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101 Best Songs of 1994 - #1 - Notorious BIG - Juicy (2 Viewers)

is the bad music countdown weekend over yet?

I kid. 

welll... no. I don't kid. but I still love me some scorchy countdowns, even if they include these awful songs. makes the great songs that much greater when they show back up. they're showing back up... right? RIGHT?!

 
massraider said:
Mid 90's R+B weekend dump. Disrespectful. 

Thank God Tony Toni Tone didn't release anything this year, or I might be getting angry. 

No one in your town was able to convince John Lithgow to let you hold a dance out by the county line? 
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Yeah, I'm perplexed.  A few of the surrounding years were great and won't be treated with such disdain, but '94 did nothing for me on the R&B front.  I'll make it up to you for sure if get to '96 - where I'm predicting a classic Teddy Riley jam will land top 5 and '92 will rival '88 in terms of numbers.

 
Dan Lambskin said:
anyway 1994 was not a great year, but I figured Don’t Take the Girl by Tim McGraw might have made it 

I Swear by John Michal Montgomery and Wink by Neal McCoy probably the best of the rest
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Dang, modern country is waaaay out of my wheelhouse.  I mean, I'm sure Friends in Low Places could show up in whatever year it was released just b/c I went to college in the south in the early '90s, and the only other song that I even really remember is Way Down Yonder on the Chatahootchee (sp) because one of my buddies always sang it at karaoke.  

But I will say the same thing about that I said to Hack (i think) about electronic music.  If you want to cut in this thread or any future one to throw up your top 5/10 country, that would be great.  Maybe I would remember more than I think.

 
El Floppo said:
is the bad music countdown weekend over yet?

I kid. 

welll... no. I don't kid. but I still love me some scorchy countdowns, even if they include these awful songs. makes the great songs that much greater when they show back up. they're showing back up... right? RIGHT?!
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Ok, first of all that Aaliyah song is legit good.  And yes, the great songs will be reappearing, though maybe nothing that you'll like as much as Bull in the Heather.  It's funny, TLC sold 23 million copies of their second record.  Meanwhile, Sonic Youth, over 25 years and 15 LPs sold about 1.2 million.  I swear a decent proportion of those must have been purchased by folks in this thread. 😉

 
scorchy said:
Dang, modern country is waaaay out of my wheelhouse.  I mean, I'm sure Friends in Low Places could show up in whatever year it was released just b/c I went to college in the south in the early '90s, and the only other song that I even really remember is Way Down Yonder on the Chatahootchee (sp) because one of my buddies always sang it at karaoke.  

But I will say the same thing about that I said to Hack (i think) about electronic music.  If you want to cut in this thread or any future one to throw up your top 5/10 country, that would be great.  Maybe I would remember more than I think.
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i looked briefly, and I’m not a huge country fan by any means, but not many great songs for that year

i will say that country music concerts are great from an eye candy standpoint 

 
TripItUp said:
90s and 00s country music in general was absolutely terrible.
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theres some good 90s country but it’s definitely when it started transitioning into southern pop.  There’s the occasional good modern hit but most of it is trash, at least for the mainstream poppy stuff 

maybe I’ll have to do a top 100 country of the 90s or something, although im guessing there wouldn’t be a ton of interest in that 

 
#60 - The Offspring - Come Out and Play

Decided to end the pop/r&b sidetrack a little early if only to get the Offspring out of the way so I can start the week with a track I really like.  It's their second appearance on the list - Come Out and Play hit #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart and along with Green Day helped drive pop-punk's rise.

Come Out and Play

 
The best thing about TLC was Michael Keaton dropping their lines in that move The Other Guys. I got a kick out of that. The R&B here is actually quite good when compared to a lot of other modern R&B on the radio. Boyz II Men, however, started the trend of singing in an overdone and overwrought manner within an R&B song that continued apace unless you were Raphael Saadiq or the modern guys that just fix it with autotune and get their trippy sex effects that way.

Amazing how R&B changed from the music of Chuck Berry to the music of Jeremih, proving that there might be more race labeling than the actual style of the musical output for the genre. 

 
scorchy said:
#60 - The Offspring - Come Out and Play

Decided to end the pop/r&b sidetrack a little early if only to get the Offspring out of the way so I can start the week with a track I really like.  It's their second appearance on the list - Come Out and Play hit #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart and along with Green Day helped drive pop-punk's rise.

Come Out and Play
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Although the sentence may be accurate, it's difficult to digest lumping in the Offspring with Green Day.

 
scorchy said:
#60 - The Offspring - Come Out and Play

Decided to end the pop/r&b sidetrack a little early if only to get the Offspring out of the way so I can start the week with a track I really like.  It's their second appearance on the list - Come Out and Play hit #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart and along with Green Day helped drive pop-punk's rise.

Come Out and Play
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You gotta keep 'em separated.

 
scorchy said:
Director:  Hey Steven, is it OK if we have your daughter strip for Alicia in the video?

Steven:  Who could say no to that?
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Steven and Liv didn’t have a conventional father-daughter relationship. She didn’t meet him until she was a teen and grew up thinking Todd Rundgren, her mother’s boyfriend, was her father. 

Still doesn’t make those videos any less awkward.

I can’t with Aerosmith’s 90s ballads. They all sound the same and that sound is not good.

 
scorchy said:
#60 - The Offspring - Come Out and Play

Decided to end the pop/r&b sidetrack a little early if only to get the Offspring out of the way so I can start the week with a track I really like.  It's their second appearance on the list - Come Out and Play hit #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart and along with Green Day helped drive pop-punk's rise.

Come Out and Play
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Oh, that guy again.

 
Pip's Invitation said:
Steven and Liv didn’t have a conventional father-daughter relationship. She didn’t meet him until she was a teen and grew up thinking Todd Rundgren, her mother’s boyfriend, was her father. 
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No doubt Steven punked Liv at that first interaction and said "Hello, It's Me". 

 
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#59 - MC 900 Ft Jesus - If I Only Had A Brain

And now, one of my favorite artists of the early/mid 90s.

MC 900 Ft Jesus (Mark Griffin) took his stage name from a sermon by Oral Roberts where the televangelist claimed that a giant Jesus came to him in a dream and said that god would strike him down unless he raised a large sum of money for a hospital.  I became a fan after a few songs from his debut record - 1990s Hell with the Lid Off - fell into regular rotation at Netherworld, Gainesville’s original industrial/goth club.  

He signed with a major for this third album and I’m sure the label wondered what the hell they were supposed to do with it, as it was even weirder than the already oddball stuff that came before it.  Before taking on his new identity, MC 900 was a classically trained jazz musician, and Along Came the Spider was full of jazzy/experimental spoken word grooves.  The anomaly on the record - If I Only Had A Brain - became  his only brush with the mainstream.*  The single reached #25 on the modern rock charts and its Spike Jonze-directed video got a fair bit of play on MTV, including a prime spot on Beavis and Butthead.

If I Only Had A Brain

* Not totally true.  In 1992, MC 900 Ft Jesus’s song The City Sleeps (a first person account of a serial arsonist) got blamed locally for a series of fires being set in northwest Baltimore.  The song had been minimally played by local alt-rock powerhouse WHFS at the time, but the controversy led to it becoming a bit of a regional hit.

 
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#58 - James - Say Something

Manchester's James are bona fide stars in the UK, with a run of top 10 albums stretching from 1990 all the way to the present.  On this side of the Atlantic, they're pretty much considered one-hit wonders with Laid (off 1993's album of the same name) reaching #3 on the modern rock charts.  Laid was a lot of fun, but I'm partial to the melancholy follow-up single, 1994's Say Something.  Beautiful song.

Say Something

 
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scorchy said:
#59 - MC 900 Ft Jesus - If I Only Had A Brain

And now, one of my favorite artists of the early/mid 90s.

MC 900 Ft Jesus (Mark Griffin) took his stage name from a sermon by Oral Roberts where the televangelist claimed that a giant Jesus came to him in a dream and said that god would strike him down unless he raised a large sum of money for a hospital.  I became a fan after a few songs from his debut record - 1990s Hell with the Lid Off - fell into regular rotation at Netherworld, Gainesville’s original industrial/goth club.  

He signed with a major for this third album and I’m sure the label wondered what the hell they were supposed to do with it, as it was even weirder than the already oddball stuff that came before it.  Before taking on his new identity, MC 900 was a classically trained jazz musician, and Along Came the Spider was full of jazzy/experimental spoken word grooves.  The anomaly on the record - If I Only Had A Brain - became  his only brush with the mainstream.*  The single reached #25 on the modern rock charts and its Spike Jonze-directed video got a fair bit of play on MTV, including a prime spot on Beavis and Butthead.

If I Only Had A Brain

* Not totally true.  In 1992, MC 900 Ft Jesus’s song The City Sleeps (a first person account of a serial arsonist) got blamed locally for a series of fires being set in northwest Baltimore.  The song had been minimally played by local alt-rock powerhouse WHFS at the time, but the controversy led to it becoming a bit of a regional hit.
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HFS also loved to play a parody by “ MC 900 Foot Shatner” called You Klingon Bastards. 

 
scorchy said:
MC 900 Ft Jesus (Mark Griffin) took his stage name from a sermon by Oral Roberts where the televangelist claimed that a giant Jesus came to him in a dream and said that god would strike him down unless he raised a large sum of money for a hospital. 
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Sam Kinison had a joke that referenced this as well.

 
#57 - De La Soul - Ego Trippin' (Part 2)

Ego Trippin' (Part 2) was the second single from De La Soul's 1993 album Buhloone Mindstate.  Like most De La Soul tracks, the verses contain a ton of clever references and samples, including Kool Keith, Boogie Down Productions, Big Daddy Kane, Grandmaster Flash, Cypress Hill, Kris Kross, Run-D.M.C., Pete Rock, and Snoop.  The video - with it's jokey takedown of gangsta rap excesses - caused a bit of controversy, culminating in Tupac dissing De La Soul in both Against All Odds and Watch Ya Mouth.  

Ego Trippin' (Part 2)

 
scorchy said:
Yeah, as I was putting things together, I kept thinking about whether Pop music was worse in 1994 or if it was just me.  It seems like a combo of both.  In the 1988 thread, a bunch of us had a non-ironic discussion about which Debbie Gibson song should have been included.*  We debated whether the Baby I Love Your Way/Freebird cover was terribly amazing or amazingly terrible.  I couldn't find those for '94, because Pop wasn't a part of my daily life.  In 1988, I heard it on the radio, at work, at high school dances, and it can still bring forth waves of nostalgia.  I have zero nostalgia for Mariah Carey or post-Vogue Madonna, or Boys II Men.  Judging by the "How Old Are You Poll?" from a few weeks ago, that's probably the same for a lot of folks here.  

Apologies for the tangent.  Just one of the many things I ponder when I walk the dogs.  And yes, Common is a fine, fine man.

* Yeah, some of the anti-Pop snobs hated on Debbie, but they can pound sand.
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@Smoo

 
#56 - Urge Overkill - Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon

Originally included on their Stull EP in 1992, Urge Overkill's cover of a Neil Diamond song got a second life when it was rereleased as a single from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack two years later.  It’s impossible to disassociate the song from a soon-to-be ODing Mia Wallace cueing it up on the reel-to-reel.

Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon

 
scorchy said:
#56 - Urge Overkill - Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon

Originally included on their Stull EP in 1992, Urge Overkill's cover of a Neil Diamond song got a second life when it was rereleased as a single from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack two years later.  It’s impossible to disassociate the song from a soon-to-be ODing Mia Wallace cueing it up on the reel-to-reel.

Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon
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Loved this when it came out and at the time didn't know that it was a Neil Diamond cover.  :bag:  

 
scorchy said:
#58 - James - Say Something

Manchester's James are bona fide stars in the UK, with a run of top 10 albums stretching from 1990 all the way to the present.  On this side of the Atlantic, they're pretty much considered one-hit wonders with Laid (off 1993's album of the same name) reaching #3 on the modern rock charts.  Laid was a lot of fun, but I'm partial to the melancholy follow-up single, 1994's Say Something.  Beautiful song.

Say Something
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I have to admit, I really don't know anything about these guys beyond Laid.  Not sure if I've ever even heard this.  This song is great.

 
scorchy said:
#56 - Urge Overkill - Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon

Originally included on their Stull EP in 1992, Urge Overkill's cover of a Neil Diamond song got a second life when it was rereleased as a single from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack two years later.  It’s impossible to disassociate the song from a soon-to-be ODing Mia Wallace cueing it up on the reel-to-reel.

Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon
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Agree - great cover. Really good band that unfortunately had a pretty short shelf life.

 
scorchy said:
#58 - James - Say Something

Manchester's James are bona fide stars in the UK, with a run of top 10 albums stretching from 1990 all the way to the present.  On this side of the Atlantic, they're pretty much considered one-hit wonders with Laid (off 1993's album of the same name) reaching #3 on the modern rock charts.  Laid was a lot of fun, but I'm partial to the melancholy follow-up single, 1994's Say Something.  Beautiful song.

Say Something
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Way better than Laid, which came way too close to yodeling for my liking. 

Say Something has a real nice melody to it. 

 
# 55 - Cake - Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle

Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle was the world’s introduction to Cake and set the template for a few albums worth of wry takes from the band.  It was the only single from the their debut album Motorcade of Generosity and reached #31 on the modern rock charts in the summer of ‘94.  Our local alt station played the hell out of it.

Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle

 
scorchy said:
# 55 - Cake - Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle

Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle was the world’s introduction to Cake and set the template for a few albums worth of wry takes from the band.  It was the only single from the their debut album Motorcade of Generosity and reached #31 on the modern rock charts in the summer of ‘94.  Our local alt station played the hell out of it.

Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle
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Fashion Nugget came out right around the time I was in college radio, followed by Prolonging the Magic. I remember sitting in my dorm room with my roommate and a friend of ours, Jen, maybe there was a bong involved. They had tickets to Counting Crows for that night and the opening act was going to start fairly soon but they weren’t really in a rush to get there. I asked them who was opening, they said “some band named Cake,” and I took the bong away and demanded they leave immediately so they didn’t miss them. They left, and the next time I saw Jen she had purchased a vibraslap. 

I eventually saw Cake later at Metropol where I saw many acts. We screamed for Jolene and eventually got it.

 
scorchy said:
# 55 - Cake - Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle

Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle was the world’s introduction to Cake and set the template for a few albums worth of wry takes from the band.  It was the only single from the their debut album Motorcade of Generosity and reached #31 on the modern rock charts in the summer of ‘94.  Our local alt station played the hell out of it.

Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle
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When this came out, I thought they were singing about me.

 
McBokonon said:
Fashion Nugget came out right around the time I was in college radio, followed by Prolonging the Magic. I remember sitting in my dorm room with my roommate and a friend of ours, Jen, maybe there was a bong involved. They had tickets to Counting Crows for that night and the opening act was going to start fairly soon but they weren’t really in a rush to get there. I asked them who was opening, they said “some band named Cake,” and I took the bong away and demanded they leave immediately so they didn’t miss them. They left, and the next time I saw Jen she had purchased a vibraslap. 
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I had a sort-of reverse experience in 2007.  I hadn't thought of Cake in years (at least since Short Skirt, Long Jacket) but one of my favorite garage bands (Detroit Cobras - check 'em out) were opening for them on a summer tour.  I had only seen the Cobras in small, sweaty clubs packed with fellow fans and they were not at their best at an outdoor stage with an unfamiliar crowd.  We decided to stay for Cake and they totally delivered.

 
scorchy said:
# 55 - Cake - Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle

Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle was the world’s introduction to Cake and set the template for a few albums worth of wry takes from the band.  It was the only single from the their debut album Motorcade of Generosity and reached #31 on the modern rock charts in the summer of ‘94.  Our local alt station played the hell out of it.

Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle
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Forgot about this song - probably hadn't listened to it in 15 years...probably hadn't listened to it sober in 25. Thanks!  :thumbup:

 
Sacramento represent!

Years ago, my wife's BFF worked at a local rock station.  Cake performed a few songs live in the studio and she got to be part of a group of about 15 people to be in the room and see them live.  Photos, meet and greet, all that stuff.

One song from the show ...  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1gShXIO6pk

 
#54 - The Pretenders - I'll Stand By You

In the wrong hands, I'll Stand By You would have been a cheesy snooze-fest, but Chrissie Hynde is pretty freaking far from cheesy.  The song was the last US hit for The Pretenders, reaching #21 in the summer of 1994.  It's since been covered by Girls Aloud, Carrie Underwood, and Shakira.  That doesn't mean the original was cheesy though, right?

I'll Stand By You

 
scorchy said:
#54 - The Pretenders - I'll Stand By You

In the wrong hands, I'll Stand By You would have been a cheesy snooze-fest, but Chrissie Hynde is pretty freaking far from cheesy.  The song was the last US hit for The Pretenders, reaching #21 in the summer of 1994.  It's since been covered by Girls Aloud, Carrie Underwood, and Shakira.  That doesn't mean the original was cheesy though, right?

I'll Stand By You
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Not one of my favorites, but a huge hit nonetheless

 
OK, so the Pretenders song was indeed boring.  Let's move on to someone who may be a lot things, but boring isn't one of them.

#53 - Hole - Rockstar

Well I went to school in Olympia
And everyone's the same
We look the same
We talk the same                                                                                                                                                                                We even #### the same   

Live Through This is not just one of my favorite albums of 1994 but of the entire decade.  There, I said it.  Just lucky that the singles were split over two years so I didn’t have five Hole songs show up here.  Rockstar wasn't even one of those singles.

The closing track on Live Through This isn’t actually named Rock Star - it’s Olympia.  The original song was dropped at the last minute (a lyric referencing Nirvana came off pretty bad given recent events) and replaced with an outtake, but the record company didn’t have time to change the title on the cover.

Whatever the name, it’s Courtney Love’s searing takedown of the riot-grrrls at Evergreen State who always looked down their noses at her.  From a discussion of Live Through This by female musicians and critics on the album's 25th anniversary: 

“Rock Star” punches the indie rock/riot grrrl/underground scene roots in the teeth, taking down punk culture and its own conservative restrictions. In this instance, the nonconformist outsiders who had flocked to find a place for themselves as Olympia hipsters ended up in a culture of homogeneous punk conformity. In an alternate version of the song, lyrics are changed to, “When I went to school / in a fascist state /We took punk rock/and we got a grade.”

The lyrics may parody what Hole perceives as the hive mind of the Olympia scenester, but the part that’s so interesting to me is that it portrays a freeze frame of the ’90s. A tiny snapshot of angry separation — Courtney Love in her attempts to distance herself from the riot grrrl movement. The song itself is really fascinating because of its honest, critical feminist dialogue of the time.
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Rockstar (Olympia)

 
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El Floppo said:
I love Courtney Love. I hate Courtney Love.
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Yeah. Pretty much. Had a great bulls*** detector, which I always appreciate. Live Through This was great. She was awesome in the Larry Flynt movie. 

And it's just been a mess ever since. Some people simply shouldn't become famous. 

 
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