“Stop!” by Jane's Addiction

"Stop!" landed on Jane's Addiction's Ritual de lo habitual in 1990, but the song was older than the album by a long stretch: the band had written it back in 1986. All four of them share the credit, Perry Farrell, Dave Navarro, Eric Avery and Stephen Perkins, and it plays like a stampede, everybody charging at once and nobody willing to give an inch.

Farrell co-produced it with Dave Jerden, with Ronnie S. Champagne engineering, and together they kept the edges sharp. The song lurches, surges, slams on the brakes and floors it again, a whiplash ride that lives up to the exclamation point in its title, and it has the wild-eyed abandon of a band that didn't care who got knocked over.

It followed "Mountain Song" as a single and went all the way to number one on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart, holding the top spot for two weeks that weren't even back to back, which tells you how stubbornly alternative radio kept coming back to it.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.