by Peter Gorman

In all the millennial fever to make best-of-the-century lists, rock and roll magazines generally haven't participated. Rock and roll has got much less than a hundred years of life to it, at most it's in its late 40s, so in 1999 all it gets to do is chronicle a mere decade. Spin magazine is a little less than 15-years-old, but throughout those years it has striven to be contemporary, which may explain why its best of the 90s issue easily tops a comparable one by Rolling Stone, a magazine that is now over 30 and can no longer be trusted. Spin can flounder when trying to find its way around rock history, but it has been here throughout the 90s, tracking the trends and overpraising in places like all pop magazines do, yet it knows where it's been, and its 90 best albums of the 90s actually makes a good case for the decade's music and Spin's role in covering it.

Apparently we don't all agree, but all the people can't be all right all of the time, as a wise man once said. An article by Gavin McNett in the on-line magazine Salon takes a different approach to Spin's list. McNett suggests the magazine concocted its list to fit a PC agenda and achieve demographically safe results. McNett even imagines the Spin editors sweating over the top three finishers, placing Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet at number two because they needed a hip-hop act near the top but not at the very top, which was reserved for Nevermind by those white boy rockers Nirvana. The number three slot then went to P.J. Harvey because - according to McNett - Spin's editors felt they needed a woman near (but not at) the top spot

Apparently McNett doesn't believe these three albums could have finished where they did without the editors fixing the election. Yet Nevermind is recognized as a classic, a touchstone of the decade, so that for it to finish out of the number one slot would have required some explanation, not to mention a rigging of the ballots. It's not that Nevermind would finish at number one on most people's best-of-the-decade lists - nothing would, there's too much out there and too much diversity, different strokes for different folks and so on - but in any fairly large poll of fairly knowledgeable rock critics, Nevermind is going to come in first because nothing else has the necessary votes to force a run-off. Second place is wide open, but would it really have been scandalous if hip-hop's first entry in the poll was in the fourth or seventh slot? Twelfth probably, Twentieth definitely, but no one would have cried foul if there wasn't one in the top three. Fear of a Black Planet was widely praised in 1990, so it's appearance in the number two slot is hardly shocking, though not a given.

Many of us do feel a need to display our open-mindedness, our well-rounded tastes, our willingness to embrace the music of different cultures. It works the other way too; sometimes voters adjust their lists to specifically avoid charges of preferential treatment. It's a tough battle to win. Don't want to appear too black, or too male, or too soft, too anything. What's a poor voter to do? Sprinkle a bit of rap here, a bit of punk there, place a country-tinge next to the house mix, and presto, a list that proves that even if we can't all get along, at least this critic can get along with whatever it is you're grooving to. The result is what a cynic would call a politically correct list. Except that 90s rock and roll really has been diverse, and good in diverse ways, and Spin is reflecting that in its list. Go ahead and mix it up; no apologies necessary for a decade of music that really had multicultural highlights.

McNett doesn't see it that way. He writes: "A woman couldn't be No. 1, but there has to be one way up there. You can almost see the editorial huddle, wrangling over an attempt to float Lauryn Hill into the top 3 (two in one!), hair-splitting over how high Beck and the Beasties should be placed relative to the Fugees, and recalculating the race-and-gender algebra anew with each change in precedence."

Let's say that McNatt's fantasy is true, that Spin's editors actually surmised about putting Lauryn Hill in the top three so that they could satisfy a race and gender quota with one selection. What Spin's editors would have failed to consider is that genders do not have a sound; different cultures can produce their own distinctive music, but women are a part of every culture. Hill owes little or nothing to her sound by simply being a female, but there is something to be said for including someone based on their musical style; and Hill owes much if not all of her musical heritage to her African-American culture, from which she has chosen her to develop her style. And what would be wrong with trying to include different styles in a music poll for a magazine that purports to cover the entire melting pot of sounds that are defined as rock and roll? A cynic would say that someone was included in a music poll because of their race; but if a particular race happens to dominate a certain style of music, the truth would more likely be that a style of music was being represented, and Spin should be attempting to create a list that reflects the decade's various styles of great rock and roll. The resulting racial diversity would simply be a by-product of that effort. (Spin, by the way, did award Lauryn Hill the album of the year in 1998, proving that their number one slots are not just for white boys.)

All right then, cultures have their own musical styles, but I've stated that women do not have a musical style all their own (debatable, but not right now). By making this statement I am then opening up possible charges of favoritism against Spin for including so many women in its poll; one could accuse them of voting for a gender, not a genre. Fair enough. However, there are two problems with making such an accusation: one, you've got no proof; two, it was simply a great decade for women in rock and roll, by far their finest decade. Nobody at Spin need have worried about including undeserving women on their poll, if they really were so inclined to fulfill some gender quota. P.J. Harvey is one of the most celebrated singers of the decade; that one of her records finished in the top three seems the process of natural selection. Liz Phair (#13) won the Village Voice poll in 1993, Hole (#6) won the same poll in 1994. The prevalence of women in Spin's poll should have been expected, and somewhere around one-third of the acts on the list are women or are bands that include women; perhaps we should accuse Spin of showing their male bias for the other two-thirds? Now I've got no evidence that Spin conducted an honest poll, or that the voters refrained from doing their own quota-based voting. My feeling is that Spin, having defined itself as a broad-based music magazine, should ensure that either their voters have diverse tastes or that they themselves show diverse taste in selecting their voters; the results then will take care of themselves.

However it was derived, Spin's list of the decade's finest albums is a worthy one. No one will or even should entirely agree with Spin's choices, but anyone who cares about contemporary rock music and its numerous genres will discover many of their favorites here, and likely will also notice some missing, the consequence of reducing the decade's 10,000 plus legitimate releases to a mere 90. Some will find new or forgotten names that they will add to their collection, as I did with DJ Shadow and the late Pakastani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (Ooh, good one: I admit to not owning these radically different records until last week, which shows both my humility and at the same time my willingness to explore new worlds ... note to self: am I too white?). The expected alt- rock and hip-hop heroes are here, Pavement, Beck, Sleater-Kinney, Dr. Dre, De La Soul, the Notorious B.I.G., but so are 60s icon Bob Dylan, 70s icon Neil Young, and 80s multi-platinum rockers R.E.M. and U2. Call it a big tent.

Some critical debate on these records would have been welcome, but these best-of lists are for praising the winners, and if this list happens to be comfortably celebrating albums that have already been applauded by Spin in years past, then let's at least congratulate Spin for not rewriting its own history. Leave it to Rolling Stone to place albums in the pantheon that it casually dismissed or even completely ignored when first released, without acknowledging its own shortsightedness. Spin has summed up the music of the 1990s the only way it accurately could: by being stylistically inclusive. For their achievement, they've got my vote.