100 Best Albums of the Nineties

60. En Vogue, ‘Funky Divas
En Vogue got all dolled up in their finest girl-group threads for Funky Divas, looking sharp and looking for love along the border of hip-hop and R&B. They flaunt their vocal pizazz from the crowd-pleasing flash of “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It” and “Free Your Mind” to the succulent soul of “Give It Up, Turn It Loose.” The En Vogue ladies had enough nerve to revamp a tune that Curtis Mayfield wrote for Aretha Franklin, and enough talent to bring it off ”” they made “Giving Him Something He Can Feel” sound weightless and dreamlike and sticky with bliss, as pure a summer pleasure as the radio gave up all decade.

59. Cypress Hill, ‘Cypress Hill’
Cypress Hill’s formula has been imitated so much, it’s easy to forget how shocking it sounded at the time: crazy L.A. voices, scary Spanglish words, dusted Seventies funk beats that made you laugh out loud. B-Real and Sen-Dog come on as a hip-hop Cheech and Chong, praising the sweet leaf with a devotion rarely seen beyond the parking lot at a Phish concert. While the rappers twist their “Latin Lingo” into vato rhymes about blunts, guns and forties, D.J. Muggs pumps bongloads of bass into paranoid sound collages like “Hand on the Pump,” and when you turn it up loud, the beat goes boo-ya.

58. Janet Jackson, ‘Janet.’
As Black-American-music royalty, Janet Jackson has had every significant moment of her growth recorded. With Control, she had her cotillion. With Rhythm Nation 1814, she announced her political and sexual awakening. And with Janet., she celebrated becoming an erotic being. Using soul, rock and dance elements, as well as opera diva Kathleen Battle, Janet unleashed her most musically ambitious record, guided, as always, by producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Two albums before, she’d innocently sung, “Let’s wait awhile.” Now she boldly purrs, “If I was your girl, oh the things I’d do to you!/I’d make you call out my name/I’d ask who it belongs to!” Like Gloria Steinem with a six-figure video budget, she shows young women a way to have their sexual freedom and their dignity, to have their cake and be eaten, too.

57. Depeche Mode, ‘Violator’
For many Depeche Mode fans, Violator is the crowning glory of the boys’ black-leather period. In “Sweetest Perfection,” “Halo” and “World in My Eyes,” they turn teen angst and sexual obsession into grand synth-pop melodrama, and their attempt at guitar rock resulted in a hit with “Personal Jesus.”

56. LL Cool J, ‘Mama Said Knock You Out’
Recovering from the flop of 1989’s Walking With a Panther, LL dusted himself off and brought a new edge and power to his big-mouthed style as he reached full manhood and hip-hop-veteran status. With huge punch lines, gigantic bravado and that LL voice filled with charisma and cool, Mama speaks of the less-dangerous side of street life ”” booming car radios and jingling babies and around-the-way girls with Fendi bags. The legendary Marley Marl supplied the wildly danceable funk, the album was a tomahawk dunk ”” and LL’s career, once again, was in full effect.

55. Jane’s Addiction, ‘Ritual de lo Habitual’
You have to put up with stuff to enjoy a Jane’s Addiction album: noodly jamming, hyperbole and a hippie-ish insistence on music’s pagan power. But give them a chance and you’ll find yourself immersed in the crashing waves of Dave Navarro’s guitar and Steven Perkins’ polyrhythmic drums, and hear in Perry Farrell’s screeching the call of the good god Pan. Ritual is the album most likely to convert skeptics. Not only does it have two great singles ”” the game of sonic peekaboo “Stop!” and the anarchist manifesto “Been Caught Stealing” ”” but the whole record rides a groove that’s as hard and frenetic as the Santa Monica Freeway leading right into these surfers’ beloved curl. Hard rock became a weirder place.

54. Bruce Springsteen, ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’
The grim ballads Bruce Springsteen purveys on The Ghost of Tom Joad make Nebraska seem like “Rosalita” ”” they veer perilously close to desperation. The title track is a prayer for revived idealism, and the album closes with “My Best Was Never Good Enough,” a contemptuous dismissal of the Gump-style clichés people lean on, however irrationally, to get by. Surveying an American landscape littered with crushed hopes, Springsteen stares down the darkness but fights it only to a draw. That a rocker of this magnitude would make a folk album this forlorn spits in the eye of the rising Dow.

53. Tom Waits, ‘Bone Machine’
Throughout the album lonesome travelers and restless strangers battle their lives with drink, religion and the active search for somewhere better than here. “A little trouble makes it worth the going/And a little rain never hurt no one/The world is round/And so I’ll go around/You must risk something that matters,” Waits sings on “A Little Rain,” with David Phillips’ pedal steel sweeping through the background. No one needs convincing. It’s a song older than Waits himself ”” older than Hank Williams, older than Robert Johnson ”” that Waits is chasing, the simple mystery of where life goes: “I don’t wanna float a broom/Fall in love and get married and then boom/How the hell did it get here so soon?/I don’t wanna grow up.” Albums this rich with spiritual longing prove the validity of that effort, no matter the odds.

52. Pearl Jam, ‘Vitalogy’
The rugged, world-weary tones of Vitalogy were a head check for Pearl Jam, as Nice Guy Eddie Vedder and his stadium-grunge all-stars grappled with their strange new role as the world’s biggest rock band. With their profile unexpectedly high ”” who can forget Sharon Stone proclaiming, “Forget Pavarotti, I wanna see Pearl Jam!” in Sliver? ”” Pearl Jam turned their confusion into the unapologetically anthemic guitar noise of “Not for You.” Vedder caught his breath with the show-stealing ballads “Better Man” and “Nothingman,” brooding over the fate of cowardly men letting good women slip away and struggling not to turn into one of those cowardly men himself.

51. Massive Attack, ‘Protection’
The Nineties were the all-time high-water mark of silly genre names, and trip-hop may be the silliest of all. But Massive Attack really did invent a whole new style, manipulating hip-hop’s boom and reggae’s throb into their own slow-motion funk noir, inspiring Bristol, England, neighbors such as Tricky and Portishead to explore cinematic dance grooves heavy on the atmospherics. Their influence has spread to all corners of pop and rock, not to mention upscale shoe stores and cafes everywhere. Daddy G, Mushroom and 3-D made their most majestic statement on Protection, with colossal beats and first-rate vocal guests. Tricky makes a great cameo, but Tracey Thorn of Everything but the Girl steals the show in the eight-minute title track, a stand-by-your-woman soul ballad that takes off into outer space and gets home in time to do the dishes.