A little take on Rolling Stone's parlour game, for the Globe and Mail in Toronto. * * * THE ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS OF THE '90s by Greil Marcus et al Rolling Stone, May 13 Reviewed by Carl Wilson ... In which Rolling Stone rushes to judgment in order to beat every other magazine to the end of the year. Hey, if you were about to release a brilliant disc in the later months of 1999, don't bother. The section is launched by Greil Marcus's brief essay on the magazine's Artist of the Decade, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. This one's no scratch on his definitive RS piece after Cobain's suicide in 1994, merely re-running Marcus's patented line on negation in American music via the epochal Smells Like Teen Spirit. It covers the "artist" part well: "The song is . . . definitively unsettling and a definitive release." But what Marcus misses is the "decade" part: Yes, Cobain dominated a two-year time span, but how did he affect the next five years? In fact, especially in death, Cobain rendered the decades-long underground-vs.-mainstream debate obsolete, forcing us to hear everything from Garth Brooks to Pavement as doubled - inherently self-subverting. Rock's resulting aporia cleared the way for hip hop, as well as for teenyboppers untainted by that original sin. And that, in brief, plus Soundscan, gives us the chart Babel of 1999. Not to mention the Babel of RS's nineties-recordings list, a scattershot rundown on dozens and dozens of albums and afterthoughts on singles (including "Top 10 Songs About Your Butt"). The selections divide evenly between the obvious (PJ Harvey, Beastie Boys, Dr. Dre, Beck), nice surprises (Iris DeMent, Yo La Tengo, Belle & Sebastian), and absurdities like Hootie and the Blowfish, Peter Wolf, Billy Joel and anything Touched by a Jagger - the latter few pulled straight from editor Jann Wenner's personal rolodex. Without the guts to confirm or deny any aesthetic agenda, lest someone feel left out, Rolling Stone's list suggests that Wenner's real artist of the decade is none other than Bill Clinton. And when Marcus quotes Cobain saying that he used to expect to be voted "Most Likely to Kill Everyone at a High School Dance," there's a haunting sense that the decade has come full circle - and that Cobain is the least of the betrayed.