The Best 90s Album In The WorldEver!

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The Internet. Blur versus Oasis. Friends. Grunge. When music was still on MTV. The 90s was a turbulent and exciting decade for pop culture. But trying to piece the puzzle together through the best 90s albums is a frustrating task – and one that usually sees the same culprits demanding attention: Radiohead, Lauryn Hill, U2… Narrowing it down to just 30 albums is even harder, but we believe these records sum up one of popular music’s most fondly-remembered eras. The chart is filled with classics and fan favourites which have stood the test of time, spanning a spectrum of the biggest genres of the decade. Expect Dr Dre, Shania Twain, Westlife, Nirvana, Spice Girls, Metallica, Destiny's Child and more.

OK Computer debuted at No. 21, then sank like a stone, but during the next year, a growing number of fans were seduced by its cryptic sweep. “People really took to it,” says Greenwood, and the band’s second single, “Karma Police,” went into rotation on MTV. No decade is a musical monolith, but seeing the best songs of the ‘90s listed all in one place, the era seems especially scattered. History has boiled it down to grunge and gangsta rap on one end, boy bands and Britney Spears at the other, but it’s the stuff in the middle and on the fringes that makes the period difficult to sum up. Pinkerton is a tired, cranky record, but therein lies its brilliance: no shortage of well-delivered mania and pathos. Gone were the likable teenage ragamuffins of The Blue Album, and in their place stumbled a group of world-weary men ravaged by the wake of unimaginable success. And so, in typical Rivers Cuomo fashion, we get brilliant rants on the emptiness of sudden fame (“Tired of Sex”), continued romantic disappointment (the hilariously bittersweet “Pink Triangle”), and a wonderfully disjointed, attention-sapped lead single (“El Scorcho”). Perhaps Pinkerton was the advent of Weezer’s slow decline into mediocrity, but it remains their most intricate, introspective, and serious work, brimming with a well-layered creepiness and complexity the band has rarely matched since. Liedel This poisonous sequel to the hardly saccharine Nevermind was heard as a fame-spurning volley in the early-’90s alternawars, but In Utero makes more sense as an honest attempt to portray life with Kurt Cobain’s famous stomach—the measure of beauty available to someone rolling around on a hotel bed, wavering between pain, spew, and fog. The Official Most Streamed Albums of the 90s chart features the Top 40 most-streamed albums from the decade, based on UK streams, as compiled exclusively by the Official Charts Company for National Album Day. The Official Top 40 Most Streamed albums of the 90s POS

Still, it could have been worse. As Reznor said in 1995, “There was another song that I didn’t put on there called ‘Just Do It.’ It was a very dangerously self-destructive, silly little snippet. You know, ‘If you’re going to kill yourself, just do it, nobody cares at all.’ But [ Downward Spiral coproducer] Flood freaked out and said, ‘No, you’ve gone too far. I don’t want to be involved in that.'” Amid the frenzied mourning that erupted in New York City following DMX’s tragic passing last year, it was easy to forget that Earl Simmons had once seemed like a lost cause, passed over by Bad Boy for the more bankable LOX after early single “The Born Loser” flopped at Columbia. But this trial by failure proved to be his salvation. By the time Def Jam gave him a shot, DMX was a 27-year-old vet who wasn’t about to take his second chance for granted. But L.L. responded with classic Muhammad Ali-style rope-a-dope. Teaming with Juice Crew founder Marley Marl, he stripped his sound down and rediscovered the battle rhymer within. The James Brown sample behind En Vogue’s dance hit “Hold On” was tweaked until it became the rugged street anthem “The Boomin’ System.” The smash “Jingling Baby (Remix)” and the R&B-flavored “Around the Way Girl” asserted that from the dance floor to the boudoir, Ladies still Loved Cool James. Romesh Ranganathan: For The Love of Hip Hop focusses on the classic 1997 album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Following the very first National Album Day in 2018, subsequent years have had a specific theme which the BBC has reflected in its content and programming - Celebrating Debut Albums (2022), Celebrating Women in Music (2021), Celebrating the 80s (2020), and ‘Don’t Skip’ to encourage fans to discover albums in full, as a complete body of work (2019).

Underneath all the marching-band tempos and piles of instrumentation, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea stands out as one of the most effective examples of dread cloaked in bright, hammering noise. From the three-part intro of “King of Carrot Flowers,” where a solitary acoustic strums are slowly buried by a clamoring wave of new sounds, these songs act as exercises in raw emotion padded with the kind of busy din that distracts from the heartrending gloom of the lyrics. Over everything is the quivering voice of Jeff Mangum, the de facto force behind this singularly sustained explosion of melancholy. Cataldo

Sara Cox’s Half Wower with lots of 90s tunes to get you dancing (available on BBC Sounds from 12 October). Listening to Warren G’s “Regulate” and Dr. Dre on the radio, the pair were inspired to come up with the nasty roller-disco throwdown of “Da Funk.”“The original riff was actually a siren,” said Bangalter, “but we wanted to make it more of a gangsta rap thing, more dirty, so we changed the sound a bit.” The song ended up a worldwide dance-floor smash, as did Bangalter’s side project Stardust (“Music Sounds Better With You”), and Daft Punk remain one of the world’s most respected club acts. “‘Da Funk’ was a big record for us,” says Tom Rowlands of the Chemical Brothers. “It was so fresh and exciting. We got a very early copy, and it was always part of our set—their records are a dream to DJ.” MIKE RUBIN Colin Greenwood (bass) says: "I’m just really grateful and happy that people love the record and those atmospheres captured in that magical place stand up today and you can hear them on the record." When “Mo Money Mo Problems” arrived in the summer of 1997, Diana Ross’ hiccupping sample and Kelly Price’s sashaying lamentation as ubiquitous as a heat wave, Biggie Smalls had been dead for four months. Mase and Puff Daddy—then nearing the release of their respective debuts—took the lead, playfully plodding through opening verses and goofing on Tiger Woods and Bryant Gumbel in a paradoxically ostentatious video. In that life-after-death context, it was impossible not to hear the song’s tragic irony, like a warning by and for B.I.G. about the fate that may await such a contentious and ostentatious superstar. But the anthem’s enduring power stems from its moral simplicity, epitomized by Biggie’s monstrous minute-long verse, buried in the second half: Stay true to your roots and crew, even as you aspire for the cover of Fortune. This was never a song about dying or problems, really; it was a song about living through a moment’s madness, of making it out intact and sane. –Grayson Haver Currin Are we going to be No. 90?” Roni Size asks. For a guy with the stones to call his debut album New Forms, Bristol’s most famous junglist can be awfully self-effacing. “My music is very sometimes-ish: Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we get it wrong.” On the two CDs of New Forms, Size and the Reprazent crew mostly get it right. The music jumps from MC Dynamite’s jungle chat on “Brown Paper Bag” (featuring a bass line hook that ended up on more than a few outgoing messages) to Onnalee’s soul-diva workouts to “Destination,” which samples a horn riff from Everything but the Girl’s “Each and Everyone.” EBTG’s Ben Watt is thrilled that something he wrote wound up on Reprazent’s debut. “Our song was owned by Warner Bros., and they got really heavy over the money. And we were just saying, ‘For Christ’s sake, this is Roni’s first album. We love his music—give the guy a break!'”

The programme will be available from Saturday 7th October (00.01am) on BBC Sounds and broadcast on Radio 2 on Saturday 14 October (1-3pm). Aaliyah’s first union with Missy Elliott and Timbaland was a jolt, completely upending R&B through a collective vision of futurism, cyber goth, and sci-fi samples that remain virtually unmatched in scope and impact, as evidenced by the number of contemporary musicians still mining her catalog for inspiration. One in a Million arrived when R&B needed an overhaul, and Aaliyah was the perfect vessel: her breathy but assured alto gave her an aura of mystique, and she possessed a kind of reticence and remove even while singing about her own desire. (Furthering this mystique was the unfounded rumor that her signature side-part and sunglasses were hiding an amblyopic eye.) Her own reasons for this remain cause for speculation—she’d been illegally child-married to R. Kelly for less than a year when One in a Million came out—but the record was unmistakably the sound of her gaining her agency as a young woman and changing the course of music history, all before she even graduated from high school. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd Given the crowded field, we’ve been ultra-selective in compiling this all-bangers, no-clangers playlist and limited it to one song per artist. Whether the ‘90s was the greatest decade for music is mostly a generational debate, but as you’ll hear, one thing’s for sure: it was never boring. One of the great artifacts from rap’s coming of age, this second album by the breeziest of the Native Tongues groups was self-aware enough to claim a jazz heritage, yet spry enough to rap about booty, not Dizzy. Bursting with happy, horny life, rappers Phife and the butter-voiced Q-Tip skip along through free associations and Queens reminiscence—letting the ’50s saxes and airy guitar chords behind them invoke the larger context of their travels. Then, in a big old barn, she wrote some songs on the keyboards and sent them to her band—old Automatic Dlamini bandmate John Parish, avant-garde guitarist Joe Gore, Captain Beefheart sideman Eric Drew Feldman, and producer Flood (U2/Nine Inch Nails)—thinking it was probably crap. But “from the moment I popped the cassette in,” Gore says, “I knew this was going be a phenomenally great record. When a lot of artists try to evoke the emotional power of blues and gospel, it comes out as lame-ass imitation. Polly doesn’t waste any time replicating the gestures, she just taps into the music’s deepest core.”But it was the follow-up, Dig Your Own Hole, that spun our world around totally. “ Exit was a complete worldview of what we wanted in music,” Rowlands explains. “ Dig Your Own Hole was a record borne out of where we ended up after Exit—playing a lot of live gigs to bigger audiences. It’s got big feelings, big emotions.” Have I got a little story for you,” Eddie Vedder booms in an epic baritone on “Alive,” one of the deeply personal tales of familial dysfunction and his search for identity—he sings to music that combines the Who’s dramatic sweep with Minor Threat’s punk energy. “ Ten is life or death,” Vedder says. “[Bandmatesj Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard [of Seattle’s Mother Love Bone] had just lost their singer, and I was trying to deal with the loss of my father, who I never got to know.” You’d never know it from the hits—dark, sweeping, cinematic arias such as “Ready or Not” and “Fu-Gee-La”—but The Score began with modest ambitions. “It was like, ‘Yo, let’s do this album like we want to do it,'” rapper/producer Wyclef Jean says. “Hopefully it’ll go gold or something, so I can get some sneakers and L. can get a Honda.” Well, it definitely went gold or something, selling 18 million copies worldwide and paving the way for changes both sublime (an open-minded inclusiveness) and crass (countless pop-song retreads) in rap music.

Lauryn Hill’s aggressive faith may be her sweetest sacrilege. “I’m not embarrassed to mention God in songs,” she said in 1998. “Some people find that corny. Some people find that offensive. And it’s always funny to hear that people think I’m too goody-goody because there’s so much baddie-baddie.” I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got gave O’Connor a platform radicals don’t usually have: the attention of ordinary softies who like a nice love song. Her haunting rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” won her an instant audience that wasn’t prepared for the proto-riot grrrl lurking within—or the rest of her starkly personal album. “The label didn’t want to release it because they said it was like reading someone’s diary,” says John Reynolds, O’Connor’s then-husband and current drummer and musical director. “There was an argument, and Sinead said, ‘Drop me.’ They changed their minds.” BARRY WALTERSShadow is surprised he influenced anyone. “After the record, I’d always bump into these world-class producers who’d say, ‘Yeah, Endtroducing…—what a great piece of production,'” he says. “I just did it on one sampler in a tiny little studio.” JON DOLAN The album is also very much a product of the creative turmoil of 1994-95 London, where Björk had relocated from Iceland. Jungle was exploding out of the underground, and strange hybrids such as trip-hop were percolating. “If Björk had moved somewhere else, like New York, it would have been a totally different album,” Massey says. Yet Post was actually recorded and mixed in the Bahamas at Nassau’s famous Compass Point Studios. According to DJ/U2 collaborator Howie B., who engineered Post, “Despite being in this Caribbean vacation paradise, we only had one day off in three weeks. And because the studios have no windows, we might as well have been in London.” Björk did record some of her vocals with her feet in the ocean, though, thanks to a long microphone cord. Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: Rage Against the Machine's 'The Battle of Los Angeles' It didn’t make Radiohead any happier either. In Meeting People Is Easy, director Grant Gee’s arty documentary about the emotional exhaustion of promoting an album in the age of MTV Singapore, a reporter asks Yorke how he feels about an upcoming show, and the singer replies that he’s terrified. As on Computer, what should be a mindless interaction with the machinery of daily life brings on a nameless dread. “The wheels start turning again and the industry starts moving again,” Yorke says. “It just keeps going—basically outside of our control.” RJ SMITH It results in killer tunes like “Same Old Show,” based around a surprisingly eerie vocal loop from “On My Radio” by British ska revivalists the Selecter, and “Jump N’ Shout,” with its raucous dancehall reggae vocal and menacing gangsta-strut bass line. Remedy‘s every-which-way creativity also encompasses the Timbaland-style stutter beats of “U Can’t Stop Me” and funk fantasia of “Rendez-Vu” and “Yo-Yo.”“When we started out, we were just trying to be house producers,” says Ratcliffe. “Now that we’ve achieved that, we’re trying not to be house producers.” SIMON REYNOLDS