
9. Tracy Bonham, "Mother Mother" (Polygram)
10. Eels, "Novocaine For the Soul" (DreamWorks)

I began the year unemployed. New Year's Eve I'd walked out of my job as a line cook at Figlio, an Italian place in uptown Minneapolis that was open late. I left in the middle of a midnight rush two hours after I'd been scheduled out. That set the tone. In 1996 I had ten jobs in two cities, usually two at a time, the longest for four-and-a-half months. That August I moved away from Minneapolis for the first time, to Seattle. That Christmas, a foot of snow fell on Seattle, the most the city had seen in decades. I will never forget walking through the streets of Lower Queen Anne, near the Pagliacci Pizza where I worked, as all that show turned into slush, because it never snows in Seattle, and the city doesn't own snow plows.

In Seattle, I lived first in a hostel-turned-flophouse, six to a room, populated by bad-tempered alcoholics with money they'd earned fishing in Alaska. Then I moved to Aurora, home of by-the-hour motels, with a short, squat dominatrix who had a five-year-old son; she withheld rent and got us kicked out in mid-January 1997, whereupon I moved back to Minneapolis. Cue Primitive Radio Gods: "I've been downhearted, baby, I've been down, I've been downhearted, baby, eeever since the day we met."

In Minneapolis, my first job of '96 was at a place called Murray's, where I worked the pantry for two months before quitting in bullshit solidarity when a coworker was fired, a metalhead named Dano whom I barely knew. It was simply the intoxication of being newly 21 and knowing I could, like, just leave. The music didn't help. At my previous job I brought tapes; here, we listened to commercial-and-announcement-free radio, programmed for in-store/restaurant listening. This being Minneapolis in the mid-'90s, the station we heard every day was the alt-rock one. It was always an up to catch Spacehog's "In the Meantime," still one of my favorite one-shots from the period, but that high was always offset by Oasis. You could set your watch by when "Champagne Supernova," all 875 godforsaken minutes of it, would appear: "Someday you will find me/Caught beneath the laaaandsliiiiide."

My other big radio job in Minneapolis that year was at Keys Café, next to Let It Be Records on 10th and Nicollet; both are gone now, replaced by condos. Keys was a great breakfast place in the grand Midwestern tradition of cheese piled on starch and set to bake; they made excellent soup and burgers, too, though at the time I was a pseudo-vegetarian and only ate those every few days. The cooks listened to Rev 105, a short-lived, well-loved modern-rock station whose format (alt-rock peppered with oldies and yuppie-friendly mainstream stuff) would prove influential. (Its programming director, Kevin Cole, now helms Seattle's KEXP.) This is where I learned to hate "Salvation" and not-quite-recognize either the Tracy Bonham or Eels songs unless I was looking at the titles; it's where I learned to find Sublime vaguely repellent; it's where I realized "Ironic" had the effect of metal tweezer-ends coming apart between teeth rows. Oh, the memories.

In June, my friend Jeremy, several of his friends and roommates, and I were to set out for the open road, armed with frayed paperback copies of the basic counterculture library and the clothes on our backs. Destination: San Francisco. (Where else?) Soon everyone bailed except Jeremy, myself, and his annoying new girlfriend, who vaguely resembled Agent 99 from Get Smart as a pothead. The three of us set out in a rickety van in August; within two weeks I would be en route to Seattle in a Greyhound. Instead of going the direct route, after a couple days in rural Minnesota with 99's family we went through Sioux Falls, S.D., to see Jeremy's uncle, who would put us up for a couple days in his house.

That stopover was the beginning of the end for me: Jeremy and 99 were essentially breaking up on the road, and I, fifth wheel, was growing agitated. Their insistence on listening to Rusted Root—a band worse than any in the Modern Rock Top 10, even—didn't help. Soon after arriving at the house, I called my mother collect from the basement and vented, loudly. Everyone in the house heard it, which I didn't know for a couple of days; nor was I aware that Jeremy and 99 were planning to dump me on the side of the road. (They didn't; we went another week before parting ways.) I deserved it at least as much as anyone else in the van.

Jeremy's uncle, though, was wonderful, your classic hospitable Midwestern straight shooter. He worked for the Nabisco manufacturing plant, and when we left, he loaded us up with boxes of product. (Jeremy and I had wolfed down the Strawberry Newtons by the time we reached city limits; Chicken in a Biskit went next.) He was married with three sons, aged from about 10 to 15. Their basement had a computer, on which he let me write; I'd been struggling for a few weeks with something about some recent James Brown reissues for a zine, and I wrote some 8,000 words in pretty much one sitting, which was therapeutic. (This was back when I didn't read what I'd written while I was writing it. You get a lot done that way.) Also in the basement was a rock-band setup: guitars, bass, drums, amps. It was soundproofed down there, and the boys, all polite and sweet-tempered, played well, took it seriously. They loved music a lot.

There was one band they loved more than anyone else. "You have to hear this," one of them told me. "It's the most radical thing I've ever heard." They explained that this group was doing things no one had ever done before, combining things in unexpected new ways that blew apart what had previously, to them, been immobile divisions. That's not how they put it, of course, but that was the effect.

I braced myself. I didn't expect John Zorn or Plunderphonics, but maybe I'd hear Beck's Odelay. I'd read about it in Spin and Rolling Stone before it came out and figured it had to be the most mind-bending record of the age; then I bought it the day of release and it sounded seamless and tepid. I remember thinking, "Well, someone thought this thing was groundbreaking. Maybe it's these kids." Then they put the tape in and hit play. Out came 311's "Down."

My first instinct, as a 21-year-old big-city music-geek jerk, was to laugh. I didn't, though—I couldn't. I was dumbfounded. I didn't make a sound. I just listened. I knew the song already; it was on the radio, in the air. It was ludicrous, Rage Against the Machine retrofitted for the Ernie and Bert Super Bubblebath-Time Cassette Deck. I looked at the kids while they listened to it. Their eyes went wide, mouths partly open. A month earlier I'd had the same expression listening for the first time to Miles Davis's "He Loved Him Madly," on Get Up with It, which I'd bought on vinyl at Let It Be Records, next door to my job at Keys, an album I'd wanted to hear for years, a song that surpassed my expectations for it. The kids' expressions said what I remember thinking: I can't believe someone actually made this. I can't believe this really exists. Someone just opened a door to a place I always wanted to exist but never dreamed could. Everything changes now.

For years I thought small towns were fiction. My logic went something like this: People think Minneapolis is a small town, but it's not. It's a big city. Therefore, small towns must be more like big cities than not. This works wonderfully well if you've only lived in one city your whole life, but the illusion generally breaks apart once you've traveled somewhere larger, more cosmopolitan. I'd already done that, though, when I'd gone to Chicago for a rave the summer before. Sure, I spent a couple days in Evanston, but that was a college town. Sioux Falls wasn't, not the same way. Culture wasn't an industry here; it was something you either were handed or found, and if you were lucky it opened a door you didn't know about.

The song ended. The boys looked at me. "What do you think?" they asked. "That's cool," I said. I didn't believe it, but I wasn't lying, either.