The weather. Tomorrow, expect a biting cold front.

Hmm, how naughty. I wonder what I'll be wearing or taking off.

The night will be wild and untamed. Expect heavy, lashing rain that'll soak you to the skin.

By Monday, temperatures will rise slowly but surely reaching their peak in the afternoon.

Not in the mood for miserable weather?

Fly cheaply to Turkey with Sun Express.

Sun Express, non-stop sunshine.

Well, Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine, about the hits from coast to coast.

I'm Chris Mulanfey, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series? On our last episode, we walked through the birth of alternative rock and the start of the grunge era,

from the breakthroughs of Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Pearl Jam, to the explosion by Nirvana that turned grunge into mainstream rock.

We are now in 1994.

Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain has passed into the afterlife.

And a wave of post-grunge is about to take over Billboard's modern rock chart and the radio,

as Alt Rock becomes America's parallel universe top 40. Even before Kurt Cobain passed,

alternative rock was diversifying and getting quirkier. Some modern rock chart

toppers that showed how far alternative nation had expanded included Blind Millons, sweet,

jam band-esque reverie, No Rain, whose video starring The Bee Girl made the song a smash top 20 on the hot 100

and number one at modern rock in late 1993 and i don't understand why i sleep all day and I start to complain

that there's no

a hate.

Beck's impossible to categorize

Loser, an accidental

...