If you’ve been following Rob Harvilla’s podcast, 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s, you know the ’90s were a chaotic and gritty and utterly magical time for music—a confounding barrage of genres and lifestyles and superstars, from grunge to hip-hop, from sumptuous R&B to rambunctious ska-punk, from Axl to Kurt to Missy to Santana to Tupac to Britney. 

On Tuesday, Rob tackles all that in print form with the release of his book, which not-so-coincidentally bears the same name as his podcast. In 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s, Rob reimagines all the earwormy, iconic hits Gen Xers pine for with vivid historical storytelling, sharp critical analysis, rampant loopiness, and wryly personal ruminations on the most bizarre, joyous, and inescapable songs from a decade we both regret entirely and miss desperately. Buy the book here, and read a brief interview with Rob and an excerpt below.

A Brief Q&A With Rob

You’ve been doing the podcast for years now. Why turn it into a book?
Prestige! To impress my parents and make them feel better about letting me major in “magazine journalism” in 1996! I got to take an author photo! (My wife took it!) The podcast has been the coolest and most gratifying experience in my 20-plus-year career as a “magazine journalist,” and I have generated like 600,000 words of profound thoughts and dumb jokes over the course of doing it, so I figured why not celebrate and also whip up a physical object I can wave around at my next high school reunion.

What were the biggest challenges in adapting things for print?
It turns out 600,000 words is way too long for a book. So the challenge was radically distilling all those profound thoughts and dumb jokes into a physical object I can physically wave around, and figuring out how to make 120 random songs make sense rubbing up next to one another. Will Céline Dion and Courtney Love get along? Will the jerky Third Eye Blind guy play nice with Brandy and Monica? Do Kurt Cobain and Biggie and Aaliyah have anything to say to each other? And how dumb are these jokes, exactly?

What can people expect from the book that they don’t get in the pod?
So my hope is that folks familiar with the show will recognize the show here: the dad jokes from back when I was still a teenager, the spectacularly mundane suburban anecdotes, the “Lars Ulrich is the Derek Jeter of drummers” hot takes. What the book does (hopefully) is cram these songs together, where they can argue and/or harmonize sweetly together. My goal is that for each chapter you read the list of 12 songs covered in that chapter and think, This is ridiculous, these songs have nothing to do with each other, and by the end of the chapter you think, OK, fine.

We’ve included an excerpt from the sellouts chapter with this newsletter. Why did the idea of “selling out” matter so much then and not as much now?
I do think Napster played a substantial role in destroying this notion of Selling Out: Once we were downloading all our music for free, we, as a society, forfeited our right to sass our favorite bands for making money any way they could. Until then we did whatever Kurt Cobain and Ethan Hawke told us to do (or not do), and it all seemed like a good idea at the time.

EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT:
“Enter Sandman,” Lars Ulrich, and the Rich History of the Rock ’n’ Roll Sellout