The Alternative Number Ones: The Sugarcubes’ “Hit”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

I've spent a grand total of 12 hours in Iceland, but those 12 hours left an impression. When I was nine years old, my family spent the year in London, and then we moved back to Baltimore when my dad's sabbatical was up. We flew Icelandair because it was the cheapest airline, and a flight delay turned what was supposed to be a quick stopover in Keflavik into a much longer stretch. Rather than being abandoned to wander the airport like ghosts, as any American company would now have you do, the airline put us all on a bus and took us on a trip around the island. I'd never seen anything like it.

Iceland looks like an alien landscape -- dark volcanic rock everywhere, virtually no vegetation, lagoons that billow with steam like they're special effects in '80s music videos, motherfucking glaciers. Only a few hundred thousand people live there, and you can ride in a bus for a long time before you see any of them. It's a geographic anomaly, a place on the edge of existence. My parents thought it was the ugliest landscape they'd ever seen. I loved it. When we finally got on the plane back home, I picked up the in-flight magazine and flipped straight to a story about the Sugarcubes. That shit blew my mind -- not for anything particular about the group, but just because I was like: Wow, they have rock bands here, too!