The Best 90s Album In The WorldEver!

Product Information

Having spent the preceding decade as one of music’s most revered experimental pop acts, for 1999’s The Soft Bulletin, the Flaming Lips jettisoned some of the problematic, self-consciously fey trappings of their previous work and distilled the elements that worked best about their distinctive take on modern pop into song structures that were as accessible as they were adventurous. The result was a deliberately constructed, refined new sound and a landmark album that was both influenced by and superior to the music of its era and which, in retrospect, stands as one of the finest, most important and influential albums of its decade. A testament to careful, selective editing, The Soft Bulletin recast the Flaming Lips as far more than a quirky cult act and laid the groundwork for their commercial and artistic breakthroughs in the years that followed. Keefe Shedding the boutiquey qualities that allowed some to dismiss her as a Sade for the ’90s, Björk hooked up with multiple collaborators to forge an eclectic tour de force that challenged the agility of her starburst voice. The orchestral grandeur of “Isobel,” the technoid seduction of “Possibly Maybe,” the industrial juggernaut of “Army of Me,” and the big-band retro romp of “It’s Oh So Quiet” each highlight a different facet of her fascinatingly mutable identity (magic-realist dreamer, cyber-diva, space-pixie, etc.). These personalities are further dramatized in a series of brilliantly inventive videos such as “Army of Me” and its Tank Girl tyke. A TV-friendly ambassador for all things avant, Björk offers electronica with a human face for those intrigued by new sounds but alienated by the genre’s anonymity. Flying in at Number 1 and Number 2 are none other than legendary Britpop band Oasis, with (Whats The Story) Morning Glory? taking the lead, and Definitely Maybe securing second place.

Recorded in Berlin after the Wall came down, Achtung Baby did the unimaginable: It made one of the world’s biggest bands seem edgy again. The righteous chest-beating of anthems like “Sunday Bloody Sunday” gave way to a worldly cynicism influenced by media overload and the albums David Bowie and Brian Eno collaborated on in Berlin in the late ’70s. But U2 weren’t pretending to be the Orb; the electronic rhythms and effects are there to shine up singles like “One” and “Mysterious Ways.” 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.The stuff of R&B legend, Mary J. Blige’s scorching second album involved nearly every major playa of the ’90s urban-music scene: Puff Daddy executive-produced it; Death Row honcho Suge Knight was rumored to have busted heads at Uptown to get Blige a better deal; and “Who Shot Ya”—the infamous Notorious B.I.G. B-side that riled up an incarcerated Tupac Shakur—began as a My Life interlude but was nixed for being too hard. BBC Radio 2's National Album Day collection goes live on Monday 9th October and will be rolled out through the week. Search ‘Radio 2 90s’ to listen.

In England, Oasis and the rest of the Britpop lot left nearly as big a mark as Nirvana and the other Seattleites. Hip-hop took over the world, and seemed to change shape every few months. Remember when electronica looked like the future? Where do mischief makers like Pavement, Beastie Boys and A Tribe Called Quest fit in? And that’s to say nothing of the totally random ska and swing revivals…although that’s all you’ll hear about it here. Cibo Matto’s debut seemed to spring from nowhere (Italy? Japan? New York?), yet it bore recognizable markings: hip-hop beats, piquant samples, ESL food poetry, and girl-power signifying that suggested superhero Venusians who’d learned to smoke from the Beastie Boys. In fact, Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda were Japanese transplants to the East Village who had consumed everything from riot grrrl to Brazilian jazz and Yoko Ono while concocting their own mastermix. Says Tim Carr, the A&R man who signed them to Warner Bros.: “Their music reminded me of Nabokov in the U.S. in the way they came here and conquered American pop music in a way nobody who had it as their first language would.” And like Björk, Cibo prove technology and female intuition can groove together, yin-yang-style. “ Viva! La Woman has that element of Miho and I sitting in our living room and talking very privately,” Honda says. “We wanted to celebrate the womanhood.” KATE SULLIVAN From Monday 9 October, a BBC Sounds Collection goes live – search ‘Radio 2 90s’ for the content - and features: 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

Luniz: “I Got 5 on It” (1995)

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. Tragically, on March 9, 1997, just as Biggie was celebrating the birth of a son and the impending release of his second album, Life After Death, he was murdered in a still unsolved Los Angeles drive-by. But in a genre of here-today-gone-tomorrow superstars, Ready to Die assures that Biggie will live on. CHEO HODARI COKER 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. 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

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 Martin Talbot, Chief Executive of Official Charts: “We are delighted to be collaborating with Radio 2 on this fantastic National Album Day chart, in celebration of the great studio albums of the Nineties. This fascinating rundown is a superb reminder of what an eclectic decade it was, dominated by Britpop and hip-hop, country and soul, metal and grunge, plus (of course) plenty of pop. What a decade it was.” 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. One of the most bizarre hip-hop albums ever made, this collaboration between eccentric Ultramagnetic MC rapper Kool Keith and San Francisco producer Dan “The Automator” Nakamura (with scratching from Invisibl Skratch Piklz turntablist Q-Bert) arrived with the stealth and unreality of an alien visitation—complete with anal probe. Part stand-up comedy routine, part downtempo groove workout, this concept album about the misadventures of a Jupiter-born gynecologist leaves butts wiggling and brains scrambling as listeners try to figure out exactly what to make of Keith’s stream-of-subconsciousness flow (“Paramedics FedEx your legs with eggs you can hatch / Can’t finetooth a dead ex but the skin don’t match”). “It was an album that let you get off all your left-field verses that didn’t make sense,” says Keith. Fight the power? Fuhgeddaboutit. In the years since that awakening, Rowlands and Chemical sibling Ed Simons have channeled the power into their own mad engines. Their 1995 debut, Exit Planet Dust, was the album that introduced the world to what the Chems had been brewing at the legendary Heavenly Social Club, where the so-called “Big Beat” scene got its start and even Fatboy Slim would stop in to take notes (“That’s why my first album is called Better Living Through Chemistry,” Norman Cook admits. “My girlfriend used to say that all I do is rip off the Chemical Brothers.”)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 You voted in your droves to make ‘OK Computer’ your Ultimate 90s Album. Following 1993 debut ‘Pablo Honey’ (containing synonymous single ‘Creep’) and 1995’s acclaimed ‘The Bends’, few could have anticipated the giant leap Radiohead would make on their third record.

The Official Most Streamed Albums of the 90s chart features the Top 40 most-streamed albums from that decade, based on UK streams, as compiled exclusively by the Official Charts Company for National Album Day. And how did the band get Ragged Glory‘s gloriously shitty sound? At one point, Sampedro recalls, their guitar tech “came in with a shovel of shit and put it in front of the microphone, and Neil stood in it to sing. We had to get authentic.” SARAH VOWELLUnderneath 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 Just as Kurt Cobain’s supposed dread of fame turned out to be a more complicated love-hate dynamic, Nevermind’s confrontational pose is also a calculated bid for acceptance. Never as hard or as dangerous as the brutal bands from which Nirvana drew their inspiration, they nonetheless synthesized one of the best examples of hard influence softened into digestible material. The progression from raw to radio-friendly is often equated with dumbing-down, but here it’s a twofold boon: creating great songs and opening, through Cobain’s unabashed love for the bands he was weaned on, a gateway to a hidden world of fantastic music. Cataldo By the end of 1996, Radiohead was a one-hit wonder (thanks to 1993’s self-loathing “Creep”) whose second album, The Bends, sold half as well in the U.S. as their first. But as they toured the world for a bleary-eyed year and a half to try to cultivate an audience for their increasingly experimental music, they came up with their great theme: In the future that’s two minutes away, everywhere looks the same and no place is home. It was the result of this most insular band becoming “a little braver about revealing feelings and letting them come out in the music,” according to Hubley. Yo La Tengo had been suggesting such ambition since 1990’s Fakebook, but they delivered it here. “A lot of the things that our group has done over the years we’ve done to try to get over our shyness,” Ira Kaplan says. “Maybe we did better at that on this record.” JON DOLAN 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.”