1990s Rock: Pumpkins Were Smashed, Buttholes Were Surfed, Muses Were Thrown

Milla Jovovich: "I love sabermetrics!" (Photo by Georges Biard.)

Astute ESPN baseball writer and all-around smartass Keith Law has published an impressive list of his Top 200 Rock Songs of the 1990s. Of course you’ll disagree with some of the choices since you didn’t compile it yourself, but it will likely bring back some good memories. It convinced me that rock in that decade was better than I thought. An excerpt of a few of his rock selections:

139. Milla – “Gentlemen Who Fell”
That’s Milla Jovovich, who has had a hell of a career jumping from modeling to music to acting to fashion. This has to be one of the five weirdest songs on the list from her on-and-off falsetto to the hints of European folk music interspersed with riffs from an electric guitar.

54. Smashing Pumpkins – “Cherub Rock”
They had a great run for four albums, but nothing quite matched this song’s combination of intensity and sludge for me, like grunge but distinct enough that they couldn’t be lumped into the Seattle scene. The words never made a lick of sense to me, though.

11. Butthole Surfers – “Who Was In My Room Last Night?”
If you know the Surfers at all, it’s probably because of alternative-radio hit “Pepper,” or perhaps from Gibby Haynes’ guest spot on Ministry’s “Jesus Built My Hotrod,” but this is by far their best track, the best song ever written about a bad dream, with a guitar riff that could have come from Tony Iommi’s best work with Black Sabbath.

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