10 Perfect '90s Rock Songs That Everyone Forgets About
The Hits That Never Were.
The amount of musical ground covered in the '90s is a bit much for anyone to keep up with. Around the turn of the decade in the '80s, we blasted glam metal into the ground and ushered almost every offshoot of rock into the mix, from pop punk to grunge to nu metal to Britpop to adult alternative all having its fair share of time on the charts.
When you're going through classic songs that fast though, it's easy to miss out on bits of perfection without even noticing it. Although each of these songs might be from bands that you recognize, these tracks never really got the recognition that they deserved in the limelight, as most of the radio stations only wanted to hear the big hits.
If you peel back the layers behind these songs though, there's an argument to be made that they might be some of the best work that these artists have ever made, either because of the risks that they decide to take or just finally nailing down their style to absolute perfection. From fresh faces on the scene to older acts showing that they can hold their own in the decades that followed, any other decade would have been proud to call these songs some of the best they had to offer.
10. Warped - Red Hot Chili Peppers
There's a good portion of Red Hot Chili Peppers fans that maintain that the best Chili Peppers records come when John Frusciante was in the band. After losing Hillel Slovak to heroin addiction, the creativity that John brought to the table was almost too much for him to bear with the sudden onslaught on fame, leading to him quitting the band and going down his own rabbit hole of self destruction. The Peppers were definitely in a tailspin, but that doesn't mean that the Navarro years should be ignored on principle.
Though One Hot Minute has been given some appraisal in the past few years for being a lot better than a lot of us remember it to be, songs like Warped should have never been given that treatment in the first place. Kicking off the record on a weird note with Anthony Kiedis speaking singing the intro of the song, the whole track turns into a borderline metal cut once the rest of the instruments kick in, with Dave Navarro taking a blistering solo in the back half that carried over a lot of the shredding he had in Jane's Addiction.
Then again, you can see why this was a much different version of the Peppers than what we had gotten used to on Blood Sugar Sex Magik. A lot of the band members had relapsed on drugs during this period, and the sound of this record was a lot more dark for people who were expecting Under the Bridge Part 2 to take in. Still, pain demands to be felt sometimes, and you can occasionally turn it into something that kicks ass.