An American Songwriter feature highlights three 1990s pop hits whose sound owes a significant, often unnoticed, debt to classic rock. The piece argues that beneath their radio-friendly production, these songs share the melodic and instrumental DNA of rock music from earlier decades, making the case that pop and rock boundaries in the era were blurrier than fans typically assume.

The three songs cited are Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn," actually a cover of a track by rock band Ednaswap, whose simple guitars evoke 1970s rock beneath its pop polish; New Radicals' "You Get What You Give," a "power pop" hit the article argues is rooted more in classic rock songwriting than pop convention; and Smash Mouth's "All Star," whose garage-rock attitude and riffs are compared to 1960s British Invasion acts. In each case, the author suggests that with different production choices, the tracks could easily pass as rock rather than pop.