'90s Rock Songs That Are Painfully Overrated

It's impossible to disconnect the 1990s from grunge rock. Overnight, on a dime, the Seattle music scene's particular brand of rough, ragged, punk-and-hardcore-influenced rock stormed popular culture following the 1991 release of Nirvana's "Nevermind" and the anthem to end all anthems, "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Dingy-chic flannel was in, hairspray and spandex were out, rough authenticity and guts trumped pomp and glitz, and by the mid-90s rock dispersed into pop-punk (e.g., Green Day), the ever-vague "alternative" moniker (e.g., Radiohead), nu-metal (e.g., Korn), and others. But no matter that the '90s vast musical milieu produced heaps of superb rock, it also shot out some seriously overrated stinkers. 

When choosing overrated songs for this article, we're not going to go full contrarian and claim that colossal hits like Pearl Jam's "Jeremy," Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun," or Alice in Chain's "Would" are overrated. That would be ludicrous because those songs are justifiably awesome. But, for a song to be "overrated" it does have to be widely listened to and liked. So, this list will likely ruffle some feathers. Be prepared. 

As for why we consider the songs in this article to be overrated, it could boil down to annoying or drab musical phrasing, kindergarten-quality lyrics, flash-in-the-pan fame thanks to lucky timing or the whims of the zeitgeist, and so forth. Sometimes media gets popular because it's truly excellent, and sometimes it gets popular because it's mediocre and drives few people away. So whether it's "Fly Away" by Lenny Kravitz, late-'90s write-by-rote Green Day, or even the biggest hit from Oasis and the acrimonious antics of the Gallagher brothers, here are our picks.

In the end, Lenny Kravitz came to represent the triumph of style over substance. Does the video for 1993's "Are You Gonna Go My Way" look cool, with a red-clad Kravitz centerstage in a circular, dome-topped musical Thunderdome venue? Sure. But the cracks were already there in the song's extremely repetitive, seven-note riff, a riff greatly deteriorated from the thoughtful chord progression of Kravitz's 1989, psychedelic-laced, funk-and-soul-infused debut, "Let Love Rule." But in comparison to 1998's "Fly Away" off "5," "Are You Gonna Go My Way" might as well be Mozart (or Salieri, more accurately). Somehow, "Fly Away" became a massive hit, won the Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance in 1999, and currently sits at almost 500 million listens on Spotify.

Overall, "5" isn't a bad album. Tracks like "I Belong to You" and "If You Can't Say No" are excellent, bluesy, soulful forays that showcase Kravitz's vocal chops and which contain some serious guitar licks (even if the tone of the percussion is irritating). "Fly Away," by comparison, is low effort, elementary trash. The lyrics are exasperatingly crude and sound like an 8-year-old inventing his first rhyme. "I wish that I could fly / Into the sky, so very high / Just like a dragonfly." Lenny, Lenny, what's going on here? Don't rhyme fly with fly. It makes us wonder why. So many people buy. Track from the pigsty.

Not everyone was snared by "Fly Away," though. Even generally positive reviews of "5" recognize that "Fly Away" is twaddle. And if folks are wondering why we're not targeting "American Woman" off the same album: It's just too awful to dignify with any degree of descriptive effort besides this one sentence. 

Did you ever want to hear Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong sing in such a low-energy, half-asleep, non-punk voice (unlike "Basketcase," let's say) over some generic and brainlessly strummed open chords that sound like a teenager's first bedroom-written guitar song? At least "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" from 1997's "Nimrod" doesn't persist beyond about two-and-a-half minutes. And at least Green Day was honest about their own song right in the title. It's something quite predictable, but in the end was right. I hope you wipe your mind of this trite. Track.

By the time Green Day released "Good Riddance," they were already sounding like limp copycats of their 1994 "Dookie" glory days, which was a specular pop-punk album overflowing with earworms, jagged power chord riffs, and superb vocal harmonies. Maybe this is why "Good Riddance" caught people's attention, because acoustic apparently equals thoughtful or introspective. The song's core, open chords, though — G, C, D — are not only the most played-out, overdone, half-baked chords in the history of songwriting, but Armstrong plays them in the most lazy, thoughtless way possible. It's just strum, strum the same rhythm for two-and-a-half minutes. At least the string section in the song's bridge grants it some emotional nuance.

Interestingly, Green Day initially omitted "Good Riddance" — which is actually a break-up song about a girlfriend who moved to Ecuador — from "Dookie" and then "Insomniac." They finally included it on "Nimrod" in a move that bassist Mike Dirnt called "the most punk thing we could we do," as Vice quotes. The song was just as much of a smash as it was overrated.

No matter how bad Green Day can get, at least they're not Blink-182. Sing it with us, because you know that you know the rhythm of the lyrics: "I know. This song. It's real-ly quite dumb. Why did. It catch on. Because. It sounds fun." And then we get the na-na, na-na, na-na, na-na, nonsense chorus. If there ever was an absolute exercise in mind-numbing musical tedium, it'd be this song, Blink-182's "All the Small Things" from 1999's Enema of the State" (the album with the nurse on the cover and in the video for "What's My Age Again?"). 

Ok, at least "All the Small Things" is self-aware, much like "What's My Age Again?," which was also a contender for this article. You might not be able to hear the self-awareness in the song's music, but you can see it in the song's video, which is a parody of boy band fame. We could even take the "na-na" chorus as making fun of brain-dead choruses. But still, none of this negates the annoying qualities of "All the Small Things," which consists of a whole, ultra-repetitive three power chords and nursery rhyme-level vocal melody. Nonetheless, Blink-182 fans will feel vindicated to know that a site like American Songwriter implies that the song's simplicity led to its success.

No matter how overrated, "All the Small Things" reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, the highest for a Blink-182 song, and stayed on the chart for 23 weeks. It also has nearly 1.5 billion listens on Spotify, making it their most listened to song. At the very least, the boys of Blink-182 deserve praise for working the unwieldy word "commiserating" into the song.

Do you ever wonder why "Wonderwall" got so big? Honestly, we don't know how anyone tolerated it beyond the first time hearing Liam Gallagher's nasal, flat voice hold the second syllable of "May-beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee." Perhaps, like other songs on this list, it took off precisely because it's so transparently simple that anyone could sing it and play it, no matter that they definitely (maybe) shouldn't. But play it they have, including on streaming services. "Wonderwall" has over 2.6 billion listens on Spotify at the time of writing, making it Oasis' biggest song from 1995's "What's the Story (Morning Glory)" and biggest song, period.

We already outlined some of the reasons why "Wonderwall" is overrated, like Gallagher's annoying voice coupled with annoyingly long vocal notes. The song's down-down-down open-chord strumming gets similarly grating because the rhythm just doesn't let up over "Wonderwall's" entire length. Yes, the song has a nice string accompaniment that adds some texture and timbral variation, plus a memorable outro guitar line. But as before, these qualities don't negate the song's weaknesses. Plus, "Wonderwall" is straight-up dull, just like "Champagne Supernova" off the same album. Also, its lyrics sound like they were written just to rhyme stuff that isn't actually all that clever or revealing, like, "And all the roads that lead you there were winding / And all the lights that light the way are blinding."

Interestingly enough, Noel Gallagher isn't too fond of "Wonderwall," either. As American Songwriter quotes him, "It's the one [song] we're famous for all over the world, and it annoys the f*** out of me" because "it's not a f****** rock and roll tune." We salute you, Noel, for your honesty. 

Alanis Morissette diehards might hunt us in our sleep for this one, but "Ironic" from 1995's "Jagged Little Pill" is overrated. Plenty of discussions and articles have already gone into why the most ironic thing about "Ironic" is that it's a song about irony that doesn't know what irony is (except maybe for Mr. Play-it-Safe). But, that's not why "Ironic" is overrated. "Ironic" is overrated because it's a radio-friendly, smoothed-over, inoffensive, la-la-la head bopper that doesn't represent "Jagged Little Pill" at all. Musically, it rushes to the chorus, burns through it, repeats, has little in the way of variation, and gets predictable. Smaller singles like "All I Really Want," the album's opener, have some of the guts of "You Oughta Know's" angry story in addition to way more thoughtful musical phrasing.  

In fact, Morissette herself didn't even want "Ironic" on "Jagged Little Pill." But as she explains on Rolling Stone, she got pressured into including it because folks liked its melody. Thankfully, she doesn't care about the song too much and even welcomes folks poking fun at it.

Nonetheless, "Ironic" currently stands as Morissette's most listened to song on Spotify, at about 600 million listens. The song helped push "Jagged Little Pill" to its lofty heights of 33-million-plus sales and contributed to the album winning for Best Rock Album and Album of the Year at the 1996 Grammys. But, it was "You Oughta Know" that won for Best Rock Song and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. Also, "Ironic" helped teach a whole generation of people what irony is, even if only because of what the song gets wrong. That's a little too ironic, don't you think?