I closed the lime-green binder. Outside, the world was gray and wet. But in my lap, the 1990s were still arguing, still dancing, still discovering that “What Is Love” was funny and “Torn” was heartbreaking and that a hundred songs could never hold a decade.
“January 1992. I was in my friend’s basement. The video came on. I didn’t know music could sound like that—like being angry and sad and free at the same time. Kurt died two years later. The song never did. It’s still here. We’re still here.”
I opened the binder. The first page was handwritten in Sharpie, the ink bleeding through the paper: top hundred songs of the 90s
The further I flipped, the more the 90s came alive—not as a nostalgic aesthetic, but as a chaotic, contradictory, beautiful mess. Page twelve: . Margin note: “We all hated this when it came out. We were wrong. It’s the perfect end credits song for the decade.” Beside it, Maya had drawn a tiny shrek head.
The binder was the color of a faded Jawbreaker sticker—electric lime green, now softened by twenty-five years of basement humidity and garage-sale purgatory. My uncle Rick slid it across his coffee table, the duct-taped spine groaning. I closed the lime-green binder
The top twenty was a war zone. Crossed-out numbers, arrows, angry annotations. had a note screaming: “OVERRATED. NO, YOU’RE OVERRATED. – Craig. Rick, fight me. – Fine, put it at 18. But I’m not happy. – No Gallagher brothers are ever happy. That’s the point.”
Rick snorted. “Craig’s pick. He said it would become a comedy staple. We told him he was an idiot. He was right.” “January 1992
The binder contained The Ultimate Top Hundred Songs of the 1990s , as determined by him and his three best friends—Maya, Jerome, and “Crazy” Craig—during a marathon argument on New Year’s Eve 1999. They’d stayed up all night, fueled by Surge and cheap vodka, listening to a five-disc changer and yelling about whether “Smells Like Teen Spirit” deserved the top spot (yes) or if it was overexposed (Craig’s losing argument).