#because he just like me fr and i’m tired of the shitty playlists people make where they just make him a frat boy :

[perrerier]

Happy Birthday Ani!!!

Here is my playlist for the wonderful beautiful amazing freshly 22 year old @keepyourlife!! I hope i did your boy proud.

Tracklist under the break, the purple highlighted songs are those that i feel particularly strong about!

[johannesviii]

Top 10 Personal Favorite Hit Songs from 1994

Back in the day, M6 (what used to be the French equivalent of MTV) would broadcast a lot of music videos and my favorite to watch were always the Dance ones.

What I’m trying to say is that you won’t like this list either.

Disclaimers:

Keep in mind I’m using both the year-end top 100 lists from the US and from France while making these top 10 things. There’s songs in English that charted in my country way higher than they did in their home countries, or even earlier or later, so that might get surprising at times.

Of course there will be stuff in French. We suck. I know. It’s my list. Deal with it.

My musical tastes have always been terrible and I’m not a critic, just a listener and an idiot.

I have sound to color synesthesia which justifies nothing but might explain why I have trouble describing some songs in other terms than visual ones

There’s so many honorable mentions this time I’m gonna list them all, with some short commentary in some cases:

Another Night - Real McCoy

Mangez-moi - Billy Ze Kick (this is a novelty song about eating shrooms. Obviously I didn’t get that as a kid.)

Nouveau Western - MC Solaar (this guy is going to end up on a list eventually, watch this space.)

Linger - the Cranberries

La Corrida - Francis Cabrel (this is a song about a corrida seen from the perspective of a bull and it’s horribly tragic.)

Think About the Way - Ice MC

Juste Après - Fredericks, Goldman & Jones (this is a song about a guy watching a documentary about a nurse who just saved a baby who was about to die at birth and he’s wondering what she was thinking about afterwards. Only in a Goldman hit song, I guess.)

Loser - Beck (the fact that this song didn’t make the list just because of two Eurodance acts should enrage every single person I ever met who tried to convince me Beck was the best artist of the 90s.)

10 - Saturday Night (Whigfield)

US: Not on the list / FR: #28

Yep. Goldman and Beck were kept off the list by Whigfield and Reel 2 Real.

I have nothing more to say about that.

9 - I Like To Move It (Reel 2 Real)

US: Not on the list / FR: #6

Nowadays I’m pretty sure everyone is thinking about Madagascar and bouncy lemurs first when they hear this song, but holy S H I T did it sound dangerous and menacing back when I was a kid. If Eurodance was full of wizards and magic and epic fights to little me back then, that singer right there was definitely the evil sorcerer of the land and all would recoil before his power.

Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to grow up in a country where you can understand 99% of the songs playing on the radio, and I can’t help but think it might be slightly less interesting.

8 - Streets of Philadelphia (Bruce Springsteen)

US: #54 / FR: #13

If my taste in music was less shitty this would be much higher. Alas, you’re reading the lists of someone who genuinely thinks Haddaway is amazing, so yeah.

Possibly one of the saddest songs ever written but the pleasant and soft music makes it incredibly beautiful, which in turn makes it sound even more tragic and ugh it always makes me want to cry. It’s so perfect. It’s so potent I knew it was a tragic and beautiful song long before I started to learn English and could understand a single word of it. And yet it’s only #8, because the fact it destroys me every time makes it hard to listen to it very often.

EDIT: I was browsing my old top 30s to take pictures for the next top 10s and I was shocked to discover I had actually put that song on one of my lists at the time, so take that as you will.

7 - Always (Erasure)

US: #73 / FR: Not on the list

The fact that this kind of weird new wave still existed AND charted in 1994 is nothing short of a miracle and makes absolutely no sense, but I’m not gonna complain. Not my favorite Erasure single by a mile though (that would be Oh l’Amour. Not surprising at all, I know).

Also I dare you not to laugh at the lyrics, especially the first line ("Open your eyes and see... your eyes are open"). Campy in all the best ways. Do I feel bad for putting it above Streets of Philadelphia? Oh yes. Will I change my mind? Probably not.

6 - 7 Seconds (Youssou N’Dour & Neneh Cherry)

US: Not on the list / FR: #1

#1 on the French year-end list, like, damn. Sometimes quality wins, I guess. But yeah, I remember this song being everywhere, to the point I’m surprised it never really charted in the US. It was overplayed to death by the radio here.

And yet... I never, ever grew tired of hearing it. Never. Not even at the time. It is that good. It’s one of the best hits of the decade if not the best.

Of course I’m gonna put some stupid shit above that song but I beg you to listen to it if, for some extraordinary reason, you’ve never heard it before.

5 - Here Comes The Hotstepper (Ini Kamoze)

US: #85 / FR: Not on the list (#10 the next year though!)

I don’t have anything to say about this song in particular. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s one of the best songs to listen to while walking because you always feel super cool, even if you objectively look like wet garbage. It just gives you an automatic +2 in charisma. That’s just the way it is.

4 - Return to Innocence (Enigma)

US: #33 / FR: Not on the list

I listened to this song on a loop for literal days when I was 15 or so.

It’s not one of the best Enigma tracks and this album isn’t even one of my faves, but listen, I’m a simple human, I see an Enigma song that charted, I put it on my list. That being said, it’s still beautiful and moving and weirdly powerful for such a soft song. And it’s not like I will have any more opportunities to put Enigma on my lists after that, so I’ll gladly take what I can get.

3 - Move On Baby (Cappella)

US: Not on the list / FR: #78

These guys had such strange music videos, full of weird props, costumes and masks, and as you can guess it was fascinating to me at the time. It still is, mostly. It’s great eurodance but with the added bonus of weird, peak new wave-like visuals. In another music video, the guy had a time machine and was wearing a top hat and was meeting Egyptian gods, a medieval princess and possibly himself!

But yeah, even without the visuals, this is a killer beat that stays in your head but never gets annoying. I love it, it’s been on my playlist for years now, and only a king of Eurodance can top this.

You already know who’s coming.

2 - Rock My Heart (Haddaway)

US: Not on the list / FR: #54

This is the song (and the video - may I remind you I was mostly hearing these songs on tv because of the French musical channel) that cemented Haddaway as “one of the coolest, most beautiful people alive and possibly a wizard” to me. Because he had a cane and it was CLEARLY a magic staff to me. Also, in my eyes, all his friends in the video looked like mysterious goddesses and spirits. Because I was six, mostly. But come on, look at them, you can’t blame me.

This is still on my mp3 playlist to this day, by the way, if you were wondering.

Why isn’t it #1 if I love it so much, you ask?

1 - The Rhythm of the Night (Corona)

US: Not on the list (...yet) / FR: #7

All hail the queen of eurodance, who is actually not credited on the single and isn’t even in the music video: Jenny B. These vocals are so. good. It’s repetitive and catchy in all the ways I love, it has an untouchable synth beat, I listened to it hundreds of times and it never gets old. N E V E R. The colors in this melody, holy SHIT

And that music video with the weird cabalistic circles is partly responsible for making me believe eurodance was the music of wizards and magic when I was a kid.

And that’s a wonderful thing.

Next up: A list with a top 3 in which every song is actually possible to defend? Sounds fake but okay