Fire's Flaming Hot Takes

  The Top 10 Best Hit Songs of 1999 Hey guys, Fire here, and it’s that time again—today we’re counting down the top 10 BEST hit songs of 1999!! So as I said in my worst list, 1999 seems to be generally agreed upon as one of the best years of the 90s for pop music. And I tend to agree, it was an iconic year for mainstream music where the boyband wars were at their apex, with *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys (and their fanbases) duking it out to see who was the biggest boyband. Additionally, this year also saw the dominance of TRL, meaning that teen pop from artists like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera had a strong showing. This was also the year of the Latin Music explosion, meaning acts like Ricky Martin, Lou Bega, and Marc Anthony were seeing success. 1999 was arguably the year where the most iconic 90s hits have lasted—I still hear a good chunk of these songs as radio recurrents. But one of the most notable things in my eyes is that 1999 was the first year that airplay single...

The Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of 1999 Hey guys, it’s Fire from Fire’s Flaming Hot Takes, and today we’re counting down the top 10 WORST hit songs of 1999!! So 1999 seems to be generally agreed upon as one of the best years for pop music of the 90s. And honestly, I can see why, even if I think I’d give an edge to 1996 and, to a lesser extent, 1998. It was the end of not only the 90s, not only a century, but the end of a millennium. What this year’s pop music reminded me of most was 2021—a big and important year for pop music that might not be quite among the very best years of its respective decade, but one where the great iconic hits overshadow the worst stuff by a considerable margin. I’ll talk more about the great trends in 1999’s pop music in the best list, but in the meantime, the worst hits of this year can be mainly lumped into a generic category of tedious and cheesy ballads and/or songs that have aged really badly thanks to events that would come to light 20-30 years later. The so...