A few months ago I decided that the 90s had too many classic albums for me to just label the ten best, so I split the Australian artists from the Rest of the World and posted that edition HERE.
The first album I ever owned was purchased in 88 or 89, the years prior to that saw me happy enough to listen to whatever was given to me, be it compilation tapes or just listening to the radio. It is fair to say that it took some time to decide what I liked, so the initial few years had me finding my feet and sorting out between what I did and didn’t like.
The 90s saw me hit my stride and define my tastes, in fact by the end of the 90s my tastes were so well defined that in the dubbos as music changed I refused to move with it, I have hardly purchased an album in the last 10 years that didn’t find its origins in the 90s or earlier, examples of my last few buys:
| Artist | Album | Origins (Started in…) |
| Hoodoo Gurus | Purity of Essence | 80s |
| People Under the Stairs | Carried Away | 90s |
| Mark Seymour | Daytime and the Dark | 80s / 90s Solo |
| James Reyne | The Best | 80s / 90s Solo |
| The Roots | How I Got Over | 90s |
| Big Boi | Sir Luscious Leftfoot | 90s |
| Living Colour | The Chair in the Doorway | 80s |
That’s just the last few months, almost… not almost, ALL of the artists either found fame in the 90s or before, I discovered them all in that decade, along with hundreds of artists long since retired or defunct.
The 90s saw me leave school, get a job, move from home, live with a bunch of scaly mates, drink way too much and ultimately move in with my then girlfriend, now wife and buy our first home. In short it was a busy decade, I started a 15 year old dipshit and ended it as a home-buying, quasi-career having, de-facto-residing dipshit.
So which albums out of the literally hundreds are the most notable from that halcyon decade? I could ramble through 50 very, very good ones but here are 10 that stand out.
So the big boys lead off. To paraphrase Song 1 from this album “This is the first review, in the Best International CDs of the 90s!”
That will mean nothing unless you have heard the album, and if you even dabble in hip-hop you should have.
The Beasties started as teenage loudmouth drunken yobs that were reviled by critics and the mainstream. Now they are wizened 40-something Buddhists and legends of an entire genre of music, pioneers that have been studied, honoured and copied for decades. Somewhere in between those polar opposites lies their best work.
I can’t be bothered arguing the toss between Check your Head and Paul’s Boutique, 15 years ago I would have plumped for Paul, now I am a CYH devotee.
I think PB was more groundbreaking at the time of release, but CYH has held up better and still works best when played loud.
The singles and obvious highlights are still brilliant but the throwaway tracks and quasi-filler that elevate the album, not bad when your lesser tracks are better than most top selling singles of the era.
Professor Booty, Finger Lickin’ Good and The Maestro might not be household names, but they are the icing on the sundae if the album already contains Pass the Mic, Jimmy James and So Watcha Want?.
Get well soon MCA.
Living Colour lit the match with Vivid and the still awesome Cult of Personality, Time’s Up saw the flame burn bright and unfortunately Stain saw it peter out and die. If Living Colour had a relevance chart it would be a triangle ^. The pinnacle is of course Time’s Up. (Vivid and Stain aren’t bad either, just not in the ballpark in a direct comparison.)
Everyone knows Love Rears up its Ugly Head, but this album is scintillating from start to finish. The thrash metal of the opening track isn’t indicative of the remainder of the album, which is a shame because it definitely would have had many buyers second guessing their purchase at the time, some of whom might not have hung around for the 60 minutes of brilliant heavy rock that followed.
Vernon Reid was at the peak of his guitar slinging powers, Corey Glover a dominating front man with a towering voice (and natty brightly coloured wetsuits that he wore to gigs onstage!) and the rhythm section of Muzz Skillings and Doug Wimbish rock solid.
No catchy guest vocalists (aside from a great cameo from Queen Latifah) and no dud tracks or filler.
At the time of Time’s Up’s release I wasn’t into any one genre, in fact at that stage I think my tape collection might have included Jimmy Barnes, INXS, Young MC, Vanilla Ice and Gloria Estefan (I liked one of her songs). Time’s Up opened my eyes to millions of possibilities, I started watching Rage late at night instead of the morning (the night had far edgier stuff).
Without Living Colour there may have been no Fishbone, Wu-Tang, Cannibal Ox, Urge Overkill or Tricky in my collection. If there is a moral to that it is to find what you like you have to test yourself first rather than follow the mainstream path to Ke$ha and Britney.
I bought Blue Lines early, I ordered it on the strength of Safe From Harm and Unfinished Sympathy. I didn’t “discover” it because someone told me about it (and I am proud of that). I have subsequently had many arguments with TOG as to which early Massive album was better, Blue Lines or Protection (Blue Lines!).
Then Mezzanine was released and it represented a significant departure from both albums, samples were practically gone, there was far more live instrumentation (especially guitar) and it just all seemed… angrier.
It took me a minute to decide if I liked the new Massive, and only a minute. Angel still slays me and inspires me to crank the volume until the windows rattle, Group Four and Dissolved Girl are still amazing and Inertia Creeps keeps hinting that it should be somewhere in my all time top 10. (For some reason it never gets in.)
Massive have only toured Perth twice as far as I am aware, I went both times. The first gig happened in Metros nightclub in the city, there might have been 600 people in attendance elbow to elbow and they played 75% of Mezzanine on the night. It was too loud, too bass heavy and the vocals were a little muddy and I couldn’t have gone away happier.
This year they toured here with Heligoland, which sounded better live than on CD. The band was set up outdoors across a small pond for scenery’s sake at King’s Park, and while it all went OK there was no link. It was more a bunch of guys playing loud songs across some water, the intimacy was gone. (It didn’t help that Martina Topley Bird was the opener and sucked big time, surprising given the fact she has a few good songs.)
The difference in the gigs is that even at their most languid Massive can make some of the most compact and intense music, there is a genuine sense of urgency across Mezzanine, it is both restrictive and insistent, an album for the claustrophobic.
And all anyone remembers is Teardrop.
I went to the US for a 6 week holiday in 2001. We visited the Grand Canyon, some theme parks, Niagara Falls, heaps of monuments and went to half a dozen NBA fans, (Spree for the game!).
Six things I remember about my American trip:
1/ A LOT of fat people, as in LAAAAARRRRGE, we tried taking a “fat person of the day” photo, but gave up when there were too many candidates.
2/ Watching Vince Carter win Slam Dunk contest on TV in a hotel in San Francisco. I’ve watched a lot of Dunk contests, that will never be topped. I was also drinking my first 40 oz bottle of (King Cobra) beer. (Two actually.) I always wanted to drink a “40” and felt that was my chance.
3/ Hearing David Gray’s Please Forgive Me in a jukebox in a nearly deserted bar also in San Francisco. We were killing a few minutes when I swear the thing turned on by itself, I wondered “Who the hell is this?” and wandered over to look.
The next day I bought White Ladder.
4/ Dale Earnhardt died when we were on the East Coast somewhere. I only vaguely knew who he was at the time as Nascar has no presence in Australia, I knew all about him by the time we left. He was like royalty.
5/ Going via a packed subway to a shopping centre in Washington DC by day = No dramas. Going home late at night on the same subway = Shit scared.
6/ Hearing Outkast’s Ms Jackson 147 times in 6 weeks. On the radio in taxis. On every bus we went on. In shopping centres. At each and every NBA game I went to. EVERYWHERE!
I wrote Outkast off because of Ms Jackson. (oooh!)
The critics at the time talked the album up and declared it one of the best ever, and the album flew off the shelves. I was a full fledged hip-hop head by this time, desperately searching for new sounds and artists, trawling music shops all over the country. I ignored it all.
In fact until Stankonia came out I had never even heard of Outkast, never knew about their albums or their singles. To this day I can’t understand why they slipped through my net for so long.
Don’t make the same mistake I did. Stankonia is actually Outkast’s 4th best album after the first three. The soaring high points are unfortunately contrasted by a couple of lows and some filler.
Aquemini though is the shit, if you took the lamentable Mamacita off the thing it would be vying very forcefully for best album of All Time honours.
As it stands that awful song knocks it down as far as “still one of the best ever anyway”, the rest is that good.
The Blur Vs Oasis argument never grabbed me… I hated both. Every so-called amazing British artist that was hailed as the savior of music (Kula Shaker, The Verve, Suede, Pulp, Menswear etc) and vanished just as quickly, no thanks.
As far as the UK goes in the 90s it was all Straight Outta Bristol – Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky, which you might’ve guessed from this list.
More recent years have given me an appreciation for PJ Harvey, Ash… and Reef.
Rides was the exception that probably had nothing to do with the rule. I liked Consideration from Glow and bought a dodgy copy in Bali sometime in the late 90s, then thought nothing more about Reef until their third (I think) single Sweety from this Rides album.
Sweety is three or so minutes of simple pop with a hooky singalong chorus and some nonsensical “wobbalaw” yelps near the end, and damn it if I don’t love the song still.
A couple of weeks later I popped Rides into the car CD player, I think I dragged it out a couple of months later.
Just an amazingly consistent album with great song after great song, they space out the loud ones and the quiet ones and the ballady ones enough so it never grows tired, and ends when it needs to. No “Let’s cram 3 more crap songs on here to get it to 15 so they think they get more value”, which I appreciate more and more, nothing worse than having to run to find the remote when “that experimental” song comes on.
I still listen to Sweety a lot, thankfully though I can listen quite happily to the 20 minutes on either side of it without tiring.
Getting the Jimmy Fallon show gig was the best and worst thing for The Roots, (money aside, I hope they get PAID).
The best because it gives them exposure to millions of new potential listeners (though if you watch the show it might soon be dozens).
The worst applies to those of us who already knew how good they were, as it kills me to watch then mug for the camera when they could be just grinding out more classic albums.
Despite this the new oft-delayed “How I got Over” = Very good. (More on that another day.)
Another success story from my US trip, I picked up Things Fall Apart somewhere along the trip, only we had too much stuff to carry and had to post a box full of knick knacks and assorted junk home. That included a bunch of CDs and a couple of DVDs.
Now, we were running on bare bones at that stage having spent way more than we expected along the way, and with the Aussie $ being at an all time low against the USD a can of Coke was costing us the equivalent of $6. So with finances tight we arranged for Last Class postage for the box of crap.
We were home 2 ½ months before we got it, and half the stuff was broken.
It was actually a little exciting, having been back a while and getting the CDs was like rediscovering them again, and in most cases I got to listen to these albums for the first time.
I already had Do You Want More?!? by that stage but had no clue that the massive leap in quality and consistency was on the way.
Things Fall Apart is head and shoulders above anything else The Roots have done, and I absolutely love some of their other stuff, Illadelph Half-life and Rising Down included.
The (slightly) commercial minor hit featuring Erykah Badu You Got Me took the press but is only a small part of what made the album so strong.
Black Thought was to that point only an MC, since Things Fall Apart he has become one of the most creative and consistent MCs around, even if he remains underrated.
Questlove’s drumming has always been rock solid and that is evident here, and no hip-hop group has ever used live instrumentation with the same success or quality as The Roots, not the Beastie Boys, not Common, no-one.
I used to be in my car for at least an hour a day, I had a 6 stack CD player that I refilled twice each week at least. Now I work near home and it can take me a week to get through an entire album. As luck would have it I had the Tribe’s Anthology in the car yesterday and had to take a short trip to a client’s business so I got to listen the whole way through. I don’t need reminding of how many great songs they made over the duration but it’s always nice to be able to crank Award Tour, Electric Relaxation etc…
Neither of those songs appear on The Low End Theory, they are both from Midnight Marauders, another classic.
So why TLET?
Simple: Excursions.
When I first moved to the city I think I had three rap CDs, Gangstarr, Ill Communication, De La Soul is Dead and The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy (I heard about it on Television – The Drug of a Nation). One of the women I worked with had a boyfriend who thought he was a bit edgy because he wore his hat backwards. They invited me around for dinner one night as a nice gesture to the new kid in the office and after a couple drinks he put TLET in the CD player, I think Q-Tip might have been up to his second bar of Excursions when I asked to borrow the album. I took it home that night.
A few months later the same guy stole about 15 of my CDs, broke up with the nice lady and started asking to borrow my car. I stopped talking to him after that.
But after buying this album for myself I went back and bought everything Tribe had done before or since, I just wish I stopped before The Love Movement.
Everyone knows Q-Tip is a far superior MC than Phife but it scarcely matters. You always know that if Phife opens the song Q-Tip will eventually bail him out anyway. Sometimes you have to listen to greatness alongside mediocrity to really recognize greatness.
And The Low End Theory is a great album. On top of that it introduced Busta Rhymes – “Raow-raow”.
(What is more surprising is the fact that Q-Tip without producer Ali sounds so rubbish. I bought his first solo album and listened to the more recent… not flash.)
I have read that Tricky freely admits his mental state is best described as fragile. When he released Vulnerable he went out of his way in interviews to bag the former album Juxtapose, an album that I love. (Vulnerable sucked.)
In fact no-one on this list is as hot and cold as Tricky is, after this brilliant debut he released the difficult to listen to but still mostly amazing Pre-Millennium Tension, OK so far. Then came the atrocious Angels with Dirty Faces that I sold years before I sold any of my CDs (at the time I thought “You bought it – you keep it”, but Angels was too awful). Then came the aforementioned Juxtapose which I thought was a little more commercial but excellent and for a change consistent. Then came Blowback, again great with a couple of low points, Vulnerable (sucked big time) and Knowle West Boy (Meh, but at least he seemed to try).
So stay with me here, that is:
Brilliant – Almost Brilliant – Absolutely Awful – Very, Very Good – Patchy but Good – Absolutely Awful – OK.
Mariah Carey couldn’t sing with that range!
At least with Maxinquaye he was either just nuts enough or just sane enough to complete a brilliant album from start to finish. From the brilliant reimagining of Karmacoma (which in itself has 137 versions floating about) through the rare successful remake of Black Steel all the way to the underrated Brand New – You’re Retro this was totally different to anything released to that point.
At once familiar yet totally foreign, samples appear through the album but are generally impossible to pick, Martina Topley-Bird’s vocals are generally incredible and Tricky generally rasps along in the background, creating an unpredictable counterpoint to her melody.
Too frequently critics point to Tricky as being a genius lyricist, over his entire discography I am yet to see too many examples of this. So I guess he is very similar to Eminem in that respect.
Unlike Eminem Tricky is capable of greatness, and has created some exceptional albums in between either benders or moments of clarity, (whatever is behind Angels and Vulnerable).
This is the very album that introduced us to our next door neighbours in the 90s, as the window-pane rattling bass in practically every song reached their home, even if the rest of the song didn’t.
Portishead shouldn’t work, take a self-loathing and shy chain-smoking gravel-voiced chick that looks like an ugly man and have her sing lounge tunes over bass-heavy tracks laden with screeches, scratches, occasional staccato drums and repetitive samples. That’s just too many damn hyphens for normal bands to pull off!
Having bought and listened to lead singer Beth Gibbons’ solo-ish album I can tell you that while her vocals are a key ingredient they are not the strength of the group, that would be the production of the backing tracks which utilize such deep bass that when joined by Gibbon’s breathy vocals almost lull you to sleep.
This couldn’t be better emphasized if you listened to their reformation album Third of a couple years back, the repetition and bass are there, the vocals and “I am so sad” lyrics remain, but the bass is overpowered by industrial effects and long grinding sequences that are apparently inspired, but try listening to them for 6 and 7 minutes at a time!
Both Dummy and the self-titled follow up album sound very samey, in a good way. An argument could be made for either, I chose Dummy as it was the first, and also because the standout tracks Mysterons, Glory Box, Roads and Numb are just better than almost anything that Portishead managed to produce afterwards, with perhaps Mourning Air as an exception.
Portishead’s relevance to current music has waned, they are perhaps more than anyone on this list an example of a brief era where their music arrived at the appropriate time for that generation, similar to Good Charlotte and Blink 182, only with talent and quality songs instead of shitty hooks and whiny lead singers. (Let’s face it, I’d back a chain smoking mannish woman over the faux punk, regretfully-tattooed pussies in those bands any day.)
There are too many Wu MCs to keep track of, as an indication of their dominance of the 90s and 00s I have done a rough count and discovered I own 20+ albums either by the Wu or their members, and I don’t mean guest artists either, I mean their name is somewhere on the spine of the album.
The unfortunate thing is that after 36 Chambers Wu never created anything as visceral, consistent or vital. Every track on this album is a classic from the first cheesy Kung-fu film sample to the closing “best protect ya neck” snippet that closes the album.
Meth might have come out of this album with the best reputation, he had a signature song on it after all and some of the best verses along the way, up until recently he also had the best solo career, though I think Ghostface has taken that prixe in recent years. RZA’s production was at its awe-inspiring best, before he let all that go to his head and decided that his shitty rhyming and vocals deserved greater prominence (they don’t, listen to Bobby Digital for proof, or better yet don’t), and of the remainder of the MCs they were all just happy to get a little shine on an actual album, before they were handed the keys to the studio to release a series of albums of decreasing quality.
The double album Wu-Tang Forever definitely had its moments, The W was quite good but patchy, Iron Flag was consistent but a couple notches down in quality and Eighth Diagram was surprisingly good coming out of the blue, but they all pale in comparison with Enter the 36 Chambers, massive beats, grimy lyrics and a bunch of adept MCs at their most hungry all taking turns, classic stuff.
Since then every rapper and his pit bull have had a shot at making the most “gangsta” album and generally failed. I personally can only think of Cannibal Ox’s only album The Cold Vein as anything as visceral and immediate as Enter the 36 Chambers, but Wu came first and blazed a path that almost no-one else was capable of following.
You can’t have a list without picking a winner so here is the final list in order:
- Mezzanine
- Aquemini
- Check Your Head
- Maxinquaye
- Rides
- Time’s Up
- Things Fall Apart
- Enter the 36 Chambers
- The Low End Theory
- Dummy
So that’s that, another list in the bag, hopefully someone might read this and decide to look up some of the albums or artists on here, if that is the case good luck and happy listening.
