Author Talk: Rob Harvilla on 60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s
360°Sound caught up with music critic Rob Harvilla, author of the new book 60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s and host of the Ringer podcast of the same name. In the funny and insightful book, Harvilla revisits iconic ‘90s hits from a variety of genres with historical narratives, critical analysis, and personal anecdotes. In this interview, Harvilla talks about why ‘90s music is so distinct, the magic of “Return of the Mack,” the first time he heard Nirvana, and more.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
360°Sound: Please start by telling us about the podcast and how it turned into a book.
Rob Harvilla: The podcast started in the fall of 2020. I wanted to do a show where every episode was about one song, and we settled on the ‘90s as a format. It’s a pretty broad but specific enough era – and a genre almost at this point. I was in high school and in college in the ‘90s. The one thing I know for sure is that the music you love when you’re a teenager is the music you’ll love the most ever in your life.
We’ve been doing the show for three years. It says 60 right there in the name, but once we got close to 60, we realized we wanted to keep going. We’ve added 30 songs a couple of times. I am finally almost wrapping this thing up at 120 episodes. We’ve got eight or nine more.
I always wanted to write a book. I write the scripts for these episodes. These monologues are scripted down to the word. And so, I had 600,000 words of raw material. Obviously, I had to radically condense that into normal book form. The idea was to take my favorite moments from those episodes but get the songs in conversation with each other and hopefully come up with some unexpected and weird pairings of songs.
[For example] nobody likes the guy from Third Eye Blind. Brandy and Monica didn’t like each other. Oasis are always fighting. Limp Bizkit are patsies for nu metal. All people that were very easy to hate. Taking the idea of villains and archenemies and trying to define that pretty broadly and get as many genres, artists, and songs into that rubric as possible, and just see what happens when you bounce it off each other. My hope is that the book works as a companion to the show. But I think this book works even if you’ve never heard the show. Hopefully, all you need to know to some degree are the songs.
You write about what you thought about these songs as a teen in the ‘90s. Can you give an example of a song where your perspective toward it changed as you revisited it as an adult?
One example is Tom Petty’s “It’s Good to Be King.” Petty was in his late 30s and early 40s in the Full Moon Fever, Wildflowers, and “Last Dance with Mary Jane” era of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Suddenly he’s on MTV all the time. When I was a teenager, Petty seemed impossibly old. He just seemed like this grizzled veteran on his last legs. He’s in his late 30s. It’s hilarious.
I dug Full Moon Fever and Wildflowers so much. And I was always drawn to “It’s Good to Be King.” But I don’t think it was until I was a grizzled, impossibly old man in my late 30s and early 40s that I could appreciate the fullness of the perspective and the accomplishment of that song and those records.
I’ve lived with Petty’s music literally all my life, and I’ve always liked him, but I do think that you got to do some living and aging to fully grasp the greatness of what he’s doing, and how his music changed with time. He was a pretty crucial part of the 90s. Even if he wasn’t by the letter of the law youth culture, he still had a lot to say then, and you can hear it a little more clearly now.
What makes Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack” such a great song?
I really enjoyed that podcast episode a lot. Prior to doing that episode, I didn’t know a whole lot about Mark Morrison and his background. I hadn’t really wrestled with how weird it is. It’s not quite a one-hit wonder, but it’s one song that is far more popular than any of his other songs. This English R&B guy with a lot of G-funk swagger to him, but that does not translate very well in England. He’s in trouble with the law a lot.
He’s ultra-cocky, and he’s just not able to sustain his career at the “Return of the Mack”-level once that song hits. I live for those songs. You don’t exactly forget that they exist, but it’s only when listening to them that you can grasp their true greatness. That song comes on at a wedding today, and just the jubilation on the dance floor and the recognition, I live for that. The “Oh, that song, I forgot that song.”
What do you love about Pulp’s “Common People”?
It’s such a triumph of storytelling. The level of detail, the chip stains, the roaches climbing the wall, the supermarket. There’s such a strong sense of place to it. It’s the indignance, the anger driving it, and it’s very joyous and celebratory and made for festivals in a fist-pumping type of way. That part, “you will never understand how it feels to live your life,” that they’ll be there to control it. Every time I hear that part, it’s somehow five to 10 times more powerful than the last time I heard it. As a feat of storytelling, I don’t think there’s another song from the ‘90s exactly like it.
Tell us about the first time you heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
I want to say I was in junior high. I was hanging out with my buddy Matt at his house. I was playing video games on his computer, and he just made a big Columbia House run, like the 12 CDs for a penny deal. He’s got this stack of new CDs. He puts in Nevermind, and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” starts. What I remember is the volume of it. He cranks his stereo all the way up. It’s the loudest music I’ve ever heard in my life, just incalculable. I’m not able to describe even now how loud it was, how terrifying it was, how shocking it was, or genuinely how life-changing it was.
It’s funny to me how cliched that is, like if that’s going to happen to me with one song, of course, it’s going to happen with a candidate for the most ‘90s song of the ‘90s. That’s the song in our cultural memory. That’s the song that changed everything, the song that killed hair metal and launched alternative rock and on and on. The hyperbole of that, the myth-making of that, the over-simplicity of it. But I remember hearing that song for the first time, and I remember how physically frightened I was. I’ve never had an experience like that with another song in my life. And I’m so grateful for it.
Why do you think the ‘90s is easier to conceptualize with music than the aughts and the teens? It seems as if later decades have fewer defining songs and sounds.
It’s definitely something I’ve thought about a lot. The first thing I tried to filter out is my personal pure nostalgia. I was a teenager then, and I don’t want to be the fortysomething talking about how music was so much better back then. But I agree with you completely that the ‘90s does feel more distinct.
I wonder if that’s a benefit of time now with 30 years of hindsight. It takes that long. You need a couple decades of distance from a decade for it to crystallize for its eras. It takes a while for that picture to come into focus. I do think that the 2000s and the 2010s feel less distinct. I think a lot about the internet when it comes to this – just the total atomization of everything, but certainly music, in particular, with Napster hitting right at the dawn of the 2000s.
So much of ‘90s culture for me is bound up with buying CDs for $20 and being captive to MTV and the radio. This deathless idea of the “monoculture” back when we were all listening to Michael Jackson or Guns N’ Roses or whatever, whether that’s true or not, the ‘90s does feel like a monolith to me now.
What would be your final pitch for your book? And what can we expect from the upcoming podcast episodes?
I have a lot of anxiety about the show ending. I’ve been doing this twice as long as I intended to, and it’s been so gratifying to do it. The emails, the DMs, and the interest I’ve received are far beyond anything I’ve done in my 20-plus-year career. I do think that just comes down to the songs. It’s just how indelible the memories of all these songs are for so many people, even if they’re totally different for everyone.
I’m thrilled with how the book came out. It’s never about me being this fascinating person. It’s just me telling my stories of mundane suburban teenage rebellion just to get you thinking about your own environment and your own adolescence. I do think that the songs are a vehicle for us to tell each other about each other and our experiences in our childhood and teenage years, and it’s such a cool thing to experience and be a part of.
Check out Rob Harvilla’s podcast, 60 Songs that Explain the ’90s, on The Ringer
