What Makes This Remarkable: 60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s

A few years ago, the slog of hacking old information into new packages was really getting to me. I was tired of trying to find new ways to say the same damn things about marketing, goal-setting, productivity, or business models. And I was even more tired of finding more ways to talk about those same damn things on social media.

It felt like my intellectual life revolved around churning out cookie-cutter thoughts.

One thing that is distinctive about an information political economy is the way it instrumentalizes difference rather than sameness. The farmer and worker produce units of commodities that are equivalent within their kind. What I call the hacker class has to produce difference out of sameness. It has to make information that has enough novelty to be recognizable as intellectual property, a problem that landed property or commercial property does not have.

— McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?

I wrote a short (for me) post in January 2021 about my content malaise. For context, this is when everyone was talking about Clubhouse. Clubhouse, remember that?! In this post, I shared the woefully unoriginal intention to focus on "conversations and ideas" rather than "platforms or tactics or algorithms." The intention might have been unoriginal—but it was sincere.

I declared that my new strategy was to only publish or consume "remarkable content." That meant no more scrolling just to scroll. No more making stuff just to catch people in their scroll. No more spending precious brain power on coaxing the algorithm to do my bidding.

The response to that post caught me off guard. Apparently, I had plenty of company in my frustration with the milquetoast, formulaic drivel that dominated social platforms. I even delivered a TEDx talk on the topic.

Obviously, my personal declaration—and even the intentions of many who shared my creative exhaustion—didn’t change the state of discourse on social media. But what it did change was how I made stuff (i.e., content but pretty much everything else, too) to share. My focus on remarkable content also changed how I consumed things others shared. I started to pay more attention to how others plied their craft.

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What Makes “60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s” Remarkable

My daughter is a champion road-tripper. She made her first cross-country road trip when she was 4 years old—from Pennsylvania to Oregon. She’s done Pennsylvania to Montana twice, PA to Maine and back once, and countless shorter trips. Rarely do I hear an “Are we there yet?”

And what would a road trip be without music? Luckily, not only is she accommodating of long stints in the car, but she also has an eclectic taste in music. When she was little, she loved George Harrison. Later, she discovered George Michael and WHAM. Then, she got into Fleetwood Mac.

A few years ago, I introduced her to The Chicks (formerly The Dixie Chicks). She fell in love. The kid can sing 95% of the words on the albums Fly, Wide Open Spaces, and Gaslighter. Her current favorite song is Sin Wagon. Don’t quite know what to make of that…

She's a little fuzzy on my personal favorite Chicks album, Taking the Long Way. I’d belt out “Not Ready to Make Nice” with all the righteous indignation I could muster when that album came out. It was quite cathartic for me during a difficult time.

We got to see The Chicks (and Ben freaking Harper) play HersheyPark Stadium in August. I bought tickets in the same spot I always do—second section from the stage, about halfway up, in the bleachers. It’s close enough to have a good view—but not so close that tickets break the bank.

We got to the stadium when the doors opened and promptly made our way to the merch stand and adult beverage pavilion. After grabbing t-shirts and IPA (for me, not for the 15-year-old), a venue rep approached us with a clipboard. She asked us where we were sitting, and, of course, the first thing that ran through my head was, “How are we in trouble already?”

I pointed towards the bleachers.

“How’d you like to sit front and center?” she asked.

I was a bit speechless. I looked at Lola, who was understandably a bit nervous about being in the thick of things. We took the tickets. The seats were incredible. And the concert was bonkers good—I was hoarse for 3 days afterward.

During our last road trip, a quickie down the Easter Shore of Virginia to see my mom, I queued up an episode of 60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s—specifically, the episode about “Goodbye Earl.” “Goodbye Earl” is The Chicks’ song that details domestic abuse, revenge, and poisoning by black-eyed peas against the backdrop of a subversively cheery and upbeat pop-country song.

When the episode was over, without my prompting, Lola decided that she wanted to listen to another. And then another. And another.

I think we listened to at least 10 episodes during the trip there and back. We tackled Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You" (naturally), Shania Twain's "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!", Green Day's "Basket Case," TLC's "No Scrubs," and more iconic songs.

I am very late to 60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s, hosted by rock critic Rob Harvilla. I found the show thanks to a quick post that Charlie Gilkey made recommending an episode. The first episode came out in October 2020—as many first episodes of podcasts did—and it details Alanis Morissette's "You Oughta Know."1

I already knew I was going to listen to this show—but opening with Alanis? I was sold.

The timing was perfect—mid-December—when I knew all my usual listens were going to be taking time off. 60 Songs could be my holiday binge-listen.

And oh, it was. It is, in fact. I’m still binging.

I listened to a few episodes just geeking out on the ‘90s-ness of it all. Then, I started to fall in love with Harvilla's style and delivery. And then, I realized how carefully crafted each episode was. Harvilla is a masterful writer with an infectious passion for music.

That's what makes this show remarkable.

Appreciation Sans Nostalgia

I have no nostalgia for the ‘90s. I appreciate what the ‘90s gave me and who I became in that decade. And, yes, it's ‘90s music that I put on when I'm feeling blah. Give me some No Doubt, some Alanis Morissette, some Cranberries, even some Sheryl Crow—and I'm likely to pep right up.

But not because I'm feeling nostalgic. I don't have any desire to go back to the time when those artists were climbing Casey Kasem's Top 40 chart. I just love the music.

I tend to be cautious when it comes to media that whips up feelings of nostalgia. Nostalgia is often weaponized by reactionaries to get us to remember (and long for) a past that never was (see also: MAGA). Nostalgia is derived from ancient Greek words that essentially mean a painful yearning for home. "Acute homesickness," as Google puts it. Nostalgia is a "mythical story" about the past. It hearkens back to something we no longer have, but without acknowledging that we never had what we lost in the first place.

When Rob Harvilla describes his life in the ‘90s, he strikes no note of nostalgia. He's about 4 years older than I am—he was in college while I was in high school—which means he had slightly more independence than I did by the middle of the decade. But otherwise, I can totally relate.

Harvilla's delivery makes it clear that he, too, appreciated what the ‘90s gave him. But nonetheless, has no interest in returning to those days. This tone gives him the chance to tell mortifying stories with humor and sincerity. In the "Wonderwall" episode, Harvilla recounts the time he tried to sing the massive Oasis hit during karaoke:

I can't decide if that's because I'm off-key, and he's trying to be helpful, or if it's because my whole vibe is so morose and catastrophic that he's making me sound even worse on purpose so that I get booed off-stage faster. Problem with that, though, is the crowd booing would require energy and a perverse sort of enthusiasm.

But no, it's like I've sucked the joy—the very life—out of the room with a giant cartoon Acme vacuum cleaner. Just silence. Dead-eyed, motionless silence. I could hear myself sweating. I could hear all the pint glasses sweating. The vowels.

Don't be like me.

Now, I've never done karaoke. I don't have a personal analog for what Harvilla is experiencing here. But I've done other embarrassing things. Plenty of them. I've taken myself too seriously. I've overestimated my own talent. I have no nostalgia for those experiences. They offer no sense of "home," let alone one that I could be homesick for. But I do appreciate them.

An emotional throughline

I've shared before that the emotion I always have in mind when I'm writing is relief. When I approach a subject, I consider whether there's a way for me to explore it so that I can make even one person out there feel some sense of relief. Maybe they feel relief that they're not the only one. Or that they finally have language for something they couldn't quite articulate. Or maybe, even ideally, they just stop worrying about something because they decide it just doesn't matter.

What's beautiful, to me anyway, is that I end up feeling the relief, too. I'm not always happy when I finish a piece, but I'm relieved to have thought the thoughts and gotten them down on paper. I'm relieved that I found words for something I couldn't articulate before. I'm relieved that I can stop worrying about the jumble of questions that had been occupying my brain space.

I can't know whether Harvilla has a particular emotion in mind when he's scripting this show. But if I had to guess, it would be profound appreciation. Even when he covers a song like the Spice Girls' "Wannabe" or Los Del Rio's "Macarena," he does so with palpable gratitude. The man clearly loves and appreciates music.

To hit that note of appreciation so consistently in each episode, to leave the feeling of appreciation with the listener week in and week out, that’s remarkable.

Harvilla's passion for music—and thus his appreciation for some truly great (and some guilty pleasure) music—is gleeful. I'll get back to the passion piece in a bit.

Masterful Signposting

But first, in that bit from the Wonderwall episode I shared, Harvilla lands on two words toward the end: the vowels.

The first time Harvilla mentions the vowels is just before the 3:00 mark. During the episode, he says "vowels" 14 times in total. Just after that first mention, he describes Oasis's Liam Gallagher's vowels like so: "majestic, elongated, luxuriantly contemptuous vowels."

Then, at 38:49, he wraps up the karaoke story by saying, "defeated by vowels."

The vowels serves a number of purposes during the episode. First and foremost, it’s an important piece of how Harvilla describes Oasis’s unique sound. Liam Gallagher does give his vowel sounds a striking character. But to set up a self-deprecating anecdote with an insight about the lyric delivery of a singer in minute 3, mention that insight multiple times in the next 30 minutes, and then finally unleash the laugh-out-loud finale of the story that was set up 35 minutes ago?

That’s remarkable.

The vowels, as a phrase, is a signpost. Signposting is a technique that writers use to help readers orient themselves to a story or argument. And it's an especially valuable technique in producing audio essays, which is how I’d categorize the main part of every 60 Songs episode. When you're reading content on a screen or page, your eyes can flit up and down the page to remind you of where you're at or a bit of information you might have forgotten as soon as you read it.

But our ears don't have that luxury.

Sure, you can hit the "back 15 seconds" button or rewind further. But few listeners will ever do that. By using a phrase or idea that repeats throughout a piece, the audio essayist can pull the listener back in when their attention inevitably falters.

Harvilla deftly uses signposts. And he has to because the format Harvilla is working in can be, I think, best described as a braided audio essay. A braided essay is an essay structure that weaves a few disparate narratives into a single piece. The essay proceeds forward, doubles back, and often makes some wild twists and turns. It’s anything but linear. The essayist draws out unexpected connections between the narratives and, in turn, often hits unexpected emotional notes. It’s often that bit of surprise insight that makes a braided essay remarkable.

You may or may not have been thinking, “How is this all going to come together?!” But when it does come together, you realize that tension existed, in a most delicious way, all along.

Harvilla not only braids strands of analysis and story, he also has the music itself to act as a strand in the braid. Each braided audio essay is, therefore, remarkably complicated, and his strong use of signposting is what makes them work.

My Favorite Kind of Nerd

Harvilla is my favorite kind of nerd. He is deeply, sincerely, and goofily passionate about music. He's the kind of nerd who has absolutely no problem with you knowing he's a nerd—even if there's a shy shrug of self-consciousness there, too. The kind of nerd who is unabashedly brilliant about his subject of choice but not at all pretentious. The kind of nerd who doesn't look down on you for your own knowledge or taste—he just wants to share what makes him so happy with you in the hopes it'll make you so happy, too.

I will listen to this kind of nerd talk about anything. I know there are plenty of people out there who are that kind of nerd. And yet, I still wish there were more. I wish I knew more of them. I wish they all had podcasts (Are you this kind of nerd? Do you need help making a podcast?).

I'll go so far as to say that I think the world needs more nerds of this ilk. Social media, I'm happy to argue, has made being this kind of nerd cool and potentially lucrative. But in my experience, people are still reluctant to just let themselves be that kind of nerd. Don’t deny the world your nerdiness, please.

I won't go so far as to say that being this kind of nerd turns anything you make into something remarkable. But I do think it's an important component.

The episode of 60 Songs that explores "Torn" by Natalie Imbruglia is a pretty good example of Harvilla's nerdiness.

"Torn" is a cover. It's a cover of a cover of a cover, actually. Harvilla not only reveals this information but the origin story of the song, the band that performed it first (Ednaswap), the Danish singer who turned into a Danish hit, the Norwegian singer who turned it into a Norwegian hit, before finally getting to Imbruglia—the Australian singer who turned "Torn" into a global hit.

Harvilla's nerdiness isn't just in the care he takes in tracing the lineage of the song. It's also in the care that he gives to each rendition of the song. He can hear what makes each one great in its own right. And he can hear why Imbruglia's became the absolute smash that it did. It's that gleeful appreciation again. Harvilla is the kind of nerd who makes me gleeful and appreciative of the music—and what he brings to it.

60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s makes me want to listen to more music. And I will. But I want to listen to another episode first.

I think that’s pretty remarkable.