100 Best Albums of the Nineties

90. Aaliyah, ‘One in a Million’
Like Michael Jackson a generation before, Aaliyah came out of the Midwest, a child singing of adult matters. But where young MJ sang of love, Aaliyah was a black Lolita, a teenage temptress with a seductive power in her smooth voice. Unlike Brandy, Aaliyah sang of sex that was hot like fire and of being a choosy lover. The seventeen-year-old could sell a sexy song like a pro, but these songs could have sold themselves ”” with writing by Missy Elliott and production by a then-unheard-of Timbaland, One in a Million unleashed the futuristic Virginia Beach funk that would soon take over the radio.

89. Tom Petty, ‘Into the Great Wide Open’
‘Into the great wide open’ started out as potentially another Tom Petty solo record, but it eventually became a full-scale collaboration with his longtime backup band, the Heartbreakers. This shift in Petty’s conception of the album enabled him to combine the unduplicable power of a long-standing band of rock & roll confederates with the new directions he has pursued with Jeff Lynne, the new album’s co-producer and Petty’s fellow Traveling Wilbury. In its best moments, the result sounds like a cross between Full Moon Fever and Damn the Torpedoes and features the most focused and resonant lyrics Petty has ever written.

88. R. Kelly, ‘R. Kelly’
A man who could stir both Saturday-night dreams and Sunday-morning sanctity into his music, R. Kelly sang, wrote and produced an album that made him essential to contemporary black music. Gliding over a slick sound that gleams like the hood of a new Benz, Kelly opens his mouth and lets you hear the church in his phrasings, the street in his grit and the classic loverman in his allure. Who else could sing alongside both Ronnie Isley and Biggie Smalls? Who else could say, “You remind me of my Jeep…. I wanna ride it,” and have you unsure whether it was sexist or funny or both ”” and make it sound so fly that you never stopped grooving.

87. De La Soul, ‘De La Soul Is Dead’
On their second album, De La Soul turned away from the “daisy-age” friendliness of their 1989 debut in favor of sleeker, head-snapping jams and skits that viciously sent up gangsta rap. The album’s hypnotic sprawl centered around producer Prince Paul’s sampleriffic beats (see the disco-rap classic “A Roller Skate Jam Named ‘Saturdays'”); the guys also took on some brave subject matter (on the disturbing incest tale “Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa”) while preserving their dextrous, clever rhyme styles. The result was a dark classic that was both stranger and deeper than most people noticed back in 1991.

86. Yo La Tengo, ‘I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One’
If this was the age of irony, nobody told Yo La Tengo ”” they just kept making one floridly romantic guitar record after another, doing for marriage what the Velvet Underground did for heroin. On this album, it’s all good in their little corner of the world: Guitarist Ira Kaplan sails away on perfect guitar drones like “We’re an American Band,” drummer Georgia Hubley croons the feedback lullaby “Shadows,” and bassist James McNew warbles the acoustic lament “Stockholm Syndrome.” Yo La Tengo also find time for a couple of space-disco novelties, a noisy Beach Boys cover and a few silly love songs, adding up to the kickiest album of their stellar career.

85. Pulp, ‘Different Class’
A Brit-pop strumpet with a heart of glass, Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker minced through Different Class as a star in the classic Bowie mold. He dressed his flimsy body in an ungodly array of thrift-store frippery, he shook what Mama gave him to the band’s fruity chamber rock, and he unzipped his breathy croak of a voice to sniff, “I’ve kissed your mother twice/And now I’m working on your dad.” Different Class swipes melodic dazzle from the likes of Stereolab and Serge Gainsbourg to make hangovers sound romantic in “Bar Italia” while pining over suburban heartbreak in “Underwear,” “Disco 2000” and the anthem “Common People.” Jarvis Cocker: international man of mystery.

84. Marilyn Manson, ‘Antichrist Superstar’
Suddenly armed with a strange mix of cartoon outrage and actual tunes ”” not to mention first-class Trent Reznor production ”” five Florida shock rockers go nationwide in their jockstraps. The record uses atmosphere from goth, disco from Ministry and Nine Inch Nails and ideas from that distinguished old sonic philosopher David Bowie. But what really makes it rise beyond the recherché is Manson himself, an Ohio-raised youngster who manages to graft charm, of all things, onto his bullshit.

83. Fiona Apple, ‘Tidal’
In the aftermath of Alanis, the airwaves were crawling with troubled ingénues singing tragic ballads about their haunted eyes, but somehow Fiona Apple stood out as a bad, bad girl. Apple’s husky voice and jazzy melodies give an unexpected weight to her confessions on Tidal, as the nineteen-year-old New York art waif broods over adolescent malaise in off-kilter, insinuating piano ballads like “Never Is a Promise.” She also comes up with a knockdown theme song in the anomalously hard-rocking “Criminal,” the anthem of a young woman who’s been careless with a delicate man and even more careless with her delicate self.

82. The Smashing Pumpkins, ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’
“I fear that I am ordinary, just like everyone,” wails master Billy Corgan on “Muzzle,” from this double-disc epic. Fear can be a great motivator, and Corgan used it to build his Taj Mahal, a sonically dazzling monument to gloom and glamour. Accused of not being punk enough, Corgan showed on Mellon Collie what punk might be if Steven Spielberg got hold of it. The angry songs distend rage and alienation via beautifully ugly guitar-drum attacks, while the wistful ballads flip hate around and turn it into exquisite, unquenchable longing. Take that, hipsters: Ordinary angst can be grand.

81. Bjork, ‘Post’
Yeah, Björk‘s music is ‘post’ ”” post-rock, post-apocalyptic, flashily futuristic in tone. But it’s also “pre,” tapping emotions untamed by rational thought. The electronic soundscapes she creates on Post, with the help of English dance-floor stars like Nellee Hooper, Tricky and Howie B., give her lots of room to roam. And she goes everywhere, from the junk-filled cliff top of the whimsical “Hyper-Ballad” to the psychic deep forest of “Isobel,” in songs that link the rhythms of early drum-and-bass to the vocal lines of Icelandic folk singing, with a dash of musical comedy thrown in for a lark. Inventing her own genre, Björk presents what she calls “an army of me” ”” the many battling voices inside one woman’s hyperactive brain.