10 Songs That Defined The '90s

So...how are you able to top something like Smells Like Teen Spirit, which already seemed to have the label of classic prestamped on it? Since Kurt Cobain had knocked down the doors for the entire genre, there's no real recovering from something like that on the charts. Well, even though Kurt Cobain may have knocked down the door with Teen Spirit, Welcome to Paradise by Green Day dared to answer the question of where we could go next.

Released just a few months after Cobain's suicide, this kind of bratty attitude was still just as visceral sounding as Nirvana did just a few years earlier. While punk rock certainly wasn't anything that new at the time, the tone of this song is much more indicative of where Generation X was after being rocked by Cobain's demise. For most of this song, the narrator is down on his luck and is rendered virtually homeless and walking the street.

Then again, the song is not defeatist like grunge, as he's willing to take on the world regardless of what kind of weird turns that it will throw at him. As much as it sounds angsty, this is disaffected without feeling too jaded for your own good. Even though things might seem pretty dire at this point, it's songs like these that let you know that escape is still possible.