Not to be confused with the Bee Gees’ classic, this song instead is all about Dru Hill’s sexual prowess. This single also helped the group blow up when it appeared on their sophomore album Enter The Dru. It had all the hallmarks of the classic Dru Hill sound: impeccable harmonies, staccato production flairs, and Sisqo’s unmistakable vocal runs. 73: Immature – Never Lie After suffering through heartache Deborah Cox is surprised to find a new love possessing the key to her heart. The unlikely, gospel-inflected hit helped establish Cox as a household diva of the 90s and eventually became a gay anthem, thanks to a remix by Hex Hector. 62: Tamia – So Into You The widow of Notorious B.I.G., Faith Evans’s musical talent is often overshadowed by her personal life. But the church-choir-bred vocalist had a talent that was leaps and bounds beyond many of her peers. Honeyed and at once yearning and comforting, Evans’ velvet voice skims over this wistful romantic ballad with depth and precision. 71: Silk – Freak Me Oasis’ most famous song has become something of a punchline, owing to countless amateur guitarists fumbling their way through it at coffeehouses and parties. However, “Wonderwall” itself is timeless. “There are many things that I would like to say to you / But I don’t know how,” Liam Gallagher sings, tapping into a lovelorn sincerity as everlasting as Kurt Cobain’s teenage angst. The Offspring – Come Out and Play (1994)

The single was released in October 1991 as promotion for the band’s Greatest Hits II album, just six weeks before Freddie Mercury died. A heartbreakingly beautiful song, it reached number 17 in the Irish charts. Though their F-bomb-dropping cover of “I Will Survive” was more notorious, “The Distance” was the bigger hit for Cake, thanks to the song’s racing-as-a-metaphor-for-romantic-pursuit narrative and mariachi-inspired trumpet. Given how dour and humorless much of grunge could be, Cake’s deadpan goofiness offered a welcome respite. The Cardigans – Lovefool (1996) The second single of their debut album Bigger, Better, Faster, More!, ‘What’s Up?’, actually originates from before the group started, with Linda Perry having written it before then. The title does not appear in the lyrics, but the phrase “What’s going on?” features heavily in the chorus. Linda Perry fought to get her version of the song released as she disliked the reworked version that featured different lyrics. The music video features a police helicopter flying around Los Angeles, catching people, gay and straight, kissing or having sex in public. George Michael is dressed as a police officer and dances in a public toilet that looks more like a nightclub. Another of my favourite queer songs from the ’90s is this single from Tracy Chapman’s fourth album, A New Beginning (1995), and her first single since 1992. The music video shows Chapman playing the song in a bar with her band. An underrated song; I just love its simplicity about looking for a reason to stay with someone. Chapman did a duet version of the song with Eric Clapton, which was released on a compilation album in 1999.The very idea of a dance rendition of a Neil Young ballad sounds like it shouldn’t work. But Saint Etienne pull off their cover of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” by staying true to the original’s emotional tenor – a melancholy, homespun charm that’s better suited for dancing on your own in your bedroom than in the club. Stereolab – French Disko (1993) Another Babyface produced hit, this sultry tune won the Soul Train Music Award for Best Male R&B, Soul single and Johnny Gill proved that like Bobby Brown and Bell Biv Devoe, he too could be a success on his own, outside of New Edition. 65: Somethin’ For The People – My Love Is The Shhh! The 4 Non Blondes got their start in the San Francisco bar scene, especially lesbian bars, which garnered them a significant following of queer women. Songs mean a lot when songs are bought / And so are you,” Stephen Malkmus snipes on “Cut Your Hair,” a sarcastic shot at an unscrupulous music industry and the fame-hungry bands willing to play ball with it. Ironically, “Cut Your Hair” was the closest Pavement would get to a hit, peaking in the Top 10 of Billboard’s US Alternative Airplay chart. Perhaps that’s why Malkmus steered Pavement toward shaggier, less commercially-friendly sounds on the subsequent Wowee Zowee. Pearl Jam – Alive (1991)

Leave it to Mariah Carey, the girl next door, to make pure lust sound so naive, so syrupy sweet, that it could be read as something pious to a passerby. Leave it to a diva at the height of her fame to describe being horny as feeling “kinda hectic inside,” and to articulate it by singing more dizzying runs than an amusement park’s worth of rides. It feels right that she wrote, produced, and recorded “Fantasy” in only two days, roughly the amount of time a person can live solely on the giddiness of a flirtation and the anticipation of an eventual release. Here’s what love at 26, the age at which she put out the song, could feel like. It’s what you want love to feel like for the rest of your life, too. Originally a song by The Village People from their 1979 album Go West, Chris Lowe of the Pet Shop Boys chose it for the duo to perform at an AIDS benefit at the Haçienda nightclub in Manchester in 1992. The duo then decided to record it, and it appeared on their highly regarded 1993 album, Very. The album was called their “coming-out” album due to its content, including this bizarrely moving cover, and Neil Tennant discussing his long-rumoured homosexuality. Played during the closing credits of The Lion King, the song was originally to be performed by characters from the movie , but John objected to its comical nature. He wanted it to follow “Disney’s tradition of great love songs” and said it had the potential to be used to “express the lions’ feelings for each other far better than dialogue could”.When Mother Love Bone frontman Andrew Wood passed away in 1990, his former roommate Chris Cornell teamed up with two of Wood’s bandmates – guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament – to pay tribute to their fallen comrade. Though its members would go on to scale greater heights in Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, Temple of the Dog was a formidable act in its own right, as proven by the chart success of the supergroup’s eponymous album and its lead single, “Hunger Strike.” It’s one of grunge’s earliest works, and one of its most essential. That Dog – Minneapolis (1997)

No decade is a musical monolith, but seeing the best songs of the ‘90s listed all in one place, the era seems especially scattered. History has boiled it down to grunge and gangsta rap on one end, boy bands and Britney Spears at the other, but it’s the stuff in the middle and on the fringes that makes the period difficult to sum up. Having perfected the blueprint for early 90s R&B songs, New Edition proved they were no longer just a fresh-faced boy band and were all grown up with “I’m Still In Love.” The second single from the fittingly titled Home Again album saw the group reunite with frontman Bobby Brown along with their veteran production team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to create a sensual jam that stormed the charts. 55: Dionne Farris – Hopeless If you started playing bass in the 90s, there’s a good chance you were inspired to do so after listening to Les Claypool, who can coax more sounds out of four strings than most guitarists can get out of six. It’s those crazy bass skills that broke Primus into the mainstream with “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” – and if you can’t remember what the song is about, it’s probably because you were too busy frantically trying to play air bass along with it. Los Prisioneros – Tren al sur (1990) Lauryn Hill initially penned “Ex-Factor” for another group but felt it was too personal to give away. This beautiful, heart-wrenching, breakup song was on repeat on many a Discman due to its relatability and stirring vocal performance. 29: Aaliyah – One In A Million Oasis have two further songs inside Greatest Songs of the 90s Top 10 – ‘Wonderwall’ at Number 3 and ‘Live Forever’ at Number 5. ‘Champagne Supernova’ narrowly missed out on the Top 10 at Number 12.

Fiona Apple: “Criminal” (1996)

This extremely upbeat cover of Ready For The World’s 1986 tune took the airwaves by storm 11 years later in 1997. INOJ’s rework of the song and her cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time”, was less a slow jam or ballad than a song to be blasted at your cardio funk class. 52: Queen Latifah – Weekend Love Unless I missed something, this is the first song on my list(s) that won an Academy Award. Unusually for Elton John, the lyricist is not Bernie Taupin but Tim Rice. The chart success of Sublime’s “What I Got” (and its parent album) was without a doubt bittersweet for the band and its fans, as frontman Bradley Nowell died of a heroin overdose just months before the single was released. But it would be reductive to tie that success to Nowell’s passing, as the tune’s loping guitar melody and warm synthesizers would’ve almost certainly made “What I Got” a hit – think of it as a Grateful Dead mantra for skate-punks and frat boys. The Sundays – Here’s Where the Story Ends (1990) Glory Box” feels like a chemical composition as much as it does a musical one: So perfect is the alchemy of Geoff Barrow’s dank soundscapes, Beth Gibbons’ shivering vocals, and Adrian Utley’s guitar lines, that if you were to upset the balance between them, the song would be unequivocally changed. It’s just one of the reasons why Portishead was one of trip-hop’s premier acts, and why none of its imitators could properly replicate its gloomy aura. Primus – Jerry Was a Race Car Driver (1991) Art Alexakis got personal on Everclear’s sophomore record, Sparkle and Fade, channeling his traumatic upbringing into tunes that were either explicitly autobiographical (“Heroin Girl”) or fictionalized versions that were detailed enough to be someone else’s truth (“Pale Green Stars”). Even “Santa Monica” can’t fully escape the drugs and death that haunt the album, but it at least offers the possibility of a life beyond them. Fastball – The Way (1998)