The Alternative Number Ones: Live’s “Lightning Crashes”

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.

Try to imagine that you cannot get away from the "placenta falls to the floor" song. If you're old enough, you won't have to imagine it. It was lived experience. You would turn on the radio, and there it would be, the "placenta falls to the floor" song. Maybe you'd be like, Hell yeah, the "placenta falls to the floor" song! Or maybe you'd want to hear something, anything, other than the "placenta falls to the floor" song. But you would flip around the radio, and it would still be there -- on the alt-rock station, the mainstream rock station, the top-40 station, the adult-contempo station. All across the radio dial, it's just the placenta falling to the floor again and again. You turn on MTV, and you're once again confronted with that imagery, that implied plop.

It's so remote now, so far away. Younger people cannot imagine living life like that. Terrestrial radio might as well not exist to my kids. It's just something that we have to deal with when we're way out in the mountains and our phones lose their signals. Even then, there's no placenta falling to the floor; it's just my kids giving me vaguely horrified side-eyes while I sing along to Foreigner. (One thing that has not changed since the '90s: You can still find Foreigner playing on a terrestrial radio station at any moment of the day or night.) If there's a TikTok equivalent to the "placenta falls to the floor" song, I have not yet experienced it. The advent of the internet means that nothing is truly inescapable -- not in the same way, anyway. In 1995, we were served up a placenta on the floor again and again, and we had to simply accept it. If you were going to interact with popular music in any way, you were going to have to deal with some placentas on some floors.