100 Best Albums of the ’90s (original) (raw)

The Nineties as a musical era started late and ended early — kicked in by the scritchy-scratch power chords of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” ushered out by the doomy piano intro of “. . . Hit Me Baby One More Time.” Anti-pop defeated by pop — full circle, all apologies. You’ve heard the story.

But the real Nineties were richer, funnier and weirder than that, with fake grunge bands writing better songs than some of the real ones, Eighties holdovers U2 and R.E.M. reaching creative peaks with Achtung Baby and Automatic for the People, Metallica and the Black Crowes co-existing on MTV, Phish tending to the Deadhead nation after Jerry’s passing — and Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer ceding their pop thrones in a few short years to Dr. Dre, Snoop and Eminem. — Brian Hiatt


Rivers Cuomo poured all his self-loathing and loneliness into ten autobiographical songs on Weezer's second album, detailing his awkward love life with agonizing specificity, beginning with "Tired of Sex," where the rock & roll groupie grind has never sounded less appealing. Some real-life girls mentioned on Pinkerton are ones Cuomo had crushes on but didn't date: a lesbian, a girl in one of his classes who rebuffed his invitation to a Green Day concert and an eighteen-year-old in Japan who wrote him a fun letter and with whom he became obsessed, wondering if she thought about him when she masturbated. With all those true confessions, it's no wonder that Cuomo is somewhat embarrassed by Pinkerton now — and that the record became a cornerstone of the next decade's emo movement.
• Rolling Stone's 1998 Review
• Rivers Cuomo Looks Back at 'Pinkerton'
• Rivers Cuomo's 'The Pinkerton Diaries' to Offer Glimpse Into Singer's Private Life


Portishead don't make dance music, exactly — the torchy gloom beat of Dummy is music for staring into your Rob Roy at 4:00 a.m. and wondering why she needed your wallet to go to the ladies' room. Geoff Barrow mixes a swellegant trip-hop pastiche of astro-lounge beats, plush soul keyboards and spy-movie guitars, with Beth Gibbons belting the bluesy cocktail ballads of a jaded Bond girl. The seductively sleek torpor of "Sour Times" and "Glory Box" has inspired countless imitators, but Portishead got it perfect the first time with Dummy, a bizarre love triangle between a man, a woman and a sampler.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1995 Review
• Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: Portishead's 'Dummy'


Jay-Z took the pay cut from big-time hustler to MC in stride, spitting his smooth-criminal genius in a string of dense poetics about dealing the stuff, escaping the feds and dripping in diamonds all the way to the bank. It makes no difference whether he samples Annie or Talking Heads — Jigga makes every track his own with massive boasts, state-of-the-art flows, vivid underworld portraits drawn in a handful of words — "On the run-by/Gun-high/One eye closed/Left holes/Through some guy clothes…." With one album, he released more classics than most MCs release in a career. The case for best MC in the post-B.I.G. era was closed.
• Photos: Jay-Z, Coldplay, Kanye West, John Mayer and More Perform in Las Vegas
• Photos: Hip-Hop Royalty


Proof that the gods of rock are unfair bastards: A former TV moppet from the not-so-dirty North hooks up with Wilson Phillips’ producer and makes an opportunistic angst-rock platter that not only sells 13 million copies — it doesn’t suck. In fact, it’s damn near flawless, from the hello-it’s-me phone rage of “You Oughta Know” to the sisterly “You Learn.” And right, Sherlock, “Ironic” isn’t ironic — it’s just Alanis speaking her piece about the perils of being a girl in a fickle-as-fuck world, singing like an acoustic guitar. Jagged Little Pill is like a Nineties version of Carole King’s Tapestry: a woman using her plain soft-rock voice to sift through the emotional wreckage of her youth, with enough heart and songcraft to make countless listeners feel the earth move.


A hip-hop mod squad from the streets of Dirty Jersey, the Fugees combined streetwise flash with righteous boho cool on their second album to become the biggest rap franchise this side of the Wu-Tang Clan. Lauryn Hill's scorched soul vocals — half Nina Simone, half Al Capone — flavor the Caribbean style of Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel. The Fugees prove themselves a damn fine wedding band with their covers of "Killing Me Softly" and "No Woman, No Cry," but they hit even harder in gems like "Family Business," trading vocals over a loop of _Godfather_-style acoustic guitar. The Score crosses boundaries of gender and geography, reinventing hip-hop as music for an international refugee camp of brothers and sisters with the inner-city blues. Lauryn and Wyclef took different roads on their solo joints, but The Score laid down the blueprint for the Fugees' vision of the world as a ghetto.
• Video: Wyclef Jean Performs Live and Talks Haiti
• Rolling Stone's Original 1996 Review
• Video: Lauryn Hill Performs Intimate Gig to Kick Off Tour


Left Eye, Chilli and T-Boz looked like a one-shot when they first emerged from the nascent Atlanta scene with 1992's "Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg." But CrazySexyCool was a real shocker, packed bumper to bumper with great songs, sassy vocals and voluptuous beats for burning down the house. "Creep" celebrates the kicks of illicit lust on the down low, "Waterfalls" digs deep into Memphis soul and "If I Was Your Girlfriend" does Prince better than the Artist has all decade. The showstopper: "Red Light Special," an impossibly steamy make-out ballad that undresses and caresses everyone with ears to hear it. CrazySexyCool established TLC as pop pros who could do it all, combining the body slam of hip-hop and the giddy uplift of a jump-rope rhyme without breaking a nail.
• Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: TLC's 'CrazySexyCool'
• Photos: Grammys' Wildest Fashion Moments


Technically, this album isn't instrumental — Bilinda Butcher's dreamy croon wafts throughout, gently defining post-punk girlishness. Guitarist and resident genius Kevin Shields also sings sometimes. But the instrumental quality of the vocals — the fact that they matter as tone, not language — helps define Loveless' new paradigm. No more would experimental bands require pompous poets ranting about lambs on Broadway. Sonic textures, from electrical-storm dissonance to feather-soft harmonics, could carry meaning and hit the gut. Imparting this truth and setting the stage for post-rock, electronica, Garbage and Beck, My Bloody Valentine vanished into the ether they'd generated. If they never return, Loveless was enough.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1992 Review
• My Bloody Valentine: The Sound Of The Future


Soundgarden's step up to rock & roll immortality came late in their day, after spells with both Sub Pop and SST Records, and after the band first grabbed the platinum ring with 1991's Badmotorfinger. But this brutish beauty gave Soundgarden a lock on the "Led Zeppelin for the Nineties" crown. A heavy-metal band with punk-rock nobility and no time for lemon-squeezin' corn, guitarist Kim Thayil, bassist Ben Shepherd and drummer Matt Cameron hammer Chris Cornell's vocal anguish in "Fell on Black Days," "Black Hole Sun" and "Like Suicide" into brilliantly warped power-thump sculpture.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1997 Review
• Soundgarden Prepare Live Album, Plot Return to Studio
• Photos: A Decade of Soundgarden


It's rare when forty years into a career, an artist unleashes an indisputable masterpiece. Johnny Cash pulled it off, though. American Recordings was the brainchild of Cash and producer Rick Rubin, who had the genius to recognize that Cash's incomparable voice alone with an acoustic guitar and a clutch of great songs was a can't-miss proposition. Cash's own tunes ("Drive On") align perfectly with apt selections by the likes of Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen and (no joke) Glenn Danzig. American Recordings is stark, stirring and, at times, even funny. Best of all it restored a master to much-deserved pre-eminence.
• Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: Johnny Cash's 'American Recordings'
• Photos: Intimate, All-Access Shots of Johnny Cash
• Listen: Johnny Cash's Early Demo of 'Get Rhythm'


The nice guys finished first. Queens-born and -bred A Tribe Called Quest brought you egoless hip-hop that let you dance to their smooth, jazzy sounds, chock with horns and upright bass and chill alongside their laid-back attitude. Producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad polished the mix, and MC Phife played a great second fiddle in rhymes about SkyPagers, the record industry and girls ("Tanya, Tameeka/Sharon, Karen/Tina, Stacy/Julie, Tracy"), but, really, it was Q-Tip's show. His distinct nasal voice light and delicious, his liquid flow as warm and comforting as an electric blanket, his natural charisma shining through the speakers, Q-Tip makes The Low End Theory feel like an easy conversation with an old friend.
• A Tribe Called Quest Now in Support of Controversial Documentary
• Photos: The Seven Best New Music Documentaries of the Year


The nineteen tracks on Being There are spread across two CDs — a sound aesthetic decision. Each disc functions as a self-contained entity digestible in a single forty-minute sitting. Together, both halves aspire to the nervy sprawl of double-album predecessors such as London Calling and Exile on Main Street, records that forged unified personal statements out of a bewildering variety of styles. Being There is a product of ambitious versatility, particularly in the string-band textures conjured by multi-instrumentalist Max Johnston and the pliant rhythms of bassist John Stirratt and drummer Ken Coomer. Wilco explore the clavinet-fueled funk of the Band on “Kingpin” and crank up the _Sun Sessions_-style reverb on “Someday Soon.” The band also bounces like the Beatles in a dance hall on “Why Would You Wanna Live” and evokes an air of desert mystery in “Hotel Arizona.”
• Rolling Stone’s Original 1996 Review
• Jeff Tweedy Opens Up About Wilco’s New Album


Trent Reznor has the shock-antic instincts of an old Hollywood B-movie producer. He made publicity hay out of the fact that part of this album was recorded in the L.A. mansion where Sharon Tate was murdered by Charles Manson's gang; he also inspired arenas of teenagers to sing along to the unforgettable chorus of "Closer": "I want to fuck you like an animal." Yet this is finely wrought gore, a swan dive into Reznor's deep vat of discontent, in which he vents as effectively in tense, muted moments ("I Do Not Want This") as he does in the full-bore, machine-generated terror of the title track. In a genre — industrial rock — wracked with cliché, Reznor demonstrates the many shades of gray that make up abject despair.
• Rolling Stone's 1997 Review
• Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Artists of All Time: Nine Inch Nails
• Photos: 2011 Oscars' Best Moments


Having shed one persona after another for more than three decades, Bob Dylan finally found one he could embrace: brokedown, death-haunted bluesman. "I'm sick of love," he groans on Time's opening track, and, man, he sounds it. That sets the tone for the ten songs that follow, a night journey that's all roads and no destination, all outskirts and no town. The sad-eyed man of "Highlands," a swirling sixteen-minute epic, is still moving, however, as the album ends, desperate to elude the reaper, nearly out of his mind with weariness, nearly out of time.
• Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: Bob Dylan's 'Time Out of Mind'
• Rolling Stone's 2001 Review
• Photos: Bob Dylan's First-Ever China Concert


Millions of us made time to listen to Billie Joe Armstrong whine as he and his band of Bay Area punk snots won America's heart with fast guitars, bouncy drums and the fakest English accents ever recorded. Their hits fit together like a stack of Pringles: "Basket Case" takes off with a case of the creeps and a melody that plays tricks on you, while "Longview" and "When I Come Around" vent the usual teen spirit with groovy hooks that the Bay City Rollers would have appreciated. Green Day took the booming Cali-punk revival to middle America: Cuter than Muppets, funnier than Weird Al, Green Day showed no signs of growing up here — which made their later transformation into politically charged arena-rockers that much more remarkable.
• Rolling Stone's 1998 Review
• Video: Green Day's Stadium-Sized '21 Guns' Sing-Along
• Photos: A Look Back at Green Day's Career


Madonna finally gets back into the groove, rocking the dance beats that made her a star in the first place, for her most shamelessly disco album since You Can Dance. Madonna's rhythm resurrection sounds like some kind of spiritual transformation, and since it accompanied her discovery of yoga and motherhood, it probably was. Producer William Orbit plugs in the techno gadgets, but it's Madonna's passion that makes the loudest bang, on powerhouse tracks like "Drowned World/Substitute for Love" and "Little Star." And in the title smash, Madonna throws herself a tantrum on the global dance floor as if she'd never been away.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1998 Review
• Video: Madonna's 50 Most Iconic Moments
• Photos: A History of Rocker-Actor Couples


"Anger is a gift," vocalist Zack de la Rocha proclaims in a venomous whisper in "Freedom," and Rage Against the Machine spread the wealth around, with an electrifying vengeance, all over the rest of their debut album. Gunning de la Rocha's incantatory rapping with rib-rattling slam, Rage Against the Machine get hot and nasty about authority with acute lyric detail and stunning force. Rage Against the Machine's mix of radical politics and headbanging kicks was a startling anomaly amid the self-absorbed ennui of the Year Grunge Broke. But the album's commercial success was a crucial reaffirmation of rock's potency as a weapon of protest. With Rage Against the Machine, subversion — in the great, defiant tradition of the Clash and the MC5 — was alive, and thrilling, in the mainstream.
• Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: 'Rage Against the Machine' by Rage Against the Machine
• Tom Morello Rages Against Anti-Union Bill at Wisconsin Rally


Straight from hip-hop's legendary Queensbridge, New York, projects to the studio, with an oven-roasted voice, butter flow, man-child eyes and a pure love of the music, streetwise intellectual Nas raised the bar on Nineties MC'ing. Nas had an eye on the street, the prison and the dreams of every ghettoman, whether he was sampling the classic film Wild Style, giving his jazz-trumpeter father a guest slot or offering rhymes like these: "Back in '83 I was an MC sparkin'/But I was too scared to grab the mikes in the parks and/Kick my little raps cuz I thought niggas wouldn't understand/And now in every jam I'm the fuckin man." True that.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1994 Review
• Video: Nas Shares His Passion For Hip-Hop Cassettes
• Photos: Rolling Stone Fact-Checks Famous Rock Songs


Chief pumpkin Billy Corgan took the idea of quality control to its obsessive conclusion by playing most of this album's guitar and bass parts himself — a rough deal for guitarist James Iha and bassist D'Arcy. But Siamese Dream — co-produced with Butch Vig, fresh from Nirvana's Nevermind — is Corgan's idealized, super-hands-on version of the full band's soaring, angst-spiked psychedelia. (The Pumpkins' glorious onstage expansions of "Silverfuck" were proof enough that Corgan couldn't do it all on his own.) That the album remains one of alt-rock's most enduring documents is down to Corgan's acute commercial vision — the way he dolled up the confessional indulgence of "Today" and "Disarm" in heavy-Seventies pop lace — and the sheer power of the playing. No matter who did what.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1993 Review
• Photos: Rolling Stone Readers Pick the Top 10 Albums of the Nineties
• Listen: Smashing Pumpkins' New Wave 'Lightning Strikes'


Blessed with impressive pedigree (he was the son of the Sixties folk-pop icon Tim Buckley) and a voice of great range and deep character, Jeff Buckley was cursed with a perfectionist's streak. Buckley had scrapped one stab at a second album and was gearing up to start over when he drowned in a freak accident in Memphis in May 1997, leaving Grace as the only studio album completed to his satisfaction in his brief lifetime. But it is a rich legacy: the transportive blend of serpentine guitars and Buckley's melismatic singing in "Mojo Pin" and "Grace"; the garage-band swagger and velvet pathos of "Last Goodbye" and "So Real"; the way Buckley turns Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" into delicate, personal prayer. A wonderful record, aptly titled. An enormously gifted artist, gone too soon.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1994 Review
• Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Singers of All Time: Jeff Buckley
• 'Grace' Remembered: 15 Years Since Jeff Buckley's Masterpiece


According to the script, Radiohead were supposed to disappear after their fluky 1993 smash "Creep," leaving only fond memories of Thom Yorke's Martin Short—after-electroshock yodel and that wukku-wukku guitar hook. But The Bends shocked everyone with its wide­screen psychedelic glory, raising Radiohead to a very Seventies kind of U.K. art-rock godhead. The depressive ballad "Fake Plastic Trees" turned up in Clueless, in which Alicia Silverstone memorably tags the band as "complaint rock"; in big-bang dystopian epics like "High and Dry," Yorke's choirboy whimper runs laps around Jonny Greenwood's machinehead guitar heroics. U2 would have sold crack to nuns to make this record.
• Rolling Stone's 2003 Review
• Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: Radiohead's 'The Bends'
• Photos: The 15 Most Eco-Friendly Rockers


In the immortal words of Mick Jagger, the change has come. Liz Phair took indie rock under her thumb with Exile in Guyville, firing off wisecracks, obscenities, pickup lines and confessions. She could crack you up and break your heart in the same song, sounding intimate without ever really giving her secrets away. Phair's dry Peppermint Patty mumble fit into a swirl of watery guitar frazzle and percussion as the melodies swam around in your head all summer long. "Fuck and Run" is Phair's greatest hit, but Exile is just one perfect song after another: the acoustic shiver of "Glory," the bangled-out glimmer of "Never Said," the wobbly jet-girl whoosh of "Stratford-on-Guy."
• Rolling Stone's 2008 Review
• Video: Liz Phair Remembers 'Exile in Guyville'
• He Said, She Said: How Liz Phair Took the Rolling Stones to 'Guyville'

Red Hot Chili Peppers
It took the Chili Peppers seven years, four albums and a few rough turns of the personnel merry-go-round to perfect the savory schizophrenia captured on Blood Sugar Sex Magik, the Los Angeles band's 1991 quadruple-platinum home run. Produced by Rick Rubin with the white-headbanger, hip-hop snap of James Brown on the Led Zeppelin II tip, Blood Sugar pingpongs between the precision swagger of "Give It Away" and "Suck My Kiss" and the luminous hurt of singer Anthony Kiedis' Top Ten junkie blues, "Under the Bridge." The alternating slap of extremes perfectly nails not only the giddy highs and drawn-out lows of life in a city built on illusions but also the Chili Peppers' fight to beat their own worst excesses. An album of honest drama — and you can mosh to it.
• Rolling Stone's 2003 Review
• Photos: Getting Naked on the Cover of Rolling Stone
• Photos: The Red Hot Chili Peppers Through the Years


With his mind on his money and his money on his mind, Snoop rolled in from the West to pick America’s pockets, and his laid-back drawl was such a hilarious trick that he got away clean. Dr. Dre’s low-riding G-funk makes the perfect backdrop to Snoop’s rhymes, as slow and lazy as a dog-day afternoon. Doggystyle has a serious streak of gangsta remorse running through all the murder and misogyny, but it also offers cheerfully ridiculous cartoon theme songs like “Who Am I (What’s My Name)?” and “Doggy Dogg World.” “Gin and Juice” takes a timeless teen trip in the tradition of “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “The Twist” and “Bust a Move” — it’s six in the morning, the freaks are still dancing, and the house party keeps jumping till Mama gets home.
• Neil Strauss’ Wild Romp Through Celebrity Culture in ‘Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead’
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Ill communication puts a little polish on the mishmash of Check Your Head; the Beasties freewheel from hardcore punk thrash to jazzy cool-downs for an album with more action than John Woo and mad hits like Rod Carew. The Boys loosen up on their instruments, especially in the subzero cool of "Transitions." But it's the linear party starters that make the record: "Sure Shot" knocks a doofy flute sample out of the park, "Get It Together" takes a D-train detour with Q-Tip, and "Sabotage" serves up a slab of red-meat metal that not even Sabbath fans could resist.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1994 Review
• Photos: Beastie Boys Through the Years
• Video: Beastie Boys' Star-Studded 'Make Some Noise'


Featuring joyous, bass-happy party funk dotted with tight horn lines, Outkast's third album captures Big Boi and Andre 3000 rollicking like the church choir in full effect. On tracks such as "Rosa Parks" and "Skew It on the Bar-B," they reveal themselves to be a stylistic midpoint between hip-hop's East and West Coasts, mixing the unassumingly cerebral hip-hop of A Tribe Called Quest or De La Soul with that George Clinton—drenched funk favored out west. With their drawled-out voices, neighborhood slang and cascading sheets of words, they put permanently to bed all questions about serious MC'ing on the South Coast. Atlanta's reputation as hip-hop's most avant-garde area code — the Long Island of the Nineties — was cemented.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1998 Review
• OutKast's Andre 3000 Returns With Beatles Cover


The Woody Guthrie of the Pizza Hut proves he can do it all on Odelay, as the Dust Brothers slip him a funky cold medina and set the stage for him to get real, real gone for a change. Beck shimmies in and out of his musical guises, whether he's strumming his folky guitar in "Ramshackle," rocking the Catskills hip-hop style in "Where It's At" or blaming it on the bossa nova in "Readymade." Odelay could have come off as a bloodless art project, but Beck gets lost in the jigsaw jazz and the get-fresh flow until his playful energy makes everyone else sound tame. That is a good drum break, indeed.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1996 Review
• Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: Beck's 'Odelay'


You remember the first time you heard Biggie — he came on as the baddest chronic-smoking, Oreo-cookie-eating, pickle-juice-drinking stud on the block, and he was the man, girlfriend. Biggie spread love the Brooklyn way, doing more than anyone else to revitalize New York hip-hop after years of West Coast dominance, and Ready to Die maps out the sounds of Nineties cool. The vision is bleak, from "Suicidal Thoughts" to the love song that hinges on the line "I swear to God, I hope we fuckin' die together." But Biggie's voice is also full of high-spirited fun, bringing the pleasure principle back to hip-hop. In "Big Poppa," his idea of a romantic evening includes a T-bone steak, cheese, eggs and Welch's grape, and that's just while the Jacuzzi heats up.
• Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: The Notorious B.I.G.'s 'Ready To Die'
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The basic tracks were recorded in two weeks; nearly all of Kurt Cobain's vocals were whipped down on tape in seven hours. If In Utero is a record born of great crisis — mostly Cobain's personal war with overwhelming good fortune — it was made with concentrated purpose. Steve Albini's corrosion-is-bliss production does not flatter songs of tempered, layered drama such as "Pennyroyal Tea" (Cobain's definitive performance is on Unplugged). But Albini's harsh touch was perfect for the extremism Cobain had already written into the soaked-in-lye cannonballs "Serve the Servants," "Scentless Apprentice" and "Very Ape." In the sun-dappled, cello-garnished sadness of "All Apologies" and "Dumb," Cobain was also upfront about his oversize needs and diminished expectations for fulfillment. He ultimately proved incapable of pulling himself out of that funk; instead, he made fine, furious art from it.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1993 Review
• Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Artists of All Time: Nirvana


After months locked in tuff Gong Studios in Kingston, Jamaica, Lauryn Hill emerged from the shadow of the Fugees to create a stunning musical document that is equal parts Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell and, well, no one but Lauryn Hill. She sings and rhymes; she gives us ballads, party rockers and doo-wop; she sings of love for men, her son, Zion, her New Jersey childhood and (maybe) her ex-boyfriend, Wyclef Jean. She wraps it all in a raw, completely human sound in which you can hear fingers plucking guitars, needles meeting vinyl and drumsticks touching cymbals. When someone asks you, “What is hip-hop soul?” play them The Miseducation.
• Video: Booker T & The Roots Cover Lauryn Hill’s ‘Everything Is Everything’
• Video: Lauryn Hill Performs Intimate Gig to Kick Off Tour


It was one of the most extreme personality transformations in pop music — ever. U2, the Irish bards of cathedral-chime guitar and pub-stool sermonizing, said goodbye to the Eighties and the suffocating tide of their own sincerity by setting up their recording gear in post-Wall Berlin and saying hello to the two i's: irony and industrial dance music. The music — slower than The Joshua Tree — is corrosive, razed-city funk laced with mad laughter and creeping paranoia. Yet the album's crackle and empty-hallway echo are really a kind of protective armor for the defiant heart in Bono's lyrics ("One," "Ultra Violet [Light My Way]") and the real lesson of Achtung Baby's post­modern giggles: To appreciate the joys of heaven, sometimes you have to take a little walk through hell.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1992 Review
• U2, Live From Outer Space: Launching the Biggest Tour of All Time
• Photos: Three Decades of the World's Biggest Band, Onstage and Backstage


Progress is a bitch, but don't let the machines, or their masters, grind you down: That is the simple message encoded in the art-rock razzle-dazzle of OK Computer. Hailed as The Dark Side of the Moon for the Information Age, Computer is too brittle in its time-signature twists and hairpin guitar turns, too claustrophobic in mood, to qualify as space rock. Instead, Radiohead shatter the soul-sucking echo of isolation and enforced routine with the violent mood swings of "Paranoid Android" and Thom Yorke's arcing vocal anguish in the gaunt, yearning ballads "Let Down" and "Lucky." Somehow, OK Computer went platinum a year after its release — a welcome testament that smart still sells.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1997 Review
• The Future According to Radiohead: Rolling Stone's 2008 Cover Story
• Photos: Fifteen Years of Radiohead, From 'Pablo Honey' to 'In Rainbows'


Once upon a time, Dr. Dre was just one of the guys from N.W.A, Suge Knight was just a bodyguard and Snoop Dogg wasn't a star. Then The Chronic dropped, and the earth moved on Planet Hip-Hop. The sound is culled from George Clinton's funk, the images are loosely inspired by the ominous malfeasance of The Godfather, and it is all pulled together by a tall, skinny new kid from Long Beach, California, who delivers vivid ghetto stories and marijuana paeans in a light, singsongy drawl that seems the epitome of cool under fire. It was the most original MC style since Rakim, and it magnetized listeners from coast to coast the first time they heard him say, "Ain't nuttin' buh a gee thang, bayyy-bay."
• Rolling Stone's Original 1993 Review
• Photos: Nate Dogg's Best Guest Appearances
• Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: 'The Chronic' by Dr. Dre