Every decade that comes and goes brings something new and different to the world of music and pop culture, and the 1990s were no exception. Frosted tips, mullets, hoop earrings, halter tops, cropped tanks, flared jeans, baggy pants, and Doc Martens were in style. Super bright colors accompanied roller blades, Super Nintendo competed with Sega Genesis for best video game console, and the Internet brought us AOL Online. The decade was full of popular TV shows such as Saved by the Bell, SeaQuest, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, 90210, and The X Files, while an entirely new music scene materializing out of Seattle entered the ears of music listeners walking around with their portable Aiwa CD players purchased at Silos. Mainstream alternative rock from American artists and bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers, R.E.M., Green Day, Soul Asylum, Beck, Counting Crows, Live, Spin Doctors, Goo Goo Dolls, The Offspring, No Doubt, Dinosaur Jr., Pavement, Mazzy Star, Jane’s Addiction, Cake, Smash Mouth, The Flaming Lips, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Gin Blossoms, Collective Soul, Rage Against the Machine, The Wallflowers, and Foo Fighters dominated the Billboard charts. Over in the UK, a counter-culture movement called “Madchester” was taking England by storm. The Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses were part of an exciting wave of Britpop bands to go along with Oasis, The Verve, Blur, Suede, James, Pulp, Supergrass, Elastica, Republica, Ash, Travis, Bush, and Super Furry Animals. Meanwhile the early 90s was notorious for some unforgettable (and infamous) acts such as the ill-fated Milli Vanilli, the laughable Vanilla Ice, and the warbling 4 Non Blondes. The decade also brought us the dance-craze Macarena, the colorful Spice Girls, and a bunch of clean cut boy bands: NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, New Kids on the Block, Boyz II Men, Take That, and Westlife.

For me, the 1990s was arguably the most influential decade of music in my life. Two very different musical genres, grunge and shoegaze, emerged out of this decade, one of which I grew up listening to as a teenager, and one of which I discovered when I was much older in life. In the United States during the 90s, a lot of young people were looking for something fresh (aside from the prince of Bel-Air), and the Seattle grunge scene offered just that. As a teenager myself growing up during those formative years, I was able to relate very well to the angst and hopelessness from bands such as Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, The Screaming Trees, Soundgarden, Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, and the Smashing Pumpkins. In 1993 when my parents sent me off to a Jewish religious boarding school outside of Washington D.C., I met some students there who were raving about a band from Seattle called Nirvana. Before I involuntarily kicked myself out of the school and came back to Pittsburgh, I had amassed a small music collection on cassette tapes. Hard rock and heavy metal were frowned upon by the religious family I was boarding with, even though I secretly rebelled as a teenager searching for music that I could relate to as a troubled youth. A few months after I left D.C., Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain committed suicide. I had just discovered this guy and now suddenly he was dead. It was a shock to every kid and adult at the time.

While I was listening to a tremendous amount of grunge music, I was also into heavy metal, and learned to play guitar thanks to listening to Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Pantera, Dream Theater, Queensrÿche, Sepultura, Anthrax, Tool, Guns N’ Roses, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden. My first electric guitar was a flaming cherry red mahogany Ibanez “S” series complete with double locking tremolos, a Floyd Rose locking nut, and a killer whammy bar. After renting a Fender Stratocaster for 3 months from the guitar shop, my dad bought me the Ibanez guitar for $649 (50% off at the time) around the 1993 holiday season. I took electric guitar lessons at the shop, Pianos n’ Stuff, for over a year, and met some friends who wanted to play metal with me too. I recall one of my Ukranian high school friends introduced me to a Russian kid who turned out to be a juvenile delinquent. He stole my “Metal Zone” Boss pedal when I was 15 or 16 years old. I’ll never forget tracking that boy down on the streets right before he threatened to smash my precious sound effect pedal on the pavement. I was hanging out with the wrong crowds as a youth while I was still navigating my way through an onslaught of musical choices and influences.

Not long after my early exposure to grunge and metal music, I quit buying cassettes and making mix tapes, started making mix CDs, and bought my very first CD (Zooropa by U2). I became so enamored by their music I built a fan website for them in 1997 that is still online to this day. I bought every single U2 album and single I could find from them towards the latter half of the decade, rummaging through record stores such as Jerry’s, Attic Records, and Dave’s Music Mine. I also discovered Radiohead even though I didn’t fully appreciate their music at the time. I’ll never forget when a friend of mine (and his brother) borrowed my Radiohead “The Bends” CD and didn’t return it. One cold Winter’s afternoon sometime in 1995, I walked over to my friend’s house, knocked on their door, said hello, followed them upstairs to their rooms, and spent the next few hours listening to music. After I had enough of hearing Bob Dylan, I grabbed my Radiohead CD (that I rightly owned), and ran down 3 flights of steps towards the front door with my friends in hot pursuit. The two brothers tried to wrestle me to the ground but they couldn’t stop me, as I dodged patches of ice on the sidewalk. In revenge, the boys signed me up on the Columbia House mail-order music club without my permission, and about a month later I received 12 CDs for a penny. Half of the albums were from Bruce Springsteen and Bryan Adams, neither of whom I cared for at the time. I ended up having to pay $50 or something to satisfy my treacherous agreement with the company. As I was maturing into a young adult, I also (unfortunately) discovered another band that I fell in love with: The Dave Matthews Band. I learned about a dozen songs of theirs on acoustic guitar and went to a bunch of DMB concerts. At the time I was truly lost, indulging in this college frat boy-loving band (even though I never once walked into a frat house), over music that I had yet to discover until 15 years later: Shoegaze. Well after the 1990s ended, I came across shoegaze/space rock bands such as My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Ride, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Spiritualized, Spectrum, Lush, Curve, Chapterhouse, Catherine Wheel, Swervedriver, Kitchens of Distinction, Flying Saucer Attack, and The Telescopes. Tracing my influences back to the 1990s is where everything came together for me in terms of what I still listen to today.

Assembling an all-inclusive, “definitive” list of the top 50 most influential albums from the 1990s (or any decade) is no easy task, so rather than compiling a list that includes artists and bands of all kinds and genres, I’ve focused only on the albums and artists that I love. I could only hope that some of you discovering these albums for the very first time will not only enjoy listening to them, but find the music to be life-changing as well. I’ve organized the albums chronologically by year (in no particular order). Though some years contain more albums than others, it is only because the albums I picked happened to be released in that specific year. I also set a 3 album maximum limit for one single artist (so I could include albums from artists that weren’t as popular). Below this, I’ve included “5 Honorable Mentions” as well as a separate list of “Notables” that didn’t make the cut. During the decade of the music of my teenage rebellion, I was playing my favorite alt. rock songs on electric guitars, spinning CDs on my Aiwa home stereo with headphones on, and just beginning to experience live music in concert. Today you can hear this same music via Spotify playlists that I’ve provided below. Next week I will focus on the 2000s, the decade of music that shaped my adulthood. If you missed last week’s albums of the 1980s, you can check them out here (and the 1970s albums here).


1990

Ride
Nowhere
Depeche Mode
Violator
The Happy Mondays
Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches

1991

My Bloody Valentine
Loveless
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Blood Sugar Sex Magik
Nirvana
Nevermind
Pearl Jam
Ten
Talk Talk
Laughing Stock
U2
Achtung Baby

1992

10,000 Maniacs
Our Time in Eden
Leonard Cohen
The Future
R.E.M.
Automatic for the People
Catherine Wheel
Ferment
The Jesus and Mary Chain
Honey’s Dead
Spiritualized
Lazer Guided Melodies

1993

Sting
Ten Summoner’s Tales
New Order
Republic
Orbital
Orbital II
The Smashing Pumpkins
Siamese Dream
Slowdive
Souvlaki
U2
Zooropa
Rush
Counterparts

1994

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
Let Love In
Nine Inch Nails
The Downward Spiral
The Stone Roses
Second Coming
Suede
Dog Man Star
Morrissey
Vauxhall and I
Soundgarden
Superunknown

1995

Neil Young
Mirror Ball
PJ Harvey
To Bring You My Love
Pulp
Different Class
Moby
Everything Is Wrong
Radiohead
The Bends
Oasis
(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?
The Smashing Pumpkins
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

1996

Electronic
Raise the Pressure
Lou Reed
Set the Twilight Reeling
Kula Shaker
K

1997

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
The Boatman’s Call
Radiohead
OK Computer
Spiritualized
Ladies and Gentlemen… We Are Floating in Space
The Verve
Urban Hymns
Björk
Homogenic

1998

Air
Moon Safari
Massive Attack
Mezzanine
Neutral Milk Hotel
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
The Afghan Whigs
1965
Manic Street Preachers
This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours

1999

Moby
Play
Tom Waits
Mule Variations

5 Honorable Mentions

The House of Love
The House of Love (Butterfly)
1990
Tom Petty
Wildflowers
1994
Jeff Buckley
Grace
1994
Garbage
Garbage
1995
The Flaming Lips
The Soft Bulletin
1999

Notables

(Or Albums That Didn’t Make the List)
Aerosmith – Get a Grip (1993)
Alice in Chains – Dirt (1992)
Alice in Chains – Jar of Flies (1994)
Aphex Twin – Richard D. James Album (1996)
Beastie Boys – Hello Nasty (1998)
Beck – Odelay (1996)
Bernard Butler – People Move On (1998)
Billy Bragg & Wilco – Mermaid Avenue (1998)
Blur – Parklife (1994)
Bob Dylan – Time Out of Mind (1997)
Bon Jovi – Keep the Faith (1992)
Brian Jonestown Massacre – Take It from the Man! (1996)
Bruce Springsteen – The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995)
Bush – Sixteen Stone (1994)
Calexico – The Black Light (1998)
Catherine Wheel – Adam and Eve (1997)
Chapterhouse – Whirlpool (1991)
Cocteau Twins – Heaven or Las Vegas (1991)
Counting Crows – August and Everything After (1993)
Curve – Doppelgänger (1992)
David Bowie – Earthling (1997)
Depeche Mode – Ultra (1997)
Dinosaur Jr. – Green Mind (1991)
Duran Duran – The Wedding Album (1994)
Enya – The Memory of Trees (1995)
Foo Fighters – Foo Fighters (1995)
Galaxie 500 – This Is Our Music (1990)
Gin Blossoms – New Miserable Experience (1992)
Guns N’ Roses – Use Your Illusion II (1991)
Iggy Pop – American Caesar (1993)
James – Wah Wah (1994)
The Jayhawks – Tomorrow the Green Grass (1995)
John Mellencamp – Human Wheels (1993)
Lush – Split (1994)
Magnetic Fields – 69 Love Songs (1999)
Mark Lanegan – Whiskey for the Holy Ghost (1994)
Matthew Sweet – Girlfriend (1991)
Mazzy Star – So Tonight That I Might See (1993)
Megadeth – Countdown to Extinction (1992)
Metallica – Metallica (1991)
Midnight Oil – Blue Sky Mining (1990)
Neil Young – Harvest Moon (1992)
Oasis – Definitely Maybe (1994)
Pearl Jam – Vitalogy (1994)
Pet Shop Boys – Bilingual (1996)
Phish – A Live One (1995)
Pink Floyd – The Division Bell (1994)
Pixies – Bossanova (1990)
R.E.M. – Out of Time (1991)
Sarah McLachlan – Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (1993)
Slowdive – Just for a Day (1991)
Sonic Youth – Goo (1990)
Stereolab – Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996)
Sting – The Soul Cages (1991)
Stone Temple Pilots – Purple (1994)
Toad the Wet Sprocket – Dulcinea (1994)
Underworld – Second Toughest in the Infants (1996)
Van Halen – For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (1991)
Velvet Crush – Teenage Symphonies to God (1994)
The Verve – A Northern Soul (1995)
Wilco – Summerteeth (1999)
Yes – Talk (1994)
Yo La Tengo – I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One (1997)