100 Best Albums of the Nineties

30. Green Day, ‘Dookie’
Millions of us made time to listen to Billie Joe Armstrong whine as he and his band of Bay Area punk snots won America’s heart with fast guitars, bouncy drums and the fakest English accents ever recorded. Their hits fit together like a stack of Pringles: “Basket Case” takes off with a case of the creeps and a melody that plays tricks on you, while “Longview” and “When I Come Around” vent the usual teen spirit with groovy hooks that the Bay City Rollers would have appreciated. Green Day took the booming Cali-punk revival to middle America: Cuter than Muppets, funnier than Weird Al, Green Day showed no signs of growing up here ”” which made their later transformation into politically charged arena-rockers that much more remarkable.

29. Wu-Tang Clan, ‘Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)’
The nine-MC Wu-Tang Clan ”” including the ruckus-bringer Ol’ Dirty Bastard, sword-sharp GZA and Kennedy­charismatic Method Man ”” burst out of the slums of Staten Island by capturing the sound of chaos on tape: tracks by RZA that were so rugged they recall pre-sampler, basement-collated hip-hop. Rhymes about drug dealing, project living, beef and martial arts. Furious flows that roar through speakers like controlled screaming. The Wu create an air of wildness that promised violence to anyone who challenged them and to some who didn’t. A generation of fans memorized every word.

28. Madonna, ‘Ray of Light’
Madonna finally gets back into the groove, rocking the dance beats that made her a star in the first place, for her most shamelessly disco album since You Can Dance. Madonna’s rhythm resurrection sounds like some kind of spiritual transformation, and since it accompanied her discovery of yoga and motherhood, it probably was. Producer William Orbit plugs in the techno gadgets, but it’s Madonna’s passion that makes the loudest bang, on powerhouse tracks like “Drowned World/Substitute for Love” and “Little Star.” And in the title smash, Madonna throws herself a tantrum on the global dance floor as if she’d never been away.

27. Rage Against the Machine, ‘Rage Against the Machine’
“Anger is a gift,” vocalist Zack de la Rocha proclaims in a venomous whisper in “Freedom,” and Rage Against the Machine spread the wealth around, with an electrifying vengeance, all over the rest of their debut album. Gunning de la Rocha’s incantatory rapping with rib-rattling slam, Rage Against the Machine get hot and nasty about authority with acute lyric detail and stunning force. Rage Against the Machine‘s mix of radical politics and headbanging kicks was a startling anomaly amid the self-absorbed ennui of the Year Grunge Broke. But the album’s commercial success was a crucial reaffirmation of rock’s potency as a weapon of protest. With Rage Against the Machine, subversion ”” in the great, defiant tradition of the Clash and the MC5 ”” was alive, and thrilling, in the mainstream.

26. Nas, ‘Illmatic’
Straight from hip-hop’s legendary Queensbridge, New York, projects to the studio, with an oven-roasted voice, butter flow, man-child eyes and a pure love of the music, streetwise intellectual Nas raised the bar on Nineties MC’ing. Nas had an eye on the street, the prison and the dreams of every ghettoman, whether he was sampling the classic film Wild Style, giving his jazz-trumpeter father a guest slot or offering rhymes like these: “Back in ’83 I was an MC sparkin’/But I was too scared to grab the mikes in the parks and/Kick my little raps cuz I thought niggas wouldn’t understand/And now in every jam I’m the fuckin man.” True that.

25. Sublime, ‘Sublime’
One of the decade’s strangest hits, Sublime came out shortly after the death of singer-guitarist Bradley Nowell but kept spinning off one hit after another, with a loose, friendly California-pop sound inflected by ska, dub, punk and folk. These Long Beach riddim kings get sloppy but keep the tempo chugging, especially in the head-spinning acoustic skank of “What I Got,” which somehow fuses the English Beat with the Grateful Dead. The success of Sublime was a compliment to Nowell’s memory and an even bigger compliment to his rhythm section.

24. Pavement, ‘Slanted and Enchanted’
Pavement channeled the spirit of Buddy Holly through one of Lou Reed’s blown amps, bringing miles of style to an indie-rock scene starved for a little romance. Stephen Malkmus had the songs to turn this homemade tape of art-punk guitar fuzz into a full-blown California fantasy of girls and boys dreaming big on the ridge where summer ends. Slanted and Enchanted is the sound of sweet suburban boys who loved the Velvet Underground without ever wondering what “The Black Angel’s Death Song” meant, and once Malkmus murmured the words “sha la la” without a trace of irony, out-of-tune guitars would never be the same.

23. The Smashing Pumpkins, ‘Siamese Dream’
Chief pumpkin Billy Corgan took the idea of quality control to its obsessive conclusion by playing most of this album’s guitar and bass parts himself ”” a rough deal for guitarist James Iha and bassist D’Arcy. But Siamese Dream ”” co-produced with Butch Vig, fresh from Nirvana’s Nevermind ”” is Corgan’s idealized, super-hands-on version of the full band’s soaring, angst-spiked psychedelia. (The Pumpkins‘ glorious onstage expansions of “Silverfuck” were proof enough that Corgan couldn’t do it all on his own.) That the album remains one of alt-rock’s most enduring documents is down to Corgan’s acute commercial vision ”” the way he dolled up the confessional indulgence of “Today” and “Disarm” in heavy-Seventies pop lace ”” and the sheer power of the playing. No matter who did what.

22. Jeff Buckley, ‘Grace’
Blessed with impressive pedigree (he was the son of the Sixties folk-pop icon Tim Buckley) and a voice of great range and deep character, Jeff Buckley was cursed with a perfectionist’s streak. Buckley had scrapped one stab at a second album and was gearing up to start over when he drowned in a freak accident in Memphis in May 1997, leaving Grace as the only studio album completed to his satisfaction in his brief lifetime. But it is a rich legacy: the transportive blend of serpentine guitars and Buckley’s melismatic singing in “Mojo Pin” and “Grace”; the garage-band swagger and velvet pathos of “Last Goodbye” and “So Real”; the way Buckley turns Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” into delicate, personal prayer. A wonderful record, aptly titled. An enormously gifted artist, gone too soon.

21. Radiohead, ‘The Bends’
According to the script, Radiohead were supposed to disappear after their fluky 1993 smash “Creep,” leaving only fond memories of Thom Yorke’s Martin Short””after-electroshock yodel and that wukku-wukku guitar hook. But The Bends shocked everyone with its wide­screen psychedelic glory, raising Radiohead to a very Seventies kind of U.K. art-rock godhead. The depressive ballad “Fake Plastic Trees” turned up in Clueless, in which Alicia Silverstone memorably tags the band as “complaint rock”; in big-bang dystopian epics like “High and Dry,” Yorke’s choirboy whimper runs laps around Jonny Greenwood’s machinehead guitar heroics. U2 would have sold crack to nuns to make this record.