The Best 90s Album In The WorldEver!

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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 WALTERS 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 Shania Twain - Still the One, presented by Scott Mills who introduces a celebration of Shania's iconic 1997 album Come On Over, one of the biggest-selling of all time. The programme includes an interview with Shania, alongside the likes of Lewis Capaldi and Kelsea Ballerini. 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. 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

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. Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. 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. 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.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. Does anyone really believe that the self-incriminating, girl-germs-infested, quote-worthy lyrics of Live Through This came from a notebook other than Courtney Love’s? As for the music, it certainly shares the soft-raw dynamics of the time with Nirvana, but with a rose/thorn quality that suggests Love knew exactly what she wanted, drawing on her own obsessive and idiosyncratic musical canon. A cover of the Young Marble Giants tune “Credit in the Straight World,” for instance, gave some recognition to a postpunk pioneer, while the lyric precisely suited her purposes. And besides that scorched-earth yowl, her vocals throughout the record had the dexterity of great acting, finding the poise to make lines like “I fake it so real I am beyond fake” credible and moving. In the end, New Forms summarized where drum ‘n’ bass was at, and where it hoped to be going. “We used vocals, we used instruments, we used jazz, soul, R&B, and hip-hop,” says a suddenly not-very-self-effacing Size. “We’re not just a bunch of kids from the rave scene. We had a vision.” JEFF SALAMON Sara Cox’s Half Wower with lots of 90s tunes to get you dancing (available on BBC Sounds from 12 October).

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. Leave it to Mariah Carey, the girl next door, to make pure lust sound so naive, so syrupy sweet, that it could be read as something pious to a passerby. Leave it to a diva at the height of her fame to describe being horny as feeling “kinda hectic inside,” and to articulate it by singing more dizzying runs than an amusement park’s worth of rides. It feels right that she wrote, produced, and recorded “Fantasy” in only two days, roughly the amount of time a person can live solely on the giddiness of a flirtation and the anticipation of an eventual release. Here’s what love at 26, the age at which she put out the song, could feel like. It’s what you want love to feel like for the rest of your life, too. 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 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. 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 RUBINHost Steve Wright says, “the joy of this chart is that it shows which 90s albums have truly endured. And that's because they're all really memorable, really influential, or just really well-loved. It's a great mix, with all the albums you'd expect to be in there and some that, maybe, you wouldn't...” Following the glossy punk sound of their breakthrough Nevermind, the decision to recruit producer Steve Albini for Nirvana’s follow-up was quite clearly an effort to somehow distance the band from their newfound mainstream success. Albini’s stripped-down approach to recording In Utero caught Cobain and company at their raw and abrasive best, emphatically dispelling claims that the group was selling out. With the album’s gentler moments buried beneath dense cacophony and filthy riffing, the ugly categorically triumphed over the beautiful, warts and all. Jones Nowell was reportedly so dope-addled during the sessions for Sublime that he was shipped home before the album was finished. The completed record is a tragic contradiction: a confident, clearheaded work by an artist coming into his own and at the same time losing control. “When you’re strung out, you get a deeper sense of reality,” says Sublime drummer Bud Gaugh. “The things you’re talking about might seem sweet, but the way you’re feeling is bittersweet. You’re standing outside.” Not a path to honor, perhaps, but a document too vital to ignore. ERIC WEISBARD