100 Best Albums of the Nineties

50. 2Pac, ‘All Eyez on Me’
All eyes were on him before he even said it. After a slew of arrests on both coasts elevated him to icon, and a near-death experience followed by months in jail made him a prison martyr, Tupac Shakur leapt out of the clink and into the most badass label in the industry: Death Row. The most combustible MC of all time then proceeded to burn a hole through America with a twenty-seven-track double album filled with bluster, bravado, Cali funk and Tupac’s towering ego. His MC skills aren’t abundant, but he spits his rhymes with an arrogance rare even on Planet Hip-Hop and sits back as he magnetizes you like only the sexiest of outlaws can.

49. Sleater-Kinney, ‘Call the Doctor’
“It’s fine ’cause it’s all mine,” sings Corin Tucker in “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone,” and nobody can argue as this righteous college girl lays claim to rock’s raw heart. Sleater-Kinney made good on the promise of the early-Nineties riot-grrrl movement, linking punk anarchy and radical-feminist insurrection. On Call the Doctor, Tucker, Carrie Brownstein and then-drummer Lora McFarlane careen around in songs like “Hubcap” and “I’m Not Waiting,” moving at warp speed from pretty to terrifying, from earnest observation to nearly incoherent rage. These weren’t the first bandmates to focus female fury and desire to the beat of a kick drum, but they could make music as fully arresting as their ideas. And no other rocker has Tucker’s voice ”” a bloody wail that goes soft at the center, a voice that feels like flesh pressing against you.

48. Weezer, ‘Pinkerton’
Rivers Cuomo poured all his self-loathing and loneliness into ten autobiographical songs on Weezer‘s second album, detailing his awkward love life with agonizing specificity, beginning with “Tired of Sex,” where the rock & roll groupie grind has never sounded less appealing. Some real-life girls mentioned on Pinkerton are ones Cuomo had crushes on but didn’t date: a lesbian, a girl in one of his classes who rebuffed his invitation to a Green Day concert and an eighteen-year-old in Japan who wrote him a fun letter and with whom he became obsessed, wondering if she thought about him when she masturbated. With all those true confessions, it’s no wonder that Cuomo is somewhat embarrassed by Pinkerton now ”” and that the record became a cornerstone of the next decade’s emo movement.

47. Portishead, ‘Dummy’
Portishead don’t make dance music, exactly ”” the torchy gloom beat of Dummy is music for staring into your Rob Roy at 4:00 a.m. and wondering why she needed your wallet to go to the ladies’ room. Geoff Barrow mixes a swellegant trip-hop pastiche of astro-lounge beats, plush soul keyboards and spy-movie guitars, with Beth Gibbons belting the bluesy cocktail ballads of a jaded Bond girl. The seductively sleek torpor of “Sour Times” and “Glory Box” has inspired countless imitators, but Portishead got it perfect the first time with Dummy, a bizarre love triangle between a man, a woman and a sampler.

46. Jay-Z, ‘Vol. 2 … Hard Knock Life’
Jay-Z took the pay cut from big-time hustler to MC in stride, spitting his smooth-criminal genius in a string of dense poetics about dealing the stuff, escaping the feds and dripping in diamonds all the way to the bank. It makes no difference whether he samples Annie or Talking Heads ”” Jigga makes every track his own with massive boasts, state-of-the-art flows, vivid underworld portraits drawn in a handful of words ”” “On the run-by/Gun-high/One eye closed/Left holes/Through some guy clothes….” With one album, he released more classics than most MCs release in a career. The case for best MC in the post-B.I.G. era was closed.

45. Alanis Morissette, ‘Jagged Little Pill’
Proof that the gods of rock are unfair bastards: A former TV moppet from the not-so-dirty North hooks up with Wilson Phillips’ producer and makes an opportunistic angst-rock platter that not only sells 13 million copies ”” it doesn’t suck. In fact, it’s damn near flawless, from the hello-it’s-me phone rage of “You Oughta Know” to the sisterly “You Learn.” And right, Sherlock, “Ironic” isn’t ironic ”” it’s just Alanis speaking her piece about the perils of being a girl in a fickle-as-fuck world, singing like an acoustic guitar. Jagged Little Pill is like a Nineties version of Carole King’s Tapestry: a woman using her plain soft-rock voice to sift through the emotional wreckage of her youth, with enough heart and songcraft to make countless listeners feel the earth move.

44. Fugees, ‘The Score’
A hip-hop mod squad from the streets of Dirty Jersey, the Fugees combined streetwise flash with righteous boho cool on their second album to become the biggest rap franchise this side of the Wu-Tang Clan. Lauryn Hill’s scorched soul vocals ”” half Nina Simone, half Al Capone ”” flavor the Caribbean style of Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel. The Fugees prove themselves a damn fine wedding band with their covers of “Killing Me Softly” and “No Woman, No Cry,” but they hit even harder in gems like “Family Business,” trading vocals over a loop of Godfather-style acoustic guitar. The Score crosses boundaries of gender and geography, reinventing hip-hop as music for an international refugee camp of brothers and sisters with the inner-city blues. Lauryn and Wyclef took different roads on their solo joints, but The Score laid down the blueprint for the Fugees’ vision of the world as a ghetto.

43. TLC, ‘CrazySexyCool’
Left Eye, Chilli and T-Boz looked like a one-shot when they first emerged from the nascent Atlanta scene with 1992’s “Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg.” But CrazySexyCool was a real shocker, packed bumper to bumper with great songs, sassy vocals and voluptuous beats for burning down the house. “Creep” celebrates the kicks of illicit lust on the down low, “Waterfalls” digs deep into Memphis soul and “If I Was Your Girlfriend” does Prince better than the Artist has all decade. The showstopper: “Red Light Special,” an impossibly steamy make-out ballad that undresses and caresses everyone with ears to hear it. CrazySexyCool established TLC as pop pros who could do it all, combining the body slam of hip-hop and the giddy uplift of a jump-rope rhyme without breaking a nail.

42. PJ Harvey, ‘Rid of Me’
As Butt-Head so eloquently put it, “This chick is weird.” Polly Jean Harvey strode out of the English countryside to make the air-guitar record of the decade, exorcising her demons in fierce, funny songs that sometimes even had melodies. On Rid of Me, she summons the thunder of classic Seventies rock with help from producer Steve Albini. Harvey wails about that not-so-moist feeling in “Dry,” proclaims herself “king of the world” in “50-Ft. Queenie” and raises hell in “Man-Size,” putting her leather boots on to go stomp the whole planet into submission.

41. Guns n’ Roses, ‘Use Your Illusion I and II’
It had been five years since Appetite for Destruction, so when Use Your Illusion I and II ”” separate albums released simultaneously ”” dropped, they exploded. Slash and Izzy Stradlin let fly a brutal twin-guitar assault, taking all “the trash … dumped into the brain” and firing it back with machine-gun fury. A soaring version of Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” is their can’t-we-all-just-get-along plea. Guns n’ Roses couldn’t ”” even with themselves. But these albums stand on their own incendiary terms, souvenirs of a season in hell.