Category: Best Songs lists

The Beastie Boys jokingly self-sabotage their album, become mostly known for rock somehow.

In the early ’90s, the Beastie Boys had grown tired of fighting for the rights (of their songs), spending more time asking for forgiveness for their 1989 pastiche/masterpiece Paul’s Boutique. MCA, Ad-Rock, and Mike D actually knew how to play instruments and had originally been members of the band The Young Aboriginals.

In 1992, the band released Check Your Head, an album credited—alongside Rage Against the Machine—with inspiring (or at least anticipating) the rap/rock fusion that dominated a decade later. The album got respect at the time, but most fans now see it as just okay: interesting because they made it, but rarely anyone’s #1 favorite. It does have some very good tracks: “Jimmy James,” “Pass the Mic,” “Gratitude”… The absolute classic is “So What’cha Want,” with a simple bass groove over a slow (for them) 101 BPM. The song contains some of the band’s best hook work. In addition to the titular phrase, it includes clever turns of phrase:

Well I think I’m losing my mind, this time
This time I’m losing my mind, that’s right
Said I think I’m losing my mind, this time
This time, I’m losing my mind

It’s impossible to read that without hearing it in your head. Now the song will be stuck in there all day. You’re welcome.
Even better is “Sabotage,” the lead single from their 1994 album Ill Communication. It came during a transitional phase, when the band couldn’t decide if they were hip-hop, rock, or something in between. Most of the album is stripped-down hip-hop, showing signs of exhaustion—especially in this verse from the second single, “Sure Shot”:

I keep my underwear up with a piece of elastic
I use a bullshit mic that’s made out of plastic
To send my rhymes out to all the nations like Ma Bell
I got the ill communication

The problem isn’t that it makes no sense—it’s that they knew it was a subpar set of lines and tried to mask it with delay and reverb. Ad-Rock presents himself as a normal guy who uses elastic for underwear (don’t 90% of people?) and a plastic mic to broadcast to the world. He had a record label and a multi-platinum album. He could afford a mic.

No such lyrical fatigue appears in “Sabotage,” which barely tries to rap at all. The song began without lyrics, as a jam built around the bass riff that opens it. Even with no melody or real hook, Ad-Rock felt it was complete. Frustrated that no one took it seriously, he vented at producer Mario Caldato Jr., who kept pressuring the band to finish. Ad-Rock, annoyed, named the song “Sabotage” and—channeling the style of Bad Brains, Minor Threat, and Black Flag—wrote sarcastic, screamy lines as a way of saying, “You want a song now? Here’s your song.”
The only real vocal hook comes in the bridge:

Listen all y’all, it’s a sabotage
(repeated four times)

Originally an instrumental, the song built up to a bridge they didn’t know what to do with. Ad-Rock created a rhythm and filled in generic words to match. The band leaned into the idea of actual sabotage—emphasizing, “listen up, I’m not doing what you want.”

They still needed more than just “I’m tellin’ y’all, it’s a sabotage.” The “chorus”, if you will, is not a section with any singing. It is a lead line played on synthesizer, monotone but with odd punctuated rhythm, played more in the vein of how DJs scratch records.  The keyboard uses a quick glide portamento to “scratch” the sound. Without sustaining a note or committing to an actual melody, the band replicates the edge Public Enemy achieved with their best singles, like “Bring the Noise” and “Rebel Without a Pause” (which uses a sax sample that had no real pitch). It also recalls “Fight the Power”, with a single-pitch instrumental track using syncopated 16ths for rhythmic interest.

“Sabotage” is too hardcore to care about choruses or melody. There seems to be no word on who wrote the part or who played the synthesizer.  Their keyboardist at the time was Money Mark.

Despite sounding unlike anything on rock or rap radio, it became the album’s first single. This was the era of “the music video comes first,” and in that tradition—like ‘Til Tuesday’s “Voices Carry,” Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” or Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love”—the band handed the album to a video director and let him pick the track that inspired the best idea. Spike Jonze chose “Sabotage,” drawn to its manic aggression. What did it remind him of? “‘70s cop shows (of course( like Starsky and Hutch,” he thought. He imagined it as the theme for a fake show in the vein of Streets of San Francisco or CHiPs—the kind he grew up watching, whether he liked them or not. Each Beastie would play a mustachioed detective with a ridiculous name.

The song wasn’t a hit. It didn’t even chart on the Hot 100. For one of the most iconic songs of the ‘90s, it barely made a dent at the time, peaking only at #18 on Alternative Airplay. But the video was a minor sensation, climbing thanks to requests and popularity rather than radio play. It eventually hit #1 on MTV’s Weekly Top 20 countdown. Even then, the song was seen as a fun gimmick, not a future classic.

But the slow burn began. In the mid-2000s, I saw a hardcore band cover it in a seedy bar. The crowd went wild. They played it note-for-note—until the scream, when the drummer unleashed a furious blast beat, hitting the snare and bass drum as fast as he could. Even the punks who hated mainstream music loved it.

The next time I heard “Sabotage” was in the unlikeliest place: J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek reboot. It was the only pop song I’d ever heard in the franchise, seemingly saying, “Of all the songs from this era, this is the one they’ll still listen to in 2233.”

You might’ve also heard it in many other places, like Shazam! Fury of the Gods, Horrible Bosses, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising—and it returned in Star Trek Beyond due to its popularity. It eventually exploded on YouTube and became, by far, the Beastie Boys’ most streamed track on Spotify.

Originally seen as a joke—a fun jam they didn’t know what to do with—“Sabotage” was the band mocking themselves. “It’s a sabotage!” they screamed, knowing they were really sabotaging their own process. But in doing so, they created a song nobody wanted… that audiences still respond to like it just came out. As of 2025, it has 466 million plays on Spotify, with a daily play count of 180,000.

Sometimes, a funny joke stays funny forever.

The big break that made Kurt Cobain forever resent the neighbors riding on Nirvana’s coat tails.

Music video is here. Age restricted, so it must be viewed on YouTube.

https://youtu.be/MS91knuzoOA?si=zjNAsEJlBBkTNSKv
The most popular song by Pearl Jam in 2025 is not “Jeremy,” their big breakout that burned them out on music videos and made them refuse to return to the medium for years. You might assume their biggest song today would be “Black”—by far the fans’ most favorite track at the time—or possibly something from Vs. or Vitalogy. But no. It’s “Even Flow,” a song that seems to have found fans among younger listeners precisely because of how overwrought and dated it sounds. The band is trying so hard—bless their little hearts.

Objectively, “Jeremy” holds up. It’s got genuine hooks and imaginative eccentricities. It’s impossible not to admire how inspired the band was here. I know people who are still sick of the song from its overplayed era, back when it seemed to air on MTV every 20 minutes. But how can you really hate a song with melodic phrasing like this:

> “Clearly I remember picking on the boy
Seemed a harmless little fuck
But we unleashed a lion
Gnashed his teeth and bit the recess lady’s breast, how can I forget?
And he hit me with a surprise left
My jaw left hurin’, ooh, dropped wide open
Just like the day
Oh, like the day I heard”

This is actual poetry—but Eddie Vedder’s songs like this were never meant to be read on paper. They’re meant to be vocalized. My favorite line is the bit about being hit “with a surprise left.” He emphasizes just that line with a raspy volume boost and a melodic change that’s totally unique in the song. Why make that the line of central emphasis? Eddie didn’t actually know this boy, but inserting a moment of direct interaction was meant to really sell the idea. Singing it that way makes the listener feel like it must be utter truth.

In 1991, Eddie read an article in a newspaper about Jeremy Wade, a 15-year-old from Richardson, Texas, who died by suicide in front of his English class. Many remember the song as being about a school shooting, and I honestly wonder if the ability to be misconstrued was intentional. The music video is certainly open-ended, and Eddie includes the line:

> “And the dead lay in pools of maroon below.”
Since when can you call a single corpse “the dead”? The jump to mass violence is unavoidable. This can only really be about a school shooting—or at least, that’s how it would be read if it were written after 1999.

The song began humbly, as a demo by bassist Jeff Ament months before they had any vocalist at all. It was called “Dollar Short.” Same basic structure as “Jeremy,” but no dynamic contrast. No build.

When Eddie was being considered as lead singer, he took home several tapes to write lyrics to. One of them was “Dollar Short,” and while surfing in San Diego, he thought about how to make it a full song. He read the article about Jeremy Wade and imagined an entire scenario—complete with a fictional backstory in which he’d known Jeremy personally. He had no aversion to bullshit, and he wrote the lyrics as a confessional from someone with firsthand knowledge.

The band heard his vocal demo and were blown away. “Jeremy” became one of the main reasons they brought him in. Eddie encouraged everyone to build intensity as the track went on, and it worked.

The band later claimed they never meant for it to be a single—but it’s hard to believe Eddie bought that. He clearly thought of “Jeremy” as his “Dream On” moment, using many of the same key ingredients as Aerosmith’s embarrassingly dramatic mega-anthem. The swelling major second chord changes and Eddie’s “Ooo”s sound exactly the same to my ears.

If anything, “Jeremy” is too big. Eddie maybe goes a bit overboard with his meaningless “Aye! Aye! Aye! Aye! Aye! Aye! Aye! Aye!” line. But he tapped into something real. He thought about kids who were depressed and felt they had nowhere to turn. He empathized with the feeling of believing that anything you say will fall on deaf ears.

Jeremy Wade’s mother, Wanda Crane, has spoken candidly about the song—and her feelings are complicated. She was never contacted by the band. She only found out about the song when it started playing on the radio. She was deeply moved by the sentiment, but also saddened that her son became the centerpiece of a dramatic rock anthem rather than a nuanced portrait.

> “That day that he died did not define his life,” she said.
“He was a son, a brother, a nephew, a cousin, a grandson. He was a friend. He was talented.”

Maybe Eddie should’ve done a bit of research. Or maybe he shouldn’t have tried so hard—in both the song and the video—to make it seem like he personally knew Jeremy or was the same age. Maybe the only real mistake was naming the song after him. That feels like the kind of mistake a band like Pearl Jam would make in their early days: sincere, pretentious, self-serious, and desperate for irresistible press coverage. All the things Kurt Cobain hated them for.

But the song worked. The band never expected it to catapult them into megastardom—or to overshadow everything else they’d do for years. “Jeremy” eventually faded, and other early tracks became more listenable in hindsight: time capsules of early grunge. Most of the waning popularity of this track is from the sensitive subject matter. The band no longer promotes the song, I never hear it on alternative radio, and the video is even age-restrcites on YouTube.  One day, the song will be rediscovered, used in a movie or Netflix TV show in a way that will make the song iconic once again.

Pearl Jam might have been one of the least cool bands of their era, but their weird earnestness made them fascinating. They were the ‘70s stadium rock band that insisted they hated ‘70s stadium rock bands.

The song Metallica never stopped promoting.

The year Nirvana “changed music forever”, the album Metallica (1991) by Metallica was actually a bigger deal. The album sold more than Nevermind, and its legion of fans were arguably much more fervent. If James Hetfield had died in 1994 instead of Kurt, the legacies of Nirvana and Metallica might have been swapped in media rounds.

Metallica will always be a Gen X favorite, but even Gen Z seems curious about them. They might be less open to metal overall, but Metallica is familiar enough to be ripe for memes. On the final episode of Stranger Things Season 4, “Master of Puppets” was featured to great effect. (Eddie Munson played the riff in the Upside Down to distract the demobats.) Metallica has had a resurgence in popularity over the last few years.

I, personally, do not like “Enter Sandman” very much. I used to play the riff in pep band during breaks at basketball games. I feel like everyone has heard the song, or at least the guitar part, from the bleachers at some low-level sporting event. It is remarkably easy to play, which is both a positive and a negative in terms of the song’s appeal.

The guitar lick was written by Kirk Hammett at home. Despite the intuitive nature of the clean riff at the beginning of the song, the demo he brought into the studio actually began with the distorted version of the lick heard at the :55 second mark. Producer Bob Rock wanted the band to embrace tighter, more focused songwriting, and the clean guitar intro was likely decided as a way to bring the song quickly to life. The formula worked well for “One”, …And Justice For All’s only well recognized single.

The songwriting process for Metallica is highly peculiar, as even though Kirk came up with the main riffs and recorded them on a demo he brought into the studio, only James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich are credited as songwriters. As typical, the lead guitar solo—arguably the most iconic part of any Metallica track—was all Kirk Hammett. He’s said it only took a couple of minutes to write and that he was surprised it became so iconic.

The lyrics came later. On the first version of the song, James brought to the band lyrics about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (crib death), with lines that originally included:

> “Disrupt the perfect family
Sleep with one eye open”

Bob Rock and Lars Ulrich said that the lyrics were too literal and upsetting and encouraged James to go broader. The lyrics became about childhood nightmares, and it evolved into the titular character coming to get you in your dreams. Metallica, just as the rest of the world, had been exposed to the idea of the boogeyman coming to get you in your sleep via Freddy Krueger and a decade of Nightmare on Elm Street movies.

I don’t necessarily credit James for coming up with a revolutionary concept, and some would argue that the start of James’s bad era of lyrical output began right here. After four albums of lyrics that held up remarkably well under scrutiny, James went a little simple. Some would even say trite. Here is a sample line from “Poor Twisted Me”, from Load (one album later):

> Swallow whole the pain
Oh, it’s too good to be
That all this misery
Is just for oh, poor twisted me, oh yeah
Poor twisted me

So James was getting burnt out with his lyric-writing process during the 1980s. During Metallica’s first 10 years, James was known to obsess about phrasing, rhythm, and word choice to make the lyrics both resonate and fit the core sound Lars and Kirk brought him. He often took his ideas from literature and intentionally avoided hard rock clichés, like sex and drugs. There seems to not be one literature reference on The Black Album, and on subsequent albums like Load and St. Anger, he had shifted to songs about self-doubt, internal rage, and writer’s block. He may have stopped reading entirely, actually.

Whereas Metallica had opposed the idea of MTV and making music videos (their first three albums went platinum without one), they tested the water with “One” off of …And Justice For All. The band’s manager and their music label (Elektra) encouraged the band to reach a wider audience. The band relented, and they filmed black and white footage of them performing in a warehouse, and the band’s management came up with the idea to juxtapose it with clips from the 1971 film Johnny Got His Gun, which was based on a 1939 anti-war novel that inspired the song. The band actually bought the film outright to avoid paying licensing fees every time the video was played. Despite initial reservations, the band was extremely happy with the final product.

The band was also reportedly happy with the video for “Enter Sandman”, despite having the look and feel of MTV du jour. The band is only filmed using strobe lighting, with motion that seems to only use about 3 frames per second. The imagery is straightforward: a little boy sleeping, an old man scowling at the camera, someone running towards the camera as a semi-truck crashes into a parked car behind him. “Just run off the road!,” we used to say. Aside from “Enter Sandman”, director Wayne Isham’s most famous work included Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” and Pink’s “Get the Party Started”. If you’re like me, you probably asked, “Those songs had music videos?”

“Enter Sandman” was cool, but in a way that felt slightly out of step with the visual culture of the moment. It had a dated quality, but there was charm in how hard the band was clearly trying—despite having little experience in the medium. Hardcore video enthusiasts were satisfied just having a reason to experience this style of music on TV, which was more or less what the band had hoped for anyway.

The song’s legacy peaked with its usage at Yankees games. Famed relief pitcher Mariano Rivera used the song as his entrance music from the late ’90s until 2013. Every time he entered Yankee Stadium, the song blasted over the speakers, a ritual heard by the most widespread fan base of any baseball team. The band leaned into this, even playing it live at Rivera’s retirement ceremony.

While Metallica continuously breaks out the song for awards ceremonies and events like their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2009, the song will always be associated first with sporting events. “Enter Sandman” is a mainstay at WWE events (to represent certain wrestlers’ aggression/intimidation), although it is often played at patriotic events for the military. Unlike most “most popular songs” by bands, Metallica seems to have never gotten tired of promoting it.

Not a hit during its release, “Closer” was promoted as if it was one and still continues to grow in popularity.

I know what you’re thinking. Half of you are saying, “How can this ubiquitous crowning achievement of one of the best bands of the ’90s not end up higher than #21?” The other half are irritated that it made the list at all. It was made specifically to be The Downward Spiral’s runaway hit, and it sounds like it. The “shock rock” explicitness and use of the word “fuck”—it’s not that it’s overly profane, it’s that it seems more designed to make you feel uncomfortable than to actually say anything meaningful.

The Downward Spiral sessions were similarly intense, but in a way that often felt obvious, unnecessary, and a little cheesy. Trent rented and renovated the mansion at 10050 Cielo Drive—the site of the 1969 Charles Manson murders of Sharon Tate and others. If you’ve ever listened to “Mr. Self Destruct” and thought, “This sounds like it was recorded in some guy’s closet,” that’s because it probably was. Turning a murder site into a recording studio (named “LE PIG”) seems more like a gimmick for press releases than an actual good idea.

The sessions were long, nightmarish, and obsessive. Trent used layers of analog synths, distorted samples, and field recordings to create a meticulously crafted wall of sound. He welcomed experimental suggestions from producers Flood, Alan Moulder, Chris Vrenna, and others—but only if they aligned with his singular vision. Work on the record was described as “psychologically punishing.”

The first part of “Closer” that Trent recorded was the beat, based on a drum sample from Iggy Pop’s 1977 track “Nightclubbing.” It sounds nothing like that track. He kept the tempo but replaced the drum sounds. The snare is white noise gated through a filter, triggered by a snare hit. The bass drum likely came from an analog drum machine—probably a Roland 808 or 909—boosted with distortion and a hefty amount of low EQ. The result feels organic, as though the drums were performed live. The snare was probably recorded to trigger the white noise, and the kick hits were nudged slightly out of time to make them feel more alive. The effect sounds like a heartbeat captured by a sonogram—if that heartbeat belonged to a xenomorph.

The synth layers are intricate and dense. In interviews, Trent said he wished Skinny Puppy and Ministry would write actual songs—with structure, hooks, and defined choruses. He took the soundscapes of those industrial acts and fused them with the songwriting instincts of mid-era Depeche Mode. The song slowly builds toward its centerpiece hook at timestamp 4:48, when a syncopated rhythm circles around a single note. That section sounds a lot like the instrumentation on Depeche Mode’s “Stripped” from 1986. Strangely, Closer utilizes the idea more effectively than most—injecting a bravura-sized dose of ego that feels more Billy Idol than New Order.

Trent Reznor claimed he never saw “Closer” as the album’s breakout hit. He said, “It was supposed to be a throwaway track, but it ended up being the most accessible thing I’d ever done. I never thought people would latch onto it the way they did. It made me uncomfortable.”

If he didn’t think the song had commercial appeal, why spend so much time and money on the music video? It remains the most famous work by director Mark Romanek, one of the most prolific music video directors of the medium’s dominant era. He’s directed countless videos, from Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” to Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” to Beyoncé’s Lemonade to Eels’ “Novocaine for the Soul.” I remember Rolling Stone’s critics’ poll calling Beck’s “Devils Haircut” the best video of 1996—that was him, too. The “Closer” video is flashy and gimmicky, blending vintage silent film techniques with the disturbing visual language of Stanley Kubrick and David Cronenberg. Nothing truly graphic is shown, but Romanek often blurs or distorts the image just enough to let your imagination do the rest.

The video is famously provocative—but it’s calculated. Like turning the house where Sharon Tate was murdered into a studio, the goal was to disturb just enough to make the promotion irresistible without crossing the line into outright censorship. I’m looking at you, The Prodigy.

The “worst” song of a terrible genre becomes a kitsch classic.

“It’s all about the he said, she said bull—shit.”

Note: you should really listen to the explicit version of this song, but the video needs to be experienced as well.

I get that the band actually had some amount of talent, but how on Earth did Fred Durst come up with a hook this weighty and memorable? Two theories: either (a) Fred has always had a natural gift for melody and cadence, or (b) he scribbled a bunch of words down, sang them as straight eighth notes and Wes Borland said, “Why don’t you delay the word ‘shit’ a bit? Add some syncopation?”

The vibe of the song is right. Wes sticks to one chord, a basic power chord rooted on dropped D tuning, and uses a little half-step bend  during the chorus. It is a formula that The Neptunes were about to utilize on every hit of the early 2000s, but Limp Bizkit jumped on the trend very early. It creates a broken, uncontrolled feeling of nausea. The guitar only adds one other note, a sudden tritone (augmented 4th/diminished fifth).It is the devil’s interval, most famous for being used in the first three notes of The Simpsons theme song. If there’s one moment worth salvaging from the Nu-metal genre, it’s this brief burst of angsty cliché.

Fred has said he wrote the lyrics after having an incredibly bad day, and I hope so. It would be a real bummer if he wrote a song like this happily, as though he was just writing something formulaic for the masses. It seems genuinely angry, like he didn’t have time to review the lyrics or think too hard about the phrasing:

“It’s just one of those days
When you don’t wanna wake up.
Everything is fucked.
Everybody -sucks..”

This song really grew into an anthem on the TikTok circuit, which means that its perfect for a short burst of impact to make a video seem complete, representing some kind of rage or frustration. If you need to convey a feeling of irresponsible anger, there is no way to do it more quickly than with “Break Stuff”, which sounds more like a toddler throwing a tantrum than actual anger.

“Break Stuff” is easily the highest-rated song by Limp on the website Album of the Year as well as their most streamed song. The song’s biggest moment? He screams, “And if my day keeps going this way, I just might /Break your fucking face tonight.”

Someone told me this line made them think of the term toxic masculinity. Oh, really? You think? Maybe? Look—I don’t think the issue is that the song is about toxic masculinity. It probably is. But that’s not what bothers me. The bigger issue is that the song is kind of stupid. It’s raw, loud, and deliberately over-the-top—perfect for a mosh pit, which, by the way, I have nothing but respect for. And a lot of Limp Bizkit’s biggest fans are women, which complicates any tidy narrative about aggression and gender.

In the documentary Woodstock ’99: Peace, Love, and Rage, archival footage shows Durst hyping the crowd during this song—leading media and organizers to accuse him of inciting violence. That’s a little unfair. The real problem wasn’t Durst; it was the lineup, which attracted exactly the kind of fans most likely to rebel against a poorly managed festival masquerading as a tribute to peace, love, and unity. If the organizers had booked only the Lilith Fair roster, the crowd would’ve stayed quiet—and maybe calmly voiced concern to someone at the merch table. Limp Bizkit fans made the festival listen.