The heyday of Top 40 radio could be as frustrating as it was exhilarating, requiring you to listen through songs you hated to hear ones you loved. Today, pop radio is so rigorously formatted to carefully selected audiences that you can listen for hours and never hear any music outside of your demographic. And when you can throw on a new CD or download music, the possibility of exposure to something new dwindles even more. MTV has never been a haven for new music trying to find an audience, but watching the station, you probably have a better chance of encountering a mix of styles and songs than you would on any radio station. A hip-hop video will follow a metal video will follow a Latin pop video will follow a pop video. Granted, they could all be junk, but at least it's a mix.

1. "Smells Like Teen Spirit," Nirvana
Every seminal moment in rock 'n' roll contains the possibility of its opposite. The enormous affirmations of Elvis and the Beatles contained implicit refusals of deadening routine, and the resounding negations of the punks allowed for the possibility of something beyond boredom. Like punk, Nirvana was a no that implied a yes, even if that no, in the form of Kurt Cobain's voice-shredding mantra "a denial," sounded as if it would brook no argument. I first came across it in a hotel room in Syracuse on an all-request video station, and could scarcely believe what I was seeing -- a pep rally in hell that turns into an anarchist's ball. But you need never have seen that great video to hear a sound growing out of the rubbery, underwater guitar chords that open the song that could reduce buildings, and everything that surrounded it on the charts, to rubble.

2. "Independence Day," Martina McBride
"Smells Like Teen Spirit" is the song that defines the decade, but this mainstream country hit is the most subversive of the decade's singles. Seven years later, its contradictions are nowhere close to being resolved. And the way Martina McBride, the finest mainstream country singer of the decade, heads into those mysteries is still thrilling. Songwriter Gretchen Peters based it on the 1983 film of the same name (written by novelist Alice Hoffman), and the material could have been a classic country weeper. It's sung by a woman remembering the Fourth of July when she was eight. While she's at the town fair, her mother sets fire to the house, killing herself and her abusive drunk of a husband. The little girl returns to find herself homeless and orphaned: "They just put out the flames, and took down some names and sent me to the county home."

Nothing here is that tidy. Years later, time hasn't begun to heal any of the wounds. Listen to McBride's voice and you hear bitterness -- at her old man's brutality, at the death of her mother, at the wagging tongues of her small town finding more shame in a woman who stays than the man who beats her. But when McBride shifts into the chorus what you hear is a kind of glory. "Let freedom ring," she begins, echoing Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, except this is no celebration of nonviolence. In the next lines -- "roll the stone away/let the guilty pay" -- she's confusing New Testament forgiveness with Old Testament retribution. "I ain't saying it's right or it's wrong," McBride sings in the song's windup and if that refusal to apologize or judge her mother is by itself startling, it's no preparation for the shock that follows with the sneer McBride puts into the lines "Talk about your revolution/It's Independence Day."

In that moment McBride focuses the song's juxtaposition of independence as national institution and banal abstraction with independence in action. McBride may not be aware how far she went; surely the country radio stations that made this a hit weren't. But as surely as the punks did. "Independence Day" calls into question the nature of institutions and Values taken for granted. If McBride has a spiritual ancestor in this song, it's a figure from the civil rights movement, SNCC's Jim Forman, who said, "If we can't sit at the table, let's kick the motherfuckin' legs off!"

3. "Miss World," Hole
Maybe 15 years from now this will sound like a great punk anthem with a great punk catch phrase: "I'll make my bed/I'll lie in it/I'll make my bed/I'll die in it." To anyone who lived through that awful spring of 1994, they will always sound like the only words that didn't seem to be spoken in a foreign language.

4. "Mind Playing Tricks on Me," The Geto Boys
Despite some records that have thrilled me to the core, I've listened to hip-hop as outsider more than adherent. Partly it's the lack of distance I hear in the celebration of guns, money and hos, a hard materialism that's (to me) depressing in a way that Chuck Berry's celebrations of drive-ins and coffee-colored Cadillacs and Hooverators crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale could never be. This horrifying song steps back from gangsta fantasies and puts us -- inescapably -- into the skin of a man trying to live the thug life. He's given up everything in pursuit of it -- his woman, his son and now, it seems, his mind.

This character had an on-screen equivalent, Ice Cube in "Boyz N the Hood," flattening all human feeling from his expressive face, steeling himself to die, an old, tired man in his early 20s. The only comfort the song offered was the scratchy sample from an old soul record, and yet as a reminder of a vanished warmth it was no comfort at all. But treating both singer and audience as subjects rather than objects, the song approached the hard truths of great early '70s soul, the heyday of Curtis Mayfield and the Chi-Lites, the O'Jays of "Back Stabbers" and the Temptations of "Papa Was a Rolling Stone." No hip-hop record I've heard has touched it.

5. "Common People," Pulp
The glorious return of class hatred. In the song, at a British art school -- launching pads for countless dandy-aesthete-socialists who, like Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, have prowled through British rock -- a working-class young man meets a rich foreign girl who wants to "be like common people." What follows is funny, incisive, cruel and, finally, something akin to the revenge taken by the sideshow freaks on the heartless blond wife in Tod Browning's classic horror film "Freaks." Cocker sings as if he has the power to make her wish come true and to make it her regret it for the rest of her life.

6. "Tom Courtenay," Yo La Tengo
Appearing at about the same time as the release of the Beatles' "Anthology" CDs and the massive video retrospective, this song by Hoboken trio Yo La Tengo indirectly addressed (as the brilliant and heartbreaking accompanying video did directly) the way people turn to the past to recapture their lost youth. With the first line invoking Julie Christie, the song recalls the way some of us obsessed over everything British because it all seemed the epitome of the cool lives we wanted to lead. Ira Kaplan's dreamy, introverted voice caresses every familiar name as if it were a talisman, a fetish object. A memory of seeing "Help!" -- "I spent so much time dreamin' 'bout Eleanor Bron/In my room with the curtains drawn/Seein' her in the arms of Paul/Sayin' 'I can say no more'" -- couldn't be more poignant if he were singing about people he actually knew.

But in a way he is. Taking for granted the way our idols become part of our lives, the song collapses the distance between fantasy and reality, between memory and the present only to have both fantasy and memory recede. The song trails out on the increasingly hazy line "thinkin' 'bout the Beatles" and a "ba-ba-ba" refrain repeated as if the perfect pop hook had become both Fountain of Youth and the Grail.

7. "There She Goes," The La's
This song from a British group that appeared out of nowhere and promptly returned there after one album might be what Yo La Tengo is reaching for in "Tom Courtenay." Possibly the most beatific pop song since "She Loves You" (though not in the same league -- what is?) and surely the simplest. The chiming guitars and ethereal harmonies that open are as much a signal from an earthly paradise as is the image of the pealing church bells in "Bredon Hill" by the British poet A.E. Housman. The protagonist of Housman's poem is exiled from that paradise. Whoever heard "There She Goes" was luckier. The perfect pop hook becomes both Fountain of Youth and the Grail.

8. "Are You That Somebody?," Aaliyah
I found no better proof of the "don't know, don't care" divisions in the rock audience than the night (while this song was ruling the radio and MTV) I went to see a show by the Spinanes, who covered it without anyone in the white indie-rock crowd showing any sign of recognition. With a stumbling, stuttering beat and the strangest hook of the decade (a baby's sampled gurgle), this Timbaland-produced number was a highlight in a decade of strong R&B singles. Aaliyah's cool is the spiciest imaginable, like Tabasco sauce fresh out of the fridge.

9. "Rebel Girl"/"New Radio," Bikini Kill
Riot Grrrl at its fiercest and most joyous. In "New Radio" -- a lesbian rrrewrite of Eddie Cochran's "C'mon Everybody"-- the party thrown while mom and dad are away has just two attendees, and Cochran's great, carefree rejection of consequences, "Who cares?" is replaced by the declaration, "Let's wipe our cum on my parents' bed/Come on!" "Rebel Girl" is a lesbian rrrewrite of "Leader of the Pack," only more egalitarian: "I think I wanna take you home/I wanna try on yr clothes." The decade's best version of rock 'n' roll as huge, bracing, dumb, soul-stirring noise. When Kathleen Hanna sings, "When she talks, I hear the revolution," she could have been talking about this single.

10. "Some Jingle Jangle Morning (When I'm Straight)," Mary Lou Lord
The first time I ever heard Mary Lou Lord playing in the Boston subways she struck me as the perfect girl for those sensitive guys still dreaming of finding a hippie-folkie chick of their own. Then she sang an aching-voiced cover of Merle Haggard's "White Line Fever" and I wiped the smirk off my face. On this song, rerecorded for her major label debut with a guitar solo by Roger McGuinn but cited here in the Kill Rock Stars vinyl 45 original, she refers to Nirvana's "About a Girl," Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" and Jackson Browne's "These Days," as well as to her own indiscreet liaison with Kurt Cobain. As usual, the weariness in Lord's breathy scratch of a voice overcomes any potential preciousness in the delivery. This is a road song sung by someone too tired to move, and an elegy for a community that was dissolving before anyone knew it, a ragged wreath commemorating the brief moment in this fading decade when the alterna-indie scene ruled rock.