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


Moby's first major-label album didn't seem promising at first — a little techno dude trying his arty hand at pop-song form, New Age movie music and blues-metal guitar. But Everything Is Wrong turned out to be one amazing record, mixing up styles with earnest curiosity and that rarest of techno-dude traits, a sense of humor. "Feeling So Real" and "Everytime You Touch Me" are stunning disco anthems, while the mellow passages roam from Eno-like lyricism to classical gas. Moby buzzes with excitement, a Christian club kid who can't stop raving about the DJ who saved his life last night and can't wait to tell the story in sounds.
• Rolling Stone's 2001 Review
• Video: Heather Graham Is an Angel of Mercy in Moby's 'The Day'


Dean Wareham made his name with the Eighties dream-pop trio Galaxie 500, but he really found his muse in these scandalously beautiful guitar ballads. His foxy voice slinks along the languid guitars as he plumbs his foolish heart in the back of a New York cab, going home alone after another night of fancy drinks and lucky toasts. Wareham purrs some sly one-liners ("It's no fun reading fortune cookies to yourself") but the music celebrates the pleasures of being too young, too rich, too pretty and too single, shopping for true love while getting lost in Chinatown.
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Love Songs was both an arch concept album and a feast, sixty-nine tunes that explored all kinds of love: the giddy kind, the heart-crushing kind, the kind between gay cowboys. Stephin Merritt's meticulous ditties were great on paper and even better as music: cheap, catchy and packed with surprises, mixing stark punk rock with swishy Tin Pan Alley and budget girl-group sonics.
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No beats, no tunes, no titles: Aphex Twin updated Brian Eno's mid-Seventies concept of "discreet," or ambient, music for the sunrise comedown hours after a hard night's rave. Richard D. James created an enriched, wraparound style of burp-and-whoosh programming, the perfect soundtrack for pulling the pieces of your brain back together after spilling them all over the club floor. The first dance album to celebrate the rhythms in your head.
• Photos: 'Rolling Stone' Readers Pick the Top 10 Albums of the Nineties


It could have turned into a reverential school project — earnest folk rockers dutifully writing music for lyrics left behind by the sainted Woody Guthrie. But Mermaid Avenue is a loose, rollicking set that brings the best out of everyone involved. On "California Stars," Wilco deftly capture Guthrie's sweet, poetic side, while Bragg and Natalie Merchant duet affectionately on "Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key." This album celebrates Guthrie by putting listeners in touch with a flesh-and-blood man, not a museum piece.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1998 Review
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Air's Nicolas Godin and Jean Benoit Dunckel were a couple of cerebral keyboard geeks from Versailles, France, where they obviously don't get out of the studio much. Their space-pop debut, Moon Safari, was a truly obsessive hommage to easy listening, a sublime Eurocheese omelet. They built their music out of classic Sixties French schlock: bongos, castanets, vintage electric piano, dream-weaver synths and shag-carpet organ straight from the soundtracks of movies like Un Homme et Une Femme. The music is full of hidden jokes, as when "Remember" replicates the distorted drum intro from the Beach Boys hit "Do It Again"; Air's Brian Wilson allusion isn't some _Smile_-era obscurity — it's a beach-party blowout. Loads of American bands tried to emulate the fab tackiness of 1960s French pop. But Moon Safari proves that the French really do it better themselves.
• Photos: 1990s Polaroid Portraits


Bossanova was the Pixies' most straight-ahead rock album. But by their warped standards, it was still safely off the mainstream. Joey Santiago's body-slamming guitars, Kim Deal's measured, penetrating bass and David Lovering's elemental drums sounded denser and tougher than on their first two albums, but some things hadn't changed. Black Francis' surreal lyrics were still open to conjecture; even he has stated he doesn't entirely understand them. "Is She Weird" might be about a prostitute; "The Happening" might be about aliens landing in Las Vegas; "Down to the Well" is probably about sex. But content is almost incidental to these songs; what stands out is the beat that throbs like a hangover, the fever-dream atmospherics and the pelvis-grinding abandon.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1990 Review


Like Michael Jackson a generation before, Aaliyah came out of the Midwest, a child singing of adult matters. But where young MJ sang of love, Aaliyah was a black Lolita, a teenage temptress with a seductive power in her smooth voice. Unlike Brandy, Aaliyah sang of sex that was hot like fire and of being a choosy lover. The seventeen-year-old could sell a sexy song like a pro, but these songs could have sold themselves — with writing by Missy Elliott and production by a then-unheard-of Timbaland, One in a Million unleashed the futuristic Virginia Beach funk that would soon take over the radio.
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A man who could stir both Saturday-night dreams and Sunday-morning sanctity into his music, R. Kelly sang, wrote and produced an album that made him essential to contemporary black music. Gliding over a slick sound that gleams like the hood of a new Benz, Kelly opens his mouth and lets you hear the church in his phrasings, the street in his grit and the classic loverman in his allure. Who else could sing alongside both Ronnie Isley and Biggie Smalls? Who else could say, "You remind me of my Jeep…. I wanna ride it," and have you unsure whether it was sexist or funny or both — and make it sound so fly that you never stopped grooving.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1998 Review
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On their second album, De La Soul turned away from the "daisy-age" friendliness of their 1989 debut in favor of sleeker, head-snapping jams and skits that viciously sent up gangsta rap. The album's hypnotic sprawl centered around producer Prince Paul's sampleriffic beats (see the disco-rap classic "A Roller Skate Jam Named 'Saturdays'"); the guys also took on some brave subject matter (on the disturbing incest tale "Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa") while preserving their dextrous, clever rhyme styles. The result was a dark classic that was both stranger and deeper than most people noticed back in 1991.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1991 Review


If this was the age of irony, nobody told Yo La Tengo — they just kept making one floridly romantic guitar record after another, doing for marriage what the Velvet Underground did for heroin. On this album, it's all good in their little corner of the world: Guitarist Ira Kaplan sails away on perfect guitar drones like "We're an American Band," drummer Georgia Hubley croons the feedback lullaby "Shadows," and bassist James McNew warbles the acoustic lament "Stockholm Syndrome." Yo La Tengo also find time for a couple of space-disco novelties, a noisy Beach Boys cover and a few silly love songs, adding up to the kickiest album of their stellar career.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1997 Review
• Video: Interview With Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan


A Brit-pop strumpet with a heart of glass, Pulp's Jarvis Cocker minced through Different Class as a star in the classic Bowie mold. He dressed his flimsy body in an ungodly array of thrift-store frippery, he shook what Mama gave him to the band's fruity chamber rock, and he unzipped his breathy croak of a voice to sniff, "I've kissed your mother twice/And now I'm working on your dad." Different Class swipes melodic dazzle from the likes of Stereolab and Serge Gainsbourg to make hangovers sound romantic in "Bar Italia" while pining over suburban heartbreak in "Underwear," "Disco 2000" and the anthem "Common People." Jarvis Cocker: international man of mystery.
• Photos: 1990s Polaroid Portraits
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Suddenly armed with a strange mix of cartoon outrage and actual tunes — not to mention first-class Trent Reznor production — five Florida shock rockers go nationwide in their jockstraps. The record uses atmosphere from goth, disco from Ministry and Nine Inch Nails and ideas from that distinguished old sonic philosopher David Bowie. But what really makes it rise beyond the recherché is Manson himself, an Ohio-raised youngster who manages to graft charm, of all things, onto his bullshit.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1996 Review
• Photos: Musical Gender-Benders, From David Bowie to Marilyn Manson


"I fear that I am ordinary, just like everyone," wails master Billy Corgan on "Muzzle," from this double-disc epic. Fear can be a great motivator, and Corgan used it to build his Taj Mahal, a sonically dazzling monument to gloom and glamour. Accused of not being punk enough, Corgan showed on Mellon Collie what punk might be if Steven Spielberg got hold of it. The angry songs distend rage and alienation via beautifully ugly guitar-drum attacks, while the wistful ballads flip hate around and turn it into exquisite, unquenchable longing. Take that, hipsters: Ordinary angst can be grand.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1995 Review
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Yeah, Björk's music is 'post' — post-rock, post-apocalyptic, flashily futuristic in tone. But it's also "pre," tapping emotions untamed by rational thought. The electronic soundscapes she creates on Post, with the help of English dance-floor stars like Nellee Hooper, Tricky and Howie B., give her lots of room to roam. And she goes everywhere, from the junk-filled cliff top of the whimsical "Hyper-Ballad" to the psychic deep forest of "Isobel," in songs that link the rhythms of early drum-and-bass to the vocal lines of Icelandic folk singing, with a dash of musical comedy thrown in for a lark. Inventing her own genre, Björk presents what she calls "an army of me" — the many battling voices inside one woman's hyperactive brain.
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GBV's six previous albums (released in limited editions on minuscule indies) were brilliant, but Bee Thousand was a tour de force by a good old-fashioned American basement genius. A rotating group of thirtysomethings based in Dayton, Ohio, Guided by Voices mined familiar territory: classic English pop rockers like the Who, the Kinks and the Beatles, albeit filtered through latter-day Beatlemaniacs like Cheap Trick and Robyn Hitchcock, as well as low-fi avatars like Daniel Johnston and Pavement. Recorded on a four-track machine, Bee Thousand sounds like a favorite bootleg or a beloved old LP whose worn grooves now reveal only a blurry jumble. Amp hum, sniffling musicians and creaking chairs all inhabit the mix, but the homespun production only underlines the strength of the songs — low-fi or not, there's no denying an astonishing rush of guitar-pop glory like "Tractor Rape Chain."
• Rolling Stone's Original 1994 Review
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To kick-start the Nineties, Neil Young reunited with Crazy Horse, cranked the amps and, as a songwriter, took a look back to see if anything was still standing. There's some blood on the tracks ("Love to Burn," "Fuckin' Up"), but "Days That Used to Be" and "Mansion on the Hill" revisit the era of peace, love and granola with a sentimentality that Young rarely permits himself. The long guitar solos are this album's real story, however. They're ragged and glorious, indeed, and they turn this look back into a look ahead: The guitar barrage of grunge is right around the corner.
• Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time: Neil Young
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This instrument-switching Scottish outfit represented the ultimate triumph of twee, that British subgenre that applies rock-style hipness and amateurish fervor to unrock interests such as coffeehouse folk, French 1960s pop and the works of Burt Bacharach. Casually led by real-life choirboy and Smiths admirer Stuart Murdoch, Belle and Sebastian attached cello, trumpet and strings to a skiffle beat and melodies devised after hours of lonely listening to vintage Top Forty radio. Not since Nick Drake had so quiet a band spoken so loudly.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1997 Review
• Photos: Belle and Sebastian Stay Loose


The Don of Virginia beach, Missy claimed hip-hop and R&B as her own playground with more ambitious flair than any other mogul, male or female. She has it all: songwriting skills, a voice that drips soul whether singing or rapping and the coolest name in showbiz. She also had Timbaland, whose dubbed-out aquaboogie rocked bodies with a whole new funk style. They were two kids out to conquer the world, and they did with "The Rain," turning an Ann Peebles oldie into an interstellar booty patrol. Missy struts her stuff through jams like "Sock It 2 Me" and the hysterical "Izzy Izzy Ahh," throwing in the words beep beep whenever she could fit them and just generally getting her vroom on.
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In "Block Rockin' Beats" — the bulldozing fusion of high-stepping funk, twisted dub games and massed, tortured-machine screams that opened their second album — Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons of the Chemical Brothers created the "Whole Lotta Love" of Nineties sampledelia, a clubland monster with rock & roll guts and symphonic dynamics. On the rest of Dig Your Own Hole, particularly the Beatlemaniac swirl of "Setting Sun" and the Day-Glo surge of "The Private Psychedelic Reel," the British DJ duo showed that (a) playing other people's records — sliced, diced and blown to ingeniously reconfigured bits — is a valid form of composition, and (b) dance music is a matter of both mind and body.
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A mad scientist who obviously doesn't get out of the lab much, DJ Shadow spends Endtroducing rewiring the Mo' Wax sound he helped invent. This snootiest of British dance labels made stars out of train-spotting DJs, hooking up countless samples and special effects into a hypnotic pastiche of tripping, hopping beats, and Shadow was its biggest star of all. The dystopian New Age of Endtroducing sounds like an alien spacecraft touching down on the autobahn late at night, probably to check out Earth's used-vinyl bins. Endtroducing is headphone macro­dub with a crafty Californian sense of humor, and the lamentable fact that DJ Shadow has spawned a thousand corny knockoffs doesn't stop grooves like "Building Steam With a Grain of Salt" from ringing out like hell's bells. This is DJ culture at its boldest: steeped in the past but zooming into the Space Age future.
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Stepping out from the pioneering British trip-hop group Massive Attack, Tricky put a match to his own sweet-leaf mix of Jamaican dub tricks, industrial post-punk clang and vintage Bronx-projects hip-hop, and blew the smoke all over the dance floor. The contact high was a whopper. Ripe with impending apocalypse (the dark, heaving menace of the grooves) and battered-warrior soul (vocalist Martine's maternal vigor, Tricky's low gangsta mumble), Maxinquaye is the end-of-the-century counterpart to Public Enemy's mid-Eighties black-power addresses: voodoo rhythms and guerrilla mixology celebrating the survival of the fittest and the inevitable victory of the righteous.
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Back when the Fugees' The Score was selling more records than Nike was selling shoes, Wyclef Jean was just one of two dudes backing up the gorgeous Lauryn Hill. With The Carnival, Wyclef was exposed as a real talent, a scion of De La Soul and Bob Marley who rhymed in Haitian patois, sampled the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive," brought in the Neville Brothers and Celia Cruz and dedicated a song "to all the girls I cheated on before." He pokes fun at hip-hop's conventions as well as himself, while displaying serious producing, guitar-playing and comedic skills, not to mention a wealth of imagination, ambition and musical courage. Clef is that rare and necessary thing: the brilliant class clown.
• Video: Wyclef Jean Performs 'Gone Till November' Live at Rolling Stone
• Video: Interview With Wyclef Jean


Made in the wake of the 1988 power-chord mother Green and the no-arena-left-unturned world tour that followed, Out of Time was an exercise in folk-pop understatement that, perversely but deservedly, made R.E.M. bigger than ever. For all of its apparent melancholy (the raindrop sound of Peter Buck's mandolin, the bleak sigh of a pedal steel guitar), Out of Time is a grand lift, elegant sanity with sure-shot songwriting. In "Losing My Religion," "Low" and "Country Feedback," Michael Stipe sings not only about lapsed faith and consuming loss but of quietly regaining ground and equilibrium. And you get the big-grin bounce of "Near Wild Heaven" and "Me in Honey," because redemption is always a good excuse to go dancing.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1991 Review
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An artfully crafted, intimate song cycle, August and Everything After seemed to explode on impact. Vividly produced by T Bone Burnett, its post-punk bleakness married to old-school rock influences, August became that rare album over which both alterna-kids and classic rockers could bond. Sure, there are a few moments when you can hear how badly the Crows want to be Van Morrison, the Band, R.E.M. and, yes, Bob Dylan, but those don't offset the divine inspiration of "Rain King," "Round Here" and "A Murder of One."
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Having sex, dealing drugs and making the heads of niggas who fucked with him rock & roll are the cornerstones of the B.I.G.'s landmark double album; Big's heavy voice, light flow and distinctive lisp slalom between biting comedy, frightening threats and narratives so sharp that you could tell the temperature in the room where the bullets were flying. Rhyming over melodic funk with his trademark diction, Brooklyn's finest made what was almost an L.A. album, topped off with a loving tribute to the City of Angels. "Going Back to Cali" is a chilling counterpoint to the album's final three songs, answers to the beef with Death Row that haunted Biggie for the last year of his life.
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That voice stopped you in its tracks. It recalled Billie Holiday a bit, sure, coming from high in the back of her throat, piercing the ear a little, but wasn't really it. Her music was up-to-the-minute jazzy hip-hop R&B, but her voice sounded ancient, with a splash of Northern hipness and a twist of Southern comfort. It was Erykah Badu, from Brooklyn via Dallas, her head wrap tall and tight, singing of knowledge and philosophy and fulfilling unrequited love in the next lifetime. She was the sister-in-music of D'Angelo and Lauryn Hill, the Earth Mother of Nineties boho soul.
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• Rolling Stone's Original 1997 Review


She's just above average in technical singing ability, but this girl from the projects of Yonkers, New York, became a cultural necessity because she had Everywoman crosses to bear and a superhuman ability to make you feel her. On her second album, My Life, Mary J. Blige shows a rare gift for pouring her heart into a recording, to make her soul come through the speakers. Collaborating with Sean "Puffy" Combs on original songs and interpolations of tracks by Barry White, Curtis Mayfield and Roy Ayers ("My Life"), Blige displays her ongoing struggle to love herself, and, as she says on the marquee single, to just be happy. The subtly autobiographical album ended up making her a megastar and crystallized the burgeoning hip-hop-soul movement.
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The apotheosis of the Wu-Tang dynasty, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… is powered by the RZA's somehow off-balance, hyperdetailed production, Raekwon the Chef's verbal intercourse — lyrics so dense you need the Staten Island Rosetta stone to make sense of them — and Ghostface Killah's brilliant supporting role. Ghostface's exuberance at finally getting to spit his style on the mike pulses through his every verse — where Raekwon comes off as a cool-criminal mastermind, Ghostface's larger-than-life persona leaps out through the speakers. Never before have the Tony Montana fantasies of young black men, the dreams of transforming giant bricks of pharmaceuticals into giant stacks of dead presidents, been portrayed with so much precision, poetry and pathos.
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Following up their earthshaking Achtung Baby, Zooropa further embellished the new model U2. These are the superstars, after all, who audaciously reinvented themselves on their eighth album — exchanging chiming guitar for funkier riffing and dense, hip-hop-meets-industrial production, unrestrained wailing for insinuating talk-singing, fever for a bubbling heat. Zooropa, their ninth outing, emphasized the shift: Instead of the mythic, desert-landscape cover shot of The Joshua Tree (1987), there's deconstructed video imagery; for the desperate spiritual questing of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," they substitute the monochromatic dead-end musings of "Numb."
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En Vogue got all dolled up in their finest girl-group threads for Funky Divas, looking sharp and looking for love along the border of hip-hop and R&B. They flaunt their vocal pizazz from the crowd-pleasing flash of "My Lovin' (You're Never Gonna Get It" and "Free Your Mind" to the succulent soul of "Give It Up, Turn It Loose." The En Vogue ladies had enough nerve to revamp a tune that Curtis Mayfield wrote for Aretha Franklin, and enough talent to bring it off — they made "Giving Him Something He Can Feel" sound weightless and dreamlike and sticky with bliss, as pure a summer pleasure as the radio gave up all decade.
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Cypress Hill's formula has been imitated so much, it's easy to forget how shocking it sounded at the time: crazy L.A. voices, scary Spanglish words, dusted Seventies funk beats that made you laugh out loud. B-Real and Sen-Dog come on as a hip-hop Cheech and Chong, praising the sweet leaf with a devotion rarely seen beyond the parking lot at a Phish concert. While the rappers twist their "Latin Lingo" into vato rhymes about blunts, guns and forties, D.J. Muggs pumps bongloads of bass into paranoid sound collages like "Hand on the Pump," and when you turn it up loud, the beat goes boo-ya.
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As Black-American-music royalty, Janet Jackson has had every significant moment of her growth recorded. With Control, she had her cotillion. With Rhythm Nation 1814, she announced her political and sexual awakening. And with Janet., she celebrated becoming an erotic being. Using soul, rock and dance elements, as well as opera diva Kathleen Battle, Janet unleashed her most musically ambitious record, guided, as always, by producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Two albums before, she'd innocently sung, "Let's wait awhile." Now she boldly purrs, "If I was your girl, oh the things I'd do to you!/I'd make you call out my name/I'd ask who it belongs to!" Like Gloria Steinem with a six-figure video budget, she shows young women a way to have their sexual freedom and their dignity, to have their cake and be eaten, too.
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• Rolling Stone's Original 1993 Review


You have to put up with stuff to enjoy a Jane's Addiction album: noodly jamming, hyperbole and a hippie-ish insistence on music's pagan power. But give them a chance and you'll find yourself immersed in the crashing waves of Dave Navarro's guitar and Steven Perkins' polyrhythmic drums, and hear in Perry Farrell's screeching the call of the good god Pan. Ritual is the album most likely to convert skeptics. Not only does it have two great singles — the game of sonic peekaboo "Stop!" and the anarchist manifesto "Been Caught Stealing" — but the whole record rides a groove that's as hard and frenetic as the Santa Monica Freeway leading right into these surfers' beloved curl. Hard rock became a weirder place.
• Rolling Stone's Original 1990 Review
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Throughout the album lonesome travelers and restless strangers battle their lives with drink, religion and the active search for somewhere better than here. "A little trouble makes it worth the going/And a little rain never hurt no one/The world is round/And so I'll go around/You must risk something that matters," Waits sings on "A Little Rain," with David Phillips' pedal steel sweeping through the background. No one needs convincing. It's a song older than Waits himself — older than Hank Williams, older than Robert Johnson — that Waits is chasing, the simple mystery of where life goes: "I don't wanna float a broom/Fall in love and get married and then boom/How the hell did it get here so soon?/I don't wanna grow up." Albums this rich with spiritual longing prove the validity of that effort, no matter the odds.
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• Rolling Stone's Original 1992 Review


The Nineties were the all-time high-water mark of silly genre names, and trip-hop may be the silliest of all. But Massive Attack really did invent a whole new style, manipulating hip-hop's boom and reggae's throb into their own slow-motion funk noir, inspiring Bristol, England, neighbors such as Tricky and Portishead to explore cinematic dance grooves heavy on the atmospherics. Their influence has spread to all corners of pop and rock, not to mention upscale shoe stores and cafes everywhere. Daddy G, Mushroom and 3-D made their most majestic statement on Protection, with colossal beats and first-rate vocal guests. Tricky makes a great cameo, but Tracey Thorn of Everything but the Girl steals the show in the eight-minute title track, a stand-by-your-woman soul ballad that takes off into outer space and gets home in time to do the dishes.
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