100 Best Albums of the Nineties

10. Pavement, ‘Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’
Pavement‘s second full-length was less quirky and diffuse than their first and even yielded their career’s only modest hit, “Cut Your Hair.” Best of all, sweetly catchy songs such as “Gold Soundz” and “Range Life” showed that Pavement were more than just smirky indie rockers.

9. Beck, ‘Odelay’
The Woody Guthrie of the Pizza Hut proves he can do it all on Odelay, as the Dust Brothers slip him a funky cold medina and set the stage for him to get real, real gone for a change. Beck shimmies in and out of his musical guises, whether he’s strumming his folky guitar in “Ramshackle,” rocking the Catskills hip-hop style in “Where It’s At” or blaming it on the bossa nova in “Readymade.” Odelay could have come off as a bloodless art project, but Beck gets lost in the jigsaw jazz and the get-fresh flow until his playful energy makes everyone else sound tame. That is a good drum break, indeed.

8. The Notorious B.I.G., ‘Ready to Die’
You remember the first time you heard Biggie ”” he came on as the baddest chronic-smoking, Oreo-cookie-eating, pickle-juice-drinking stud on the block, and he was the man, girlfriend. Biggie spread love the Brooklyn way, doing more than anyone else to revitalize New York hip-hop after years of West Coast dominance, and Ready to Die maps out the sounds of Nineties cool. The vision is bleak, from “Suicidal Thoughts” to the love song that hinges on the line “I swear to God, I hope we fuckin’ die together.” But Biggie’s voice is also full of high-spirited fun, bringing the pleasure principle back to hip-hop. In “Big Poppa,” his idea of a romantic evening includes a T-bone steak, cheese, eggs and Welch’s grape, and that’s just while the Jacuzzi heats up.

7. Nirvana, ‘In Utero’
The basic tracks were recorded in two weeks; nearly all of Kurt Cobain‘s vocals were whipped down on tape in seven hours. If In Utero is a record born of great crisis ”” mostly Cobain’s personal war with overwhelming good fortune ”” it was made with concentrated purpose. Steve Albini’s corrosion-is-bliss production does not flatter songs of tempered, layered drama such as “Pennyroyal Tea” (Cobain’s definitive performance is on Unplugged). But Albini’s harsh touch was perfect for the extremism Cobain had already written into the soaked-in-lye cannonballs “Serve the Servants,” “Scentless Apprentice” and “Very Ape.” In the sun-dappled, cello-garnished sadness of “All Apologies” and “Dumb,” Cobain was also upfront about his oversize needs and diminished expectations for fulfillment. He ultimately proved incapable of pulling himself out of that funk; instead, he made fine, furious art from it.

6. Pearl Jam, ‘Ten’
‘When their debut came out, Pearl Jam were competing with Nirvana in a grunge popularity contest they were bound to lose. Yet Ten is a near-perfect record: Eddie Vedder’s shaky, agonized growl and Mike McCready’s wailing guitar solos on “Alive” and “Jeremy” push both songs to the brink and back again.

5. Lauryn Hill, ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’
After months locked in tuff Gong Studios in Kingston, Jamaica, Lauryn Hill emerged from the shadow of the Fugees to create a stunning musical document that is equal parts Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell and, well, no one but Lauryn Hill. She sings and rhymes; she gives us ballads, party rockers and doo-wop; she sings of love for men, her son, Zion, her New Jersey childhood and (maybe) her ex-boyfriend, Wyclef Jean. She wraps it all in a raw, completely human sound in which you can hear fingers plucking guitars, needles meeting vinyl and drumsticks touching cymbals. When someone asks you, “What is hip-hop soul?” play them The Miseducation.

4. U2, ‘Achtung Baby’
It was one of the most extreme personality transformations in pop music ”” ever. U2, the Irish bards of cathedral-chime guitar and pub-stool sermonizing, said goodbye to the Eighties and the suffocating tide of their own sincerity by setting up their recording gear in post-Wall Berlin and saying hello to the two i‘s: irony and industrial dance music. The music ”” slower than The Joshua Tree ”” is corrosive, razed-city funk laced with mad laughter and creeping paranoia. Yet the album’s crackle and empty-hallway echo are really a kind of protective armor for the defiant heart in Bono’s lyrics (“One,” “Ultra Violet [Light My Way]”) and the real lesson of Achtung Baby‘s post­modern giggles: To appreciate the joys of heaven, sometimes you have to take a little walk through hell.

3. Radiohead, ‘OK Computer’
Progress is a bitch, but don’t let the machines, or their masters, grind you down: That is the simple message encoded in the art-rock razzle-dazzle of OK Computer. Hailed as The Dark Side of the Moon for the Information Age, Computer is too brittle in its time-signature twists and hairpin guitar turns, too claustrophobic in mood, to qualify as space rock. Instead, Radiohead shatter the soul-sucking echo of isolation and enforced routine with the violent mood swings of “Paranoid Android” and Thom Yorke’s arcing vocal anguish in the gaunt, yearning ballads “Let Down” and “Lucky.” Somehow, OK Computer went platinum a year after its release ”” a welcome testament that smart still sells.

2. Dr. Dre, ‘The Chronic’
Once upon a time, Dr. Dre was just one of the guys from N.W.A, Suge Knight was just a bodyguard and Snoop Dogg wasn’t a star. Then The Chronic dropped, and the earth moved on Planet Hip-Hop. The sound is culled from George Clinton’s funk, the images are loosely inspired by the ominous malfeasance of The Godfather, and it is all pulled together by a tall, skinny new kid from Long Beach, California, who delivers vivid ghetto stories and marijuana paeans in a light, singsongy drawl that seems the epitome of cool under fire. It was the most original MC style since Rakim, and it magnetized listeners from coast to coast the first time they heard him say, “Ain’t nuttin’ buh a gee thang, bayyy-bay.”

1.  Nirvana, ‘Nevermind’
The album that guaranteed the nineties would not suck. Every word and note Kurt Cobain wrote for Nevermind now rings with the heavy clang of compound retrospect: his sad, foolish death; the thousand grunge-alikes who aped Cobain’s pain well enough but blew it with the music. In fact, Cobain’s special genius ”” and that of drummer Dave Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic ”” was in barbed humor and the amp-joy classicism of the Sex Pistols, Cheap Trick and AC/DC. Nevermind pulled the decade’s ultimate mosh-party record out of a generation’s discontent ”” and showed that rock & roll, in its messy middle age, could still fuck things up, gloriously.