60 Songs That Explain the '90s

 Book 63 of my 2025 Reading Challenge

read from August 24 - 31

60 Songs That Explain the '90s by Rob Harvilla

published 2023

My Opinion

2 stars

I'm also a '90s high schooler/college kid which makes me the prime demographic for this book.  As the author rightly points out, the music of your teenage years is probably going to be what you consider the "best" decade of music.

There are way more than 60 songs mentioned in this book, as the author notes immediately.  This book spawned from the author's podcast of the same name (which has also covered more than 60 songs so far) which I haven't heard.  Maybe that format works better than the book but I'm also not intrigued enough to check it out.

Credit where credit is due: it was a great start with the laugh-out-loud descriptions of Celine Dion (my personal favorite: "[Dion] came here to kick ass and sing songs, and she's about out of ass") and the letter from his mother.  But it all went downhill from there, unfortunately.

I found the book difficult to read with all the footnotes cramming extra information in instead of finding a way to work it into the text.  And with so many songs it became a line or two (and maybe a footnote) about each one, making it difficult to stay grounded.  Either I'd heard the song and would've wanted more reflection or I'd never heard the song and would've wanted to learn about it.  Or more likely, I'd heard the song but didn't know I'd heard the song because I didn't know that was the title of the song and there was nothing else shared that would've jogged my memory.

Overall, this was a miss for me.  I'd hoped for shared experiences but I'll just go back to my own '90s playlist and feel my own nostalgia instead.