Tag Archives: the nineties

Best Songs of the 90s: Behind the Scenes

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.

Now that the official SportsAlcohol.com list of the best songs of the 90s has been revealed to the world in full, I thought I’d offer the list geeks among you a quick peek behind the scenes at the making of the list. So if you’re wondering why Pavement didn’t make the cut or how assured Nirvana’s victory really was, read on!

Participants
As mentioned, we had 22 voters each assemble a ranked top 40 list. There were twelve women and ten men, and most of the participants spent at least some time as teenagers in the ’90s, though one of us didn’t enter teenagehood until after the turn of the century.

Because of the high number of participants, a single number-one vote was not enough to propel a song onto the master list. Every song on our final list garnered at least two votes, and while it was theoretically possible to make the list without any of those votes being in anyone’s top ten, that was not the actual case when all was said and done. Every song on this list was on at least one person’s Top Ten of the ’90s, and in fact several songs with two votes (where one was passionate enough) beat out a number of songs that garnered three or even four votes. That four-vote wonder, the most-voted song that failed to make the list? The subject of founding editor Sabrina’s t-shirt: “It’s a Shame About Ray” by the Lemonheads. A shame indeed; sorry, Dando.
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