100 Best Albums of the Nineties

70. Tricky, ‘Maxinquaye’
Stepping out from the pioneering British trip-hop group Massive Attack, Tricky put a match to his own sweet-leaf mix of Jamaican dub tricks, industrial post-punk clang and vintage Bronx-projects hip-hop, and blew the smoke all over the dance floor. The contact high was a whopper. Ripe with impending apocalypse (the dark, heaving menace of the grooves) and battered-warrior soul (vocalist Martine’s maternal vigor, Tricky’s low gangsta mumble), Maxinquaye is the end-of-the-century counterpart to Public Enemy’s mid-Eighties black-power addresses: voodoo rhythms and guerrilla mixology celebrating the survival of the fittest and the inevitable victory of the righteous.

69. Wyclef Jean, ‘The Carnival’
Back when the Fugees‘ The Score was selling more records than Nike was selling shoes, Wyclef Jean was just one of two dudes backing up the gorgeous Lauryn Hill. With The Carnival, Wyclef was exposed as a real talent, a scion of De La Soul and Bob Marley who rhymed in Haitian patois, sampled the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive,” brought in the Neville Brothers and Celia Cruz and dedicated a song “to all the girls I cheated on before.” He pokes fun at hip-hop’s conventions as well as himself, while displaying serious producing, guitar-playing and comedic skills, not to mention a wealth of imagination, ambition and musical courage. Clef is that rare and necessary thing: the brilliant class clown.

68. R.E.M., ‘Out of Time’
Made in the wake of the 1988 power-chord mother Green and the no-arena-left-unturned world tour that followed, Out of Time was an exercise in folk-pop understatement that, perversely but deservedly, made R.E.M. bigger than ever. For all of its apparent melancholy (the raindrop sound of Peter Buck’s mandolin, the bleak sigh of a pedal steel guitar), Out of Time is a grand lift, elegant sanity with sure-shot songwriting. In “Losing My Religion,” “Low” and “Country Feedback,” Michael Stipe sings not only about lapsed faith and consuming loss but of quietly regaining ground and equilibrium. And you get the big-grin bounce of “Near Wild Heaven” and “Me in Honey,” because redemption is always a good excuse to go dancing.

67. Counting Crows, ‘August and Everything After’
An artfully crafted, intimate song cycle, August and Everything After seemed to explode on impact. Vividly produced by T Bone Burnett, its post-punk bleakness married to old-school rock influences, August became that rare album over which both alterna-kids and classic rockers could bond. Sure, there are a few moments when you can hear how badly the Crows want to be Van Morrison, the Band, R.E.M. and, yes, Bob Dylan, but those don’t offset the divine inspiration of “Rain King,” “Round Here” and “A Murder of One.”

66. The Notorious B.I.G., ‘Life After Death’
Having sex, dealing drugs and making the heads of niggas who fucked with him rock & roll are the cornerstones of the B.I.G.‘s landmark double album; Big’s heavy voice, light flow and distinctive lisp slalom between biting comedy, frightening threats and narratives so sharp that you could tell the temperature in the room where the bullets were flying. Rhyming over melodic funk with his trademark diction, Brooklyn’s finest made what was almost an L.A. album, topped off with a loving tribute to the City of Angels. “Going Back to Cali” is a chilling counterpoint to the album’s final three songs, answers to the beef with Death Row that haunted Biggie for the last year of his life.

65. Erykah Badu, ‘Baduizm’
That voice stopped you in its tracks. It recalled Billie Holiday a bit, sure, coming from high in the back of her throat, piercing the ear a little, but wasn’t really it. Her music was up-to-the-minute jazzy hip-hop R&B, but her voice sounded ancient, with a splash of Northern hipness and a twist of Southern comfort. It was Erykah Badu, from Brooklyn via Dallas, her head wrap tall and tight, singing of knowledge and philosophy and fulfilling unrequited love in the next lifetime. She was the sister-in-music of D’Angelo and Lauryn Hill, the Earth Mother of Nineties boho soul.

64. Sinead O’Connor, ‘I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got’
Everything that Lilith Fair later made trendy in the Nineties governs this album’s haunting songs: introspection, empathy, accessible but inventive music and, most of all, an undeniable voice. Amid the album’s springy New Wave melodicism, O’Connor‘s love of black music is evident, particularly in the gorgeous Prince-penned “Nothing Compares 2 U.” But above all, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got is audacious: O’Connor is singing about God and her own weaknesses, and contradicting rock’s rules for tough chicks.

63. Mary J. Blige, ‘My Life’
She’s just above average in technical singing ability, but this girl from the projects of Yonkers, New York, became a cultural necessity because she had Everywoman crosses to bear and a superhuman ability to make you feel her. On her second album, My Life, Mary J. Blige shows a rare gift for pouring her heart into a recording, to make her soul come through the speakers. Collaborating with Sean “Puffy” Combs on original songs and interpolations of tracks by Barry White, Curtis Mayfield and Roy Ayers (“My Life”), Blige displays her ongoing struggle to love herself, and, as she says on the marquee single, to just be happy. The subtly autobiographical album ended up making her a megastar and crystallized the burgeoning hip-hop-soul movement.

62. Raekwon, ‘Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…’
The apotheosis of the Wu-Tang dynasty, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… is powered by the RZA’s somehow off-balance, hyperdetailed production, Raekwon the Chef’s verbal intercourse ”” lyrics so dense you need the Staten Island Rosetta stone to make sense of them ”” and Ghostface Killah’s brilliant supporting role. Ghostface’s exuberance at finally getting to spit his style on the mike pulses through his every verse ”” where Raekwon comes off as a cool-criminal mastermind, Ghostface’s larger-than-life persona leaps out through the speakers. Never before have the Tony Montana fantasies of young black men, the dreams of transforming giant bricks of pharmaceuticals into giant stacks of dead presidents, been portrayed with so much precision, poetry and pathos.

61. U2, ‘Zooropa’
Following up their earthshaking Achtung Baby, Zooropa further embellished the new model U2. These are the superstars, after all, who audaciously reinvented themselves on their eighth album ”” exchanging chiming guitar for funkier riffing and dense, hip-hop-meets-industrial production, unrestrained wailing for insinuating talk-singing, fever for a bubbling heat. Zooropa, their ninth outing, emphasized the shift: Instead of the mythic, desert-landscape cover shot of The Joshua Tree (1987), there’s deconstructed video imagery; for the desperate spiritual questing of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” they substitute the monochromatic dead-end musings of “Numb.”