Showing posts with label ice cube. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ice cube. Show all posts

Monday, September 3, 2018

the top ten best hit songs of 1993

So I'll freely admit of the Patreon-requested years for which I cover the year-end Hot 100, we haven't really encountered a 'bad' year for the charts, the sort of years that even with the benefit of hindsight and nostalgia cause us to wince in the face of the memories. The closest that I've covered in this territory throughout the five years I've been on YouTube have been 2016 and maybe either 2010 or 2014, and even then, both of the latter have strong enough redeeming moments to knock them into quality.

1993 is not one of those years - perhaps not the worst the Hot 100 has had to offer, but definitely the sort of transitional early 90s year where the best stuff wasn't charting, most of the good stuff was starting to get overexposed, music legends were falling apart in slow motion, and the rest was a wasteland of formless mush. Thank god R&B and new jack swing were mostly holding up and that g-funk was cutting a swathe across hip-hop, because rock had lapsed into parody, the pop-rap of the early 90s was trying and failing to keep up, and punk and country were nowhere to be seen, despite the advent of riot grrl and the neotraditional country revival in full swing. Even grunge, widely hailed as the breakthrough sound by music critics of the early 90s, had little to no traction in 1993 - and before hip-hop can raise a triumphant flag here, there was no way in hell that the best of that genre was getting to pop radio in the face of an avalanche of easy listening pablum left over from the 80s and artists who should really know better! No In Utero, no 36 Chambers or Ain't No Other or Buhloone Mindstate, but hey, you got Kenny G!

Now what that means is that the best of 1993... look, it's all over the place, especially as some of the chart oddities have aged better than what was big at the time, and while there are a few classic cuts from this era, in comparison to stronger years this particular top ten is substantially shakier - and as always, the songs have to have debuted on the year-end Hot 100 in 1993... which actually didn't result in any cuts from this list, and thank god for that, as it's pretty thin. But hey, let's start off with...