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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting concept, but I think the researcher put too much personal bias in their choice of songs. For example, there are some very conspicuous omissions from the list: no Nirvana, no Foo Fighters, no Linkin Park, no Jay Z, no No Doubt. These are some of the most iconic musicians from the 90s.

I still see young kids walking around with the same Nirvana t-shirt with the yellow smiley face that I wore in middle school. So I imagine Smells Like Teens Spirit is recognized by teenagers today. I've heard a lot of people say that's the song that started the 90s.

Also, it would be interesting to normalize this by noting whether or not the song appeared on Glee. I'm fairly certain that's the reason for the Losing My Religion being so recognizable, I wonder how it compares to a song like It's the End of the World.

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Linkin Park was not an iconic ‘90s band at any time in the 1990s —- why would they be a glaring omission when their debut came out in 2000?

Fair enough, I thought Hybrid Theory, which was all over the radio when it was released, came out in 99.

> This is an interesting concept, but I think the researcher put too much personal bias in their choice of songs. For example, there are some very conspicuous omissions from the list: no Nirvana, no Foo Fighters, no Linkin Park, no Jay Z, no No Doubt. These are some of the most iconic musicians from the 90s.

It's garbage in, garbage out. They should have sanity tested their song selections before they started collecting data.

And even if they wanted to stick with an "unbiased" criteria like peak chart position, with 2,925,295 data points, they could have probably broadened the criteria to account for some of the problems.

As a gen-z born in 99, I can tell that many people who were born in 97-2002 might know a lot of songs by Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Guns 'n' Roses, Ramones. Also, at least when I did the quiz, I knew 1 out of 10 songs, and I used to listen to a lot of pop songs when I was a child.

It would also be interesting to see how the location might affect the numbers, since popular local radio and TV stations might have aired different songs, some movies and series were popular in some countries and not in others, etc. Tom Scott did something similar with Jingle Bells [1].

Something else to note: I missed Hey There Delilah and La Bamba, songs that you can recognise easily if the most recognisable part of the song is played.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5u9JSnAAU4

The article says the choice of songs is "all the ’90s songs that charted in the top 5 of the Billboard Hot 100". Is that incorrect? It does seem likely that Jay-Z at least would be on there...

There's a local radio station that got bought out and changed its format, probably about 20 years ago. They played "It's the End of the World" on repeat for about 24 hours.

It’s worth a read:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KXXR

They played it over the whole weekend. I was in high school and we all talked about it Monday morning. The replacement station then played it as it’s first track. Later, the station came back at a different frequency. Then the two stations swapped, and when they did, the replacement station played it on a loop on their final day.

Interesting. The event I was remembering was the second one, when The Edge switched. 1997, so my guess of 20 years ago wasn't too far off.

Smells Like Teen Spirit may have started the 90's but the Pixies arguably started Nirvana.

Pixies were the flame, Wipers were the fuse, Stooges were the bomb.

https://images.kerrangcdn.com/KurtDiaryPage.jpg?auto=compres... for the rest of the list.

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