Soundtracks of our lives: "Angus".

"Girls want guys who are dangerous. Have tattoos, play the guitar."

For a brief window in my youth, ice skating became the cool thing to do. Kid would lace up their skates, hit the ice, and try to "spray" by stopping suddenly and creating a blast of ice chips, a technique familiar to seasoned hockey players everywhere.

At the rink by my house, they would play music as we endlessly circled the ice. This was 1995, so you could expect to hear "Gangsta's Paradise", "Fantasy", and that U2 song from the Batman movie in an endless loop. (After listening to that Mariah Carey song for the first time in about 15 years, I have to say: what a sick fucking jam.)

The video—which features Mariah kicking back at an amusement park full of menacing clowns and overweight children—is also impossibly bizarre by modern pop standards.

But one day I heard something that stopped me in my skates.  It rocked harder than any of the Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins songs I was accustomed to, but it had a wistful edge that left me feeling all nostalgic and reflective even though nothing had happened to me yet. It was "J.A.R." by Green Day, their contribution to the Angus soundtrack.

Green Day had broken through into mainstream popularity a year earlier with Dookie, and I think by that point I was already acquainted with "Basket Case" and "When I Come Around" from the radio—but "J.A.R." grabbed me in a way that nothing else had. It was pretty much the best thing I'd ever heard.

To be fair, the competition at that point was not particularly intense:

When I heard this song on the radio I didn't realize he was talking about the Miami Dolphins, and I thought Hootie just meant that the eerie majesty of dolphins reduced him to a state of infantile wonder. This is still how I choose to interpret it.

That year I received the Angus soundtrack as a birthday present, and found that it featured numerous other gems—and pretty soon I had a copy of Dookie, which led to ...And Out Come the Wolves, which led to Minor Threat, etc. Before long, I was arguing about The Locust and collecting Japanese hardcore records.

You know times have changed when someone's arguing that The Locust are the real deal and some other band is "gay hipster bullshit".

When I was in college, I revisited Angus, with some trepidation. Having long since lost or sold my copy, I picked one up at Amoeba in Los Angeles and hit the 101 to the familiar strains of "J.A.R." But I was afraid that the seminal album of my childhood would have lost some of its luster for me—like the pizzeria you loved as a kid, but revisit as an adult to discover that the pie tastes like cardboard and tire and you really only liked it because they had Street Fighter II.

It turns out that I was totally wrong; if anything, it sounds even better to me now, like the girl next door who grows up to be a total knockout.

Somehow this still makes me feel kind of skeezy, even though I'm only like a month older than her.

To my jaded ears, Angus is as good a compilation as any released in the '90s, and a manifesto for the artistic validity of a style—pop-punk—viewed with disdain by most scenesters. (Very little has changed, other than that nobody uses the word "scenester" anymore.) 

The lineup is a delicate balance of mainstream alternative rock and underground legitimacy, as bands like Weezer and Love Spit Love rub elbows with Lookout luminaries like Pansy Division and the Riverdales.

They didn't use this Pansy Division song, though.

Everybody brings their A game too. Pansy Division's "Deep Water" is an unusually moving song from a band known for their cheeky sense of humor (see above), while Weezer's "You Gave Your Love To Me Softly" is the bridge between the blue album's sunny power-pop and the murky Japanophilia of Pinkerton. (The analog synth also foreshadows the Get Up Kids and their fellow travelers).

And then there's Ash, the only band to contribute more than one song. They epitomize the record's balance of pop-punk and more mainstream alternative: "Jack Names the Planets" is a quintessential piece of '90s slack pop (complete with movie tie-in video featuring bedroom moshing and singing band posters), but "Kung Fu" could practically be a Teenage Bottlerocket song.

I wish you'd come back; everything's ready for you.

And the song that at first seems the most out of place actually turns out to be one of the best on the entire record. "Ain't That Unusual", a deep cut from the Goo Goo Dolls album A Boy Named Goo, is basically the best Replacements song never written, complete with title and lyrics so redolent of Paul Westerberg they should be wearing sunglasses and swearing on live TV.

The album closes out with Love Spit Love's gorgeous ballad "Am I Wrong?", which is used in the movie's opening, with the marching band nicely integrated into the tune. (Notably absent is Mazzy Star's "Fade Into You", which plays when Angus and Melissa dance; it's a very pretty and apropos song, but one that admittedly wouldn't have fit into the album very well. This isn't the Joyride soundtrack.)

This is what high school was like, in my mind.

Of course, your mileage may vary. But for me, Angus is one of the quintessential '90s albums and honestly one of my favorite records of all time. In two years, Angus will be 20 years old(!), and I can't think of a more appropriate comment than what Angus says to the jock bully Rick (James Van Der Beek, in the role he was born to play) at the film's climax:

"I'm still here asshole. I'll always be here."