Songs mean a lot when songs are bought / And so are you,” Stephen Malkmus snipes on “Cut Your Hair,” a sarcastic shot at an unscrupulous music industry and the fame-hungry bands willing to play ball with it. Ironically, “Cut Your Hair” was the closest Pavement would get to a hit, peaking in the Top 10 of Billboard’s US Alternative Airplay chart. Perhaps that’s why Malkmus steered Pavement toward shaggier, less commercially-friendly sounds on the subsequent Wowee Zowee. Pearl Jam – Alive (1991) After a pair of middling synth-pop records in the late 80s, Underworld rebooted themselves as a house and techno act in the mid-90s. They hit the peak of their powers with “Born Slippy .NUXX,” a delirious, gleaming rave-up that throttles along whether you’re listening to the single edit or the nearly 12-minute full-length version. The Veldt – Soul in a Jar (1994) The late Keith Flint first joined the Prodigy as a dancer, and with the group’s third outing, The Fat of the Land, he became the group’s frontman as well. It’s his menacing-yet-impish vocals that appear on “Firestarter,” a twisted rave-up that would’ve almost certainly become an international hit regardless of who was singing on it. Flint’s boasts could be menacing – “I’m the fear addicted, danger illustrated,” he barks – but there was something about the way he invited you to be a firestarter, too, that made it impossible to look away. Pulp – Common People (1995) No, that isn’t “The Imperial March” that you hear at the beginning of White Town’s fluke hit, “Your Woman” – it’s actually taken from an old jazz tune. (You can hear the same sample in Dua Lipa’s “Love Again.”) If anything, “Your Woman” sounds like lo-fi Prince – and yes, the song is as great as that sounds. Yo La Tengo – Autumn Sweater (1997) However, the title, ‘Losing My Religion’, is a phrase from the southern United States (R.E.M. are from Georgia), meaning to lose your temper or feel frustrated. Michael Stype has said it is, in fact, about pining for someone and unrequited love.

No decade is a musical monolith, but seeing the best songs of the ‘90s listed all in one place, the era seems especially scattered. History has boiled it down to grunge and gangsta rap on one end, boy bands and Britney Spears at the other, but it’s the stuff in the middle and on the fringes that makes the period difficult to sum up. While it was a hit in the US, her biggest ever, it did poorly in the UK and I actually couldn’t find how it placed on the Irish charts. Tevin Campbell was everyone who ever tried to find the courage to talk to their crush. “Can We Talk” was all about the angst of teenage love, longing and words left unsaid. 41: Hi-Five – I Like The Way (The Kissing Game) Leave it to Mariah Carey, the girl next door, to make pure lust sound so naive, so syrupy sweet, that it could be read as something pious to a passerby. Leave it to a diva at the height of her fame to describe being horny as feeling “kinda hectic inside,” and to articulate it by singing more dizzying runs than an amusement park’s worth of rides. It feels right that she wrote, produced, and recorded “Fantasy” in only two days, roughly the amount of time a person can live solely on the giddiness of a flirtation and the anticipation of an eventual release. Here’s what love at 26, the age at which she put out the song, could feel like. It’s what you want love to feel like for the rest of your life, too. The second single of their debut album Bigger, Better, Faster, More!, ‘What’s Up?’, actually originates from before the group started, with Linda Perry having written it before then. The title does not appear in the lyrics, but the phrase “What’s going on?” features heavily in the chorus. Linda Perry fought to get her version of the song released as she disliked the reworked version that featured different lyrics.The single was released in October 1991 as promotion for the band’s Greatest Hits II album, just six weeks before Freddie Mercury died. A heartbreakingly beautiful song, it reached number 17 in the Irish charts. When “Mo Money Mo Problems” arrived in the summer of 1997, Diana Ross’ hiccupping sample and Kelly Price’s sashaying lamentation as ubiquitous as a heat wave, Biggie Smalls had been dead for four months. Mase and Puff Daddy—then nearing the release of their respective debuts—took the lead, playfully plodding through opening verses and goofing on Tiger Woods and Bryant Gumbel in a paradoxically ostentatious video. In that life-after-death context, it was impossible not to hear the song’s tragic irony, like a warning by and for B.I.G. about the fate that may await such a contentious and ostentatious superstar. But the anthem’s enduring power stems from its moral simplicity, epitomized by Biggie’s monstrous minute-long verse, buried in the second half: Stay true to your roots and crew, even as you aspire for the cover of Fortune. This was never a song about dying or problems, really; it was a song about living through a moment’s madness, of making it out intact and sane. –Grayson Haver Currin

I’m cheating with this one a bit, as it was actually released in November of 1989. However, it became a dance floor hit in early 1990 in the US, despite never being released there commercially. Additionally, it got to number 13 in the Irish charts.Art Alexakis got personal on Everclear’s sophomore record, Sparkle and Fade, channeling his traumatic upbringing into tunes that were either explicitly autobiographical (“Heroin Girl”) or fictionalized versions that were detailed enough to be someone else’s truth (“Pale Green Stars”). Even “Santa Monica” can’t fully escape the drugs and death that haunt the album, but it at least offers the possibility of a life beyond them. Fastball – The Way (1998) This extremely upbeat cover of Ready For The World’s 1986 tune took the airwaves by storm 11 years later in 1997. INOJ’s rework of the song and her cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time”, was less a slow jam or ballad than a song to be blasted at your cardio funk class. 52: Queen Latifah – Weekend Love It topped the charts in a number of European countries, including Ireland, and appears on VH1’s 100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it can be heard at a few weddings and night-outs in Ireland too. The music video relies heavily on computer-generated imagery and features Soviet imagery and iconography. The single got to the top spot in Ireland, the last single of theirs to do so to date and their fourth Irish number one. The Village People only managed number 15.