I'm doing a fun thing on Bluesky, and from now through November, this newsletter will be home to my bonus liner notes. A very organized guy named Arron Wright has been moderating a series of song countdown events with deliciously detailed rules and restrictions, which begin with lots of people revealing their lists day by day on social media, and end with a meta-countdown of the most chosen songs. The upcoming event, UncoolTwo50, asks for a list of best/favorite songs released as singles between 1977 and 1999. The game officially begins in October, but I'm extending my countdown from 50 to 200. That means I started posting my list on August 1, 2024, and if I stick with my schedule, I'll wrap things up more or less when the official posting window ends on November 19.

Bluesky has a character count limit per post, so when I post songs there, I'm limited to either a one-sentence blurb with one link, or a thread that I'm not sure people will even read. I have at least a paragraph's worth of thoughts on every song, in part because I can drum up a paragraph's worth of thoughts on almost anything, but mostly because the period from 1977 to 1999 spans from two years before my birth to halfway through my junior year of college. In other words, it's the entire formative era of my musical taste, and it was a challenge to narrow my list down to 750 songs, let alone 200 or 50. Plus, the newsletter gives me room to share live performances and cover versions that add context to each song.

So here's the first set of ten songs, coming in at 200-191 on my personal Hot 200.

Oh, and if you want to follow me on Bluesky, it's the only social media where I'm active. I'm rasher.bsky.social, and when I'm not writing about music there, I'm live-skeeting figure skating and gymnastics or posting photos of my garden and cats.

200. The English Beat – Save It For Later (1982)

Dave Wakeling came out as bisexual in Mother Jones in 1985. Around 2017, I saw him and the US touring version of the band, live in a bar in Dewey Beach, Delaware. On its merits as a recorded track, this song doesn’t quite get to my top 200, but it gets here from the combination of remembering that fantastic live show (shoving ice cubes down my bra so I wouldn’t overheat) and the Dave Wakeling, Secret Bi Icon factor. Nonetheless, it’s a great song, melding New Wave production with ska horns and rhythms. It has a weird chord structure and tuning, so it feels like your ears are bending a little, trying to get around the pleasingly off-kilter intervals. The lyrics are one double entendre after another, explicit in their playfulness, like they’re wondering how long it’s going to take you to figure it out.

Pete Townshend’s deliciously dramatic 1986 cover.

The English Beat playing live in 1982, with their ska moves and quirks more visible.

199. Mariah Carey – Vision of Love (1990)

Mariah Carey’s voice is an incredible instrument. We say that about a lot of pop voices, but Carey’s is on another level. When this song came out, I religiously listened to the Casey Kasem top 40 countdown, tuning my bright yellow Sony Walkman to the local pop radio station each week to hear the movement in the rankings. Carey’s voice tore through the parade of radio hits, and for me, it’s not her whistle-register finale, but the richness of her low alto, where she sits for most of this song’s verses. The Gospel elements, like the 12/8 blues rhythm and the call-and-response vocals, felt like a Motown throwback in 1990, but they sound so typical of ‘90s R&B now. Probably because pop music has been trying to catch this song for the past 35 years.

Carey’s 1990 live performance on Good Morning America will take you directly to church.

Most people know better than to cover this, but Jennifer Hudson proved she’s the exception to the rule at the 2023 theGrio awards, with Carey in the audience.

198. Tom Waits – Downtown Train (1985)

It’s not a song about stalking a girl home from the subway; it’s a song about urban isolation. That is to say, it’s still a song narrated by a creep, but the girl he’s following is not literally a girl, and he’s only a creep as much as we’re all creeps when we ride transit alone. It begins with the natural world – the yellow moon cutting a hole in the night sky – and gradually retreats into the manufactured world of city streets. The '80s production sweetens the guitars against Waits’s rough Cookie Monster delivery, giving his voice a weary grace. But ultimately, it’s an ugly song masquerading as a pretty one, or a song that thinks it’s too ugly to be beautiful.

Here’s Waits live in 1986 at the San Remo Festival, growling into his jacket lapels:

Courtney Marie Andrews, on a 2019 tribute compilation, turns this into a country-tinged narrative of queer longing.

197. Trisha Yearwood – XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl) (1994)

My favorite subgenre of ‘90s country is extremely pointed white working-class feminism. It’s not nostalgic for an era of over-performed femininity, so much as acknowledging the shift in what it means to perform femininity when you’re trying to make it in your daddy’s world. When Yearwood performs this live, she often transposes the main hook to guitar, but I love the bright, old-fashioned fiddle riff that runs through the recorded version.

Yearwood played a duet with co-songwriter Matraca Berg at the Bluebird Café sometime in the mid-90s.

This song’s other writer is Alice Randall, who is Black, and Caroline Randall Williams’ 2024 spoken-word cover highlights that aspect of the song’s heritage.

196. Laurie Anderson – O Superman (1981)

If I’d realized when I was still teaching college writing that this song is just Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto in the form of experimental pop music, my students would have one hell of an annoying high-concept semester. This song is, from a certain angle (probably many angles) unlistenable, but if you’re in the right frame of mind (i.e. in college and a girl you like lends you a CD of Big Science) it’s captivating in its strangeness. The alienating elements don’t get warmer as the song progresses. The relentless rhythm of the single repeated synth note and the multi-tracked vocoder vocals stay chilly, like an early ‘80s vision of a science fiction future that never came to pass. But the narrative gets more poignant, a plea for connection in the sterile, over-technologized world.

Anderson seldom performed this song live in the years immediately after its release, but she resuscitated it after 9/11 and has been bringing it to life with political urgency ever since, as in this 2015 concert.

This minimalist 2022 cover by O’o is haunting in a wholly different way from the original.

195. The Cars – You Might Think (1984)

In an era of over-layered synths, this song’s one-finger keyboard riff is a triumph of simplicity. The keyboard lines grow more intricate as the song progresses, but they stay as indefatigable as the song’s obsessed narrator. This is definitely a song with consent issues (which the bonkers music video makes worse) but there’s a gentle resignation to it, like the narrator is going to back off after this last-ditch musical attempt to get the girl. Somewhere, sometime, when she’s curious, he’ll be back around.

The Cars’ 1985 Live Aid performance draws attention to the heavy lifting those keyboards are doing.

100 Fables’ 2015 trash-pop cover is the kind of fun this song deserves.

194. Rusted Root – Send Me on My Way (1994)

The crunchy neo-hippie jam rock of the ‘90s gets a bad rap now, but I cannot express how much this stuff spoke to my soul when I was fifteen. And because we all accept in advance that music like this is cheesy and dated, it’s easier for me to enjoy it for what it is than a lot of other genres. The guitar riff is infectious, and Michael Glabicki’s mumble-crooned vocals are pleasingly earnest. There’s a strain of pop music that’s starting to sound like this again, and I suspect that every generation needs to tweetle a whistle flute and imagine a journey for themselves.

Rusted Root’s live performance at Woodstock 99 featured a bongo solo and extended whistle flute.

The only cover this song needs is by a college a cappella group, so here’s Not Too Sharp, from 2014.

193. Yazoo – Only You (1982)

At its core, this is a torchy ballad that might be more at home as a country or soul song, but the synth-pop arrangement turns it into the heartbroken lament of a lonely alien, drifting through space. There’s a strange calm to Alison Moyet’s vocal, like she’s trying to hold it together for a difficult conversation, and she’ll cry when the song is over. The synth lines are deceptively simple, weaving in and out of one another, each its own hooky, shimmery loop. As I suspected, Wikipedia confirms they were recorded on monophonic synthesizers and mixed. Forty years on, it still sounds like the future.

A live 1982 performance that highlights how much mileage Vince Clarke got out of a single Roland synthesizer.

Joshua Radin’s beautiful cello-and-guitar acoustic cover from 2018.

192. Fey – Azúcar Amargo (1996)

The sunniest possible answer to “Why don’t you dump that guy already?” I don’t know how Fey consistently managed to keep her relentlessly upbeat electro-pop on the right side of annoying. In this case, it’s because the lyrics are so much darker than the sound of the song, shifting back and forth between the pain of realizing a relationship has run its course and the frustration of having to bear the emotional weight of a guy who won’t communicate. But if it’s last call at the club and you’re dancing with your friends, all you care about is the infectious rhythm and shoutable chorus.

Fey has a little more grit in her voice in this 2012 live performance.

In 2021, Suprema Corte del Norte gave this song the pop punk cover it deserves.

191. Ice Cube – It Was a Good Day (1993)

One of my favorite social media posts of all time is the one where they figure out exactly which day in 1993 Ice Cube is rapping about. The genius of the song is how mundane his good day is – he gets laid, he beats his friends at dice, the Lakers win. But it’s also slyly political: the centerpiece moment is when he says there were no murders in South Central that day. Musically, Cube’s flow is laid back but flawlessly timed, and the looped sample of the Isley Brothers’ “Footsteps in the Dark” drives with unhurried bliss.

Live at Woodstock 99, Ice Cube got the mostly white crowd to put their peace signs in the air.

Cary Kanno makes the genius choice to play the main riff on mandolin in this 2021 cover.

Plus: Something I watched this week

I've mostly been watching the Olympics, but I took a break from gymnastics on Sunday to watch Pedro Almodóvar's short film, Strange Way of Life. At first, I was frustrated that it's a lean 30 minutes, because I wanted more of these characters and their story. But it's a tight fable that needs no additional storytelling, and I like that at least for directors of Almodóvar's caliber, there's room on streaming services for films that aren't unnecessarily bloated out to feature length. It's a sly and canny commentary on both the straight male fantasy of the American West and the gay male fantasy of cowboy homoeroticism. And like a lot of what Almodóvar has been doing lately, it's also a reflection on aging and the way older bodies change and interact. In terms of performances, Ethan Hawke is a bit hammier than I'd like, and I can't tell if Pedro Pascal is too restrained or just subdued by comparison. Still, both are actors committed to wearing the inner lives of their characters in their faces and movement, which is why I was left wanting more. After only 30 minutes, these two men seemed so real.

And a cat photo

Thanks for reading!