Defining Albums of the 90s
A friend sent me a text message over the weekend asking what two or three albums defined the 90s. I tried to clarify whether this meant specifically as I experienced the decade or from a historical perspective. He said he was more interested in my interpretation so I came up with the following short list:
Smashing Pumpkins – Siamese Dream
1993
A number of grunge albums immediately popped into my head as I was a full-blown teenaged Seattle scenester (minus the part about actually living in the Pacific Northwest). However, this particular album was my final selection because not only did I listen to it more than the others, but I haven’t really gone back to revisit it all that much since that time. From about 1994 through 1998 it was a mainstay in my CD players and tape decks, but since then it hasn’t ever really made a full-on revival (despite the fact that every time I do listen to it or any of the tracks I think, “Man that was a great album!”) which has served to sort of lock it into that particular place and time.
My principal recollections involve, primarily, me playing air drums with a pair of drumsticks I bought specifically for that purpose (I never owned a real drum set) in my bedroom with the CD on repeat until blisters formed on my hands. The other thing I remember is accurately predicting the three singles following “Cherub Rock” (which is what prompted me to pick the album up in the first place), although I got them out of order. I knew “Disarm” was a hit (it was one of my early favorites) and I figured “Rocket” and “Today” would be easy candidates for singles/videos. What surprised me then, and continues to surprise me now, is that the album’s best track, “Mayonaise,” never got the attention I thought it deserved. The local alternative rock radio station (Live 105) played it on a middling rotation for a few years late in the 90s but I guess the band and the powers that be were already on to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by that time and it just never became the big hit I thought it could have been.
In some ways, it’s easy for me to overlook the significance of The Black Album on my life as a music-listener. As a skinny, clueless, short-term member of the high school wrestling team as an underclassman, I was subjected to the single of “Enter Sandman” on repeat during our hours-long after school training sessions by the varsity team leader (who also happened to be the coach’s son). Up until that point, honestly, my secular musical exposure was limited to Boyz II Men, Paula Abdul and “Weird Al” Yankovic. But somehow between the forced repetition of the lead track from Metallica’s self-titled “crossover” album and a friend’s Christmas haul that included both volumes of Guns N’ Roses’ profane (and occasionally brilliant) Use Your Illusion, the 1991-1992 school year became the period when I really discovered what would become my musical taste.
I dipped into much heavier material later on, Slayer and Bolt Thrower and Corrosion of Conformity and so on. But the first inkling I had that rock music was where my heart found kin was in this album. Since then, of course, I’ve devoured Metallica’s back catalog and found The Black Album somewhat lacking comparatively to, say, Master of Puppets or …And Justice For All. But the summer of 1992 my friend (actually the one who sent the text message), my brother and I spent untold hours fighting our way through SSI’s Eye of the Beholder PC game while The Black Album played in an endless loop. Metallica has never quite found their groove again since this transitional release and while from a sheer teenaged angst-rage standpoint it doesn’t quite compare to their 80s work, it stands as a perfect junction between heavy and accessible which made it the ideal bridge to facilitate my exit from musical apathy into dedicated appreciation. As a metaphor for my entire adolescence, it works remarkably well and owing to the fact that the 90s were my teenage years, nothing else could fit as well in the definition of that decade than this.
I struggled to find a suitable third, thinking at first maybe just the original two were sufficient. But there was another aspect beyond just my most-played album and the album that got me into music at all that defined the 90s for me. What I eventually settled on was an album that, at the time, I didn’t appreciate at all. But, in retrospect, I can’t think of a single album that immediately evokes the whole decade better than Dr. Dre’s The Chronic.
For a time, when competition among musical genres seemed perfectly rational, I would decry rap and its gangsta-wannabe devotees for its (to me, at the time) inconceivable dominance of the popular music charts, led by thug lifestyle peddlers such as Tupac, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and Dr. Dre’s seemingly endless string of Long Beach spin-offs, guest appearances and protegees. Then, it seemed like these fictionalized gang bangers were merely standing in the way of the ascension of the true musical formula found in the rock and roll of the time. One couldn’t watch MTV, hoping to get the blessing of the program director in the form of Jane’s Addiction’s “Been Caught Stealing” or Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike,” without enduring a barrage of cuts like Warren G’s “Regulate” and Notorious B.I.G.’s “Big Poppa.” Nestled in there as well were, in the same heavy rotation as Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” video and Metallica’s “Wherever I May Roam,” Dr. Dre’s “Ain’t Nothing But a G Thang,” lamentably catchy and regrettably likable despite it’s obvious stylistic flaws.
Later, in my 20s, I would come back around and embrace my once-hidden affection for rap, discarding the silly combative pretext of “chosen” musical genres. But I was never able to discard the temporal context of The Chronic and no other album that I can think of so readily transports me back to summer water ski weekends on the Delta, wallflower-y upperclassman dances with sneaked cigarettes or endless hours driving around town with nothing better to do than channel-surf the radio.
In Conclusion
There are a ton of other albums I could have cited. Pearl Jam’s Ten was a huge influence on me and rivaled Siamese Dream for sheer playtime. However, I’ve clung to that album, revisiting it a number of times in the years since, so that it isn’t as anchored to the 90s as Smashing Pumpkins’ album is. The follow-up, Vs., may be a contender if you’re talking about 90s-only but I’d feel uneasy including it over the far more seminal Ten.
From a historical perspective I could cite Nirvana’s Nevermind, which I liked and listened to but never as much as others. Somewhere between Alice In Chains’ Facelift, Dirt, and Jar of Flies is a definitive 90s album but, as released, they faded a bit on the weakness of the occasional unpolished track. Few hard rock albums typify the decade more to me than White Zombie’s La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1 but the overall impact of it pales in comparison to Metallica’s Black Album and, honestly, La Sexorcisto was a bit ahead of its time, stylistically more similar to nü metal from the early 00s than much else that was happening in 1992.
U2’s Actung Baby might make a top 10 list but I wasn’t quite ready for art-rock in my teens so while I owned and loved it, there was little resonance for me to the time period. Other albums from the decade I discovered only later like Radiohead’s The Bends or OK Computer (I guess technically I found Radiohead in 1999 so it counts but I consider them more indicative of my experience in the early 2000s as a young married man). If history were a determining factor, then Radiohead may not be able to be ignored since, for my money, either of those albums would be in my short-short list for tops of the decade. Other albums I discovered and loved in the 90s but were technically released in the 80s like Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine.
It also helps, I think, in narrowing my selections that the artists represented all faded into something significantly different since the 90s: The Smashing Pumpkins haven’t been the same since Adore and who knows if their on-again-off-again personnel problems will ever result in a return to form; in the meantime newer acts like Silversun Pickups have adopted the shoegazer dream rock mantle to solid effect. Dr. Dre is more of a mogul, shaping careers of the likes of Eminem and 50 Cent (following the success of Snoop Dogg in the mid-90s), rather than doing much more mic work himself (the long-awaited Detox notwithstanding). And Metallica’s popularity in spite of fan whinging about their loss of an edge is sufficiently legendary to not require much more discussion than that.
Taken for exactly what the 90s was like to me, then, I think these three neatly encapsulate that period in my life. It’s an interesting question. I wonder how differently it would get answered depending on the specific age of the responder, too. I note my albums were all released in the early half of the decade; later stuff like Daft Punk’s Homework or Tool’s Ænima get lumped in my mind with college age and early adulthood associated with the opening years of the 21st century, despite falling definitely within the decade in question. Perhaps people a few years younger might dismiss Nevermind in favor of In Utero or the admittedly wonderful MTV Unplugged album Nirvana did. People a bit older might take a wider view of the decade and have no problem associating a release from 1990 with one from 1998. Fun food for thought.
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