100 From 1977-2003

How do you make a great album even better? Add a track so late in the game that you don’t even have time to list it on the jacket. And make that track as good — if not better — than anything else on the album. Then, watch that song scale the charts. This is what the Clash did with “Train in Vain”, the “hidden” track on London Calling. Unlike many Clash classics, this song is not about politics. Rather, it is ostensibly about being betrayed and abandoned by a woman. Yet, with all its ranting about “you didn’t stand by me” and “you must explain why this must be”, it has all of righteous indignation and thirst for justice of an overtly political Clash song like “Clampdown”. More than that, it’s catchy as hell and you can dance to it. Topper Headon’s infectious drumming powers the song, but it truly belongs to guitarist Mick Jones, who sings here like a man possessed. Though the lyrics claim he is miserable about losing his girl, Jones sounds joyful, as does the rest of the band. In 1979, at the peak of their power, “the only band that matters” really was irrepressible.
      — Jordan Kessler

Slash never liked “Sweet Child O’ Mine”. He saw the song as a necessary evil, the pop single Guns N’ Roses needed to sell copies of their radio-unfriendly debut, Appetite for Destruction. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” was pretty, which made it the ideal Trojan horse to sneak “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Mr. Brownstone” and the rest of their punk-metal scorchers past the gates and into the ears of impressionable Midwestern boys like me. But to call “Sweet O’ Child of Mine” a Trojan horse doesn’t imply that this power ballad to end all power ballads is empty or hollow. Indeed, though Slash might be loathe to admit it, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” contains his moment of greatness. Of course I’m referring to the majestic 15-second guitar intro, easily one of the most breath-taking opening riffs in rock history. It’s graceful yet gritty, like a French horn dragged through a Marshall amp. It’s a testament to how great this song is that things drop off only slightly after that. In a world without that opening riff, Axl’s surprisingly poetic lyrics would dominate this song. “Her hair reminds me of a warm safe place / Where as a child I’d hide / And pray for the thunder / And the rain / To quietly pass me by”. Axl wrote that about Erin Everly, a girl he later beat up and dumped for a supermodel. Well, at least we still have the song. And Slash’s riff.
      — Steve Hyden

For a moment, let’s pretend George W. Bush were to give up his warmongering ways, and let’s also imagine that everyone in the Middle East began to see eye-to-eye. While we’re writing fiction, let’s add that Blacks and Whites finally join together — in Montgomery, Alabama no less — to wash away the centuries of hate and oppression. Hell! Let’s go as far as to say The Creator Himself and The Fallen One make amends; all sins are forgiven. Even if all that were so, we mustn’t forget the bloody path we’ve forged, and Metallica’s “One” serves as that link to the past (present, and, sadly, future). Not America’s past, not Europe’s, not the Middle East’s, not Russia’s — everyone’s. It’s a harsh tale of a soldier — any soldier — left deaf, blind, and sans limbs; he’s all but dead and surely forgotten, if ever known, by the government that sent him to his doom. In our global attempt to achieve peace — through war it seems — we must remember that men, women, and children are being left in this very state, leaving “One” to stand as a very haunting reminder.
      — Michael David Sims

The title of Public Enemy’s second album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, proved prophetic. It was the first hip-hop album to melt blazing political, racial, and musical commentary onto mind-blowing beats. As the album’s opening track, “Bring the Noise” features hard-rhymer Chuck D dissing stodgy critics, DJs, and politicians, and uniting his listeners in a magnetic “Us vs. Them” dynamic. Chuck D is in his prime lyrically, dropping Farrakhan and Anthrax references in the same song and making an impassioned — and convincing — case for hip-hop as the new revolutionary rock ‘n’ roll. And though Chuck’s perhaps best known for the stomping rhyming style on songs like “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” and “By the Time I Get to Arizona”, his voice here is like a maxed-out bungee chord, elastic and explosive as he wraps his lyrics around the beat. The song is a scorcher, and it immediately set the pace for political hip-hop and for a rap group that couldn’t be stopped.
      — Jonathan Messinger

When Dr. Dre released “Nuthin But a ‘G’ Thang” in 1992, it was impossible to get away from. But although the single pumped from speakers all over town forever, somehow it failed to burn itself out. Instead, it sired dozens of imitators, and its own hip-hop sub-genre — G-funk. All this from the member of N.W.A. that everyone guessed was least likely to succeed. Ice Cube and Eazy-E had already released successful solo efforts. Where had Dre come from? As it turned out, he’d been digging through a few record crates. Dre wrapped basic gangsta accessories such as low-lows and nine millimeters around Parliament and James Brown samples like so many Christmas tree lights. He also had the foresight to recognize the chilled out delivery of one Calvin Broadus, aka Snoopp Doggy Dogg, for the genius that it was. Plus, it complimented Dre’s uninflected baritone perfectly. Today, nearly every line of this ditty has become a cliché, either through intended or ironic use. This rap is why white kids from Nebraska talk about putting the smack down on their beeyatches, and East Coast rap finally started imitating the West Coast in earnest. Ten years later, hip-hop is still checking this song’s blue print. It changed the template for popular culture. Turn on MTV today and you see hip-hop instead of Metallica and Mariah. This song is the reason why.
      — Ari Levenfeld

Back in 1993, a surge of hip, cool, great girl bands rode along in the wake of the tidal force that was Nirvana and the grunge scene. On the crest of this second wave rode an out-of-nowhere instant classic by the Breeders. Fronted by sisters Kim and Kelly Deal, this band had unmatchable indie clout, with family ties to Belly, Throwing Muses, and the Pixies. “Cannonball” was a perfect summer anthem for a time when cool alternative music had conquered MTV, but had yet to be co-opted by the “suits”. “Cannonball” was fun, energizing, accessible, and it rocked. Kim and Kelly were real, normalizing girls, like the ones you hung out with, and they still looked great in the video. It was like you were their guest at a big alternative rock family picnic. “Cannonball” was the perfect song for that picnic; it’s the crusty foam that still clings to the wall above the high water mark that was the early ’90s alternative “chick” rock renaissance.
      — Erich Kuersten

Cheap Trick’s place in popular culture was firmly established when teenage entrepreneur Mike Damone referred to “the charisma of Rick Nielsen, the magnetism of Robin Zander” before bursting into the chorus of “Surrender” when trying to illegally sell concert tickets to a cute girl in the 1982 movie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. That ever-familiar chorus line — “Mommy’s alright / Daddy’s alright / They just seem a little weird” — took the rebel song to a new level back in the day of acid trips in the school yard, inviting parental respect when so many other songs of the time were tearing it down. The song, about a weird kid who wakes up to find his folks “Rolling on the couch / Rolling numbers / Rock and rolling / Got my Kiss records out”, continues to make waves, as evidenced by Everclear’s tribute to the song on their 2003 album, Slow Motion Daydream — “Heard you singing in a Taco Bell bathroom / Heard you singing a Cheap Trick song / Yeah, we sang Surrender all the way the county line / When I listen to that music / It makes me think of summertime / We were wasted and happy”.
      — Nikki Tranter

The Pixies are the unacknowledged god-parents of indie-rock before “indie” even became a recognizable category. Surfer Rosa, the band’s first full-length, is their most eclectic album, uniting punk, pop, and Mexican standard into a highly charged debut. Under the production skills of ex-Big Black front man Steve Albini, the music is both raw and textured. “Gigantic” was the only song written by bassist Kim Deal for the album. And after hearing it, one wishes that Deal was able to front more songs, since her voice’s ability to suggest worldly disinterest, naïve sincerity, and strength compliments the band’s highly ambiguous lyrics and style. The song’s introductory bass line smoothly wraps around Deal’s lyrics, “And this I know / His teeth as white as snow”. The guitars smoothly enter as Deal shifts from first to third person perspective, making her words simultaneously personal and distant. By the time the chorus begins, you are already singing along even though you don’t exactly know the words. “Gigantic” is a strangely mellow song that nonetheless is more highly-charged than most punk double-time, 30-second assaults. The Pixies’ fusion of pop and punk defies explanation and can only be heard to be understood.
      — Chris Robe

“Unfinished Sympathy” is a lyrical poem, a self-contained work of art. Here is a pure sensual epic, belying the fact that it was pieced together with all the reverence and precision given to that of a Swiss watchmaker. You could search for many moons without recognizing a production job as pristine as the one displayed here. Achingly beautiful, it is the jewel in the crown of Massive Attack’s hugely influential first album, Blue Lines. The song succeeds superbly on a strictly visceral level, but it is also recognizable as one of the bolder releases of its era. It arrived during the apex of British rave culture, a time when music was permeated by heavy driven beats and studio trickery, and the populace continued to ride high on the Ecstatic wave. Massive Attack chose the moment to release a song of agonized tenderness, anticipating the gutted emptiness of a generation about to come to terms with the party’s hangover. The come-down queens, the ‘trip-hop’ kings, the denizens of down-tempo and the ‘chilled’ vibe, all are direct descendants of this work. None of which you need to know in order to appreciate it. Sit back. Listen. Enjoy.
      — John Davidson

This song starts with the sound of angels we have heard while high, angels with high density addictions to chemicals, to lager, to beautiful people. With heavenly strings and delayed chords crackling our synapses, we take nightflights in cityscapes, listening to our own innerspaces. On this journey, as the ecstasy melts between our velvet lips, the steel metropolitan heartbeats surround us. We dance to pounding percussion, burning a white hole in the spaces between us, stretching time out forever, forever seeing absolution and clarity and shimmering hot intercourse in Romford at the end of the night that never comes. (Having just outlined that metaphysical and utopian scenario for this song — which could have happened to the tarnished protagonists of Danny Boyle’s 1996 film, Trainspotting, from which this song first appeared in many of our lives, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of kids that house/rave music empowered — the socioeconomic conditions accompanying it — executives pouncing on electronic dance music in the late 1990s as the new grunge, inventing the mean-nothing term “electronica” and fattening some wallets in the process — are an unfortunate fact of its existence.)
      — Anthony Bleach