Come to explore the eclectic musical landscape at the start of the 90’s. Stay to gawk at the awkward use of computer graphics on the album covers.
Against my better judgment, I’m undertaking a project to determine my top 10 albums of every year since 1960. Instead of just picking my favorite stuff out of my collection, I intend to explore, re-visit and discover. While I can’t promise to leave no stone un-turned, I am going to go deeper than I ever have before. Why would I partake in a journey that will inevitably take many years and that I ultimately may never finish? Most importantly, to uncover great music that I’ve never heard before. Second, to boost my knowledge of music history and get a sense of what was happening at a macro scale in a snapshot of time. Finally, I want to share my passion for music with you and, fingers crossed, generate a dialogue down in the comments. So without further ado, here is #18 in the series. My random number generator tells me that the next year to explore is 2012!
Check out my previous entries here.
The Greatest Albums of 1990
From a musical perspective, “the nineties” didn’t really kick off until 1991. The first official year of the decade represents a hangover from the late 80’s, and you could easily point to the September ’91 release of Nirvana’s Nevermind as the true start of the decade, at least for our purposes here. Prior to that, rock and hip hop were both in somewhat amorphous transition periods. The cock rock of Motley Crue, Poison and their ilk was still doing gangbusters in terms of revenue, but it was well past its shelf life in terms of offering anything impactful to the culture. Hip hop was also finding its way, as 1st wave gangsta rap had run its course and the Native Tongues jazz-rap movement was just barely finding its footing. It would really be 92-93 (a.k.a. the years of The Chronic and Enter the 36 Chambers) before the genre’s bi-coastal identity was forged for the foreseeable future.
As such, my top ten of 1990 feels a little off-kilter. There is representation from thrash metal (another fading art form) and a couple of rock efforts that fit in the seam between the broader genres of cock rock and grunge. The list is made up largely of albums that don’t resemble anything else of the era, or any of my other top ten lists. I would also suggest that it doesn’t contain any real all-time great albums. Even my number one would be topped in consecutive releases by the same group. Nevertheless, it was a fun and interesting year to delve into.
I always look forward to tackling a year from my youth, to see how much my tastes have evolved. There were a handful of low-grade hair metal records from 1990 that I was particularly excited to have the excuse to delve into: Poison’s Flesh & Blood, Tesla’s Five Man Acoustical Jam, etc. Intellectually, I know this isn’t good music – there’s a reason I had to queue them up on Spotify rather than access them from my own collection, of course. Yet after listening to the whole lot of them, or at least as much as I could stand, I failed to get even the meager nostalgic sugar rush that I was looking forward to. In fact, I found myself seriously questioning 12-year-old Lucas’s taste. If I’m really honest, I suspect that even then I knew deep down that Slaughter’s Stick It To Ya’ was not destined to hold up for future generations. Luckily, there were a few albums from my youth that did hold up and carry over into my top ten.
People’s Instinctive Travels and Paths of Rhythm – A Tribe Called Quest
More than any other year, I struggled to assign an album to my top slot. In essence, its really a four-way tie, and the order on this list is a little arbitrary. I ended up favoring A Tribe Called Quest because People’s Instinctive Travels… is clearly the most important and influential of the four. This is the first record that fully proved out what the Native Tongues movement could be. They took the template that De La Soul set the prior year on 3 Feet High and Rising and expanded it exponentially. Their sound features a laid back, conversational vibe and irreverent lyrics that feel miles away from predominant trends. Can you imagine Big Daddy Kane or MC Hammer rapping “I don’t eat no ham and eggs, cause they’re high on cholesterol!”? That’s what made Native Tongues hip hop stand out: It didn’t harbor any of the violent or misogynistic trappings of the massively popular “gangsta rap” of the time, and it was far looser and less over-engineered than the even more massively popular “pop rap” that was starting to dominate the charts. Ultimately, Tribe helped expand the acceptable palette that future hip hop artists could utilize.
The beats on People’s Instinctive Travels… are masterful. Some of the samples sound a bit obvious to contemporary ears, but taken in context of 1990 rap music, the jazzy, warm and melodic tone is pretty revolutionary. The Bomb Squad and the Dust Brothers had been making massive progress in hip hop production over the prior couple of years, but the sound that resulted from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back or Paul’s Boutique was dense and cacophonous, practically the polar opposite of Tribe’s approach. Also novel is the rhyming style employed by Tribe’s trio of emcees (Q-Tip, Phife Dog & Jarobi.) Let’s compare them to Mobb Deep for instance, another early-to-mid nineties hip hop group from Queens. Mobb Deep rides the beat, with an emphasis on internal rhymes. Tribe rides the bassline, with an emphasis on flow and alliteration. You could pick up a Prodigy verse and drop it over virtually any other beat, provided you synch up the tempo, but a Q-Tip verse is much more married to the individual track it is on. This style makes the rhyming a harmonious element of the overall aesthetic, rather than the clear focal point. While that means that I don’t have a litany of classic Phife Dog verses that I can recite, it also means that listening to a Tribe album is a uniquely mellifluous and enjoyable experience. Peoples Instinctive Travels and Paths of Rhythm is the first album to embody that experience, but the group would make a hall of fame career out of doing it over and over again.
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Painkiller – Judas Priest
One of the most gratifying things I’ve gotten from this blog is a new appreciation for Judas Priest. I’ve discovered some seminal albums of theirs and finally started to figure out how they fit into the evolution of metal through the seventies and eighties. None of that prepared me for this fucking album, though. This doesn’t sound like a band that pre-dates Iron Maiden and Metallica. It sounds like those two bands had a baby and fed it nothing but cheap vodka and Minotaur blood for its whole life. Rob Halford, who would leave the band after this release, is in top form here, milking every grunt, squeal and banshee howl for all its worth. Also seeking to impress is new drummer Scott Travis, who attacks the opening of the album in a fury, and then proceeds like he’s afraid the band might change their mind on him at any moment. His tempo rarely dips below “full sprint”, and that drives a tremendous amount of energy and momentum from the band. There are some real stunners among the individual tracks (“Metal Meltdown”, “Leather Rebel”), but nothing tops the bludgeoning intensity of the title track. It chronicles some sort of cyborg messiah riding a flying motorcycle who descends on humanity to trigger the apocalypse (an interpretation helpfully reinforced by the album art), and all of that sounds ridiculous of course, but Priest tackles the concept with conviction. The onslaught of guitars and percussion seeks to approximate that apocalypse on your eardrums, and Halford deploys some heretofore unheard vocal gymnastics to sell you on it. I can’t tell you the last time I had so much fun listening to a track, and that sense of fun pervades the entire album. Non-metal fans will surely miss the appeal, but for the rest of us, this is sweet nirvana.
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Sex Packets – Digital Underground
Lots of hip hop acts of the 80’s and 90’s made a living sampling P-Funk to death, but none of them embodied the spirit of the funkateers as fully as Digital Underground. Half party rap record, half sleazy concept album, Sex Packets is a timeless work of art that embraces high concept and low brow in equal measure. It’s a tricky balancing act, and that’s probably why the group never released anything else with nearly the same impact. It kicks off with an all-time classic crowd pleaser. The year’s most populist hits may have been “U Can’t Touch This” and “Ice Ice Baby”, but only “The Humpty Dance” elicits universal cheers, rather than cringes, nearly thirty years later. Hip hop is a genre that invites its participants to play a character, but no one has embraced the opportunity with as much comedic gusto as Gregory Jacobs, the man behind both Humpty Hump and Shock G. His performance is so confident that he makes Burger King toilet sex sound cool and turns a come on to a “fat girl” into a rally cry for inclusion. The opening track is far from only delight on the album, however. Digital Underground does an amazing job of making their tracks sound like parties. “Doowutchyalike” and “Underwater Rimes” are both extended jams that feel like gatherings where anybody may just wander through, and are indeed populated by baby rappers, blowfish rappers, and everything in between. The album’s closing 15 minutes are centered on the concept of hallucinatory pills that provide potent sexual fantasies. It’s pretty weird. It’s also pretty great, and gives some thematic weight to the album, no matter how silly. Perhaps the only things keeping Sex Packets from the number one spot are the back-to-back duds “Gutfest ‘89” and “The Danger Zone”. For some reason, I love the idea of listening to the Underground rap about pretend sex drugs, but I have no interest in hearing them address similar but more mundane topics like strippers or crack cocaine. Still, I’m confident that this is an album we’ll still be using to start the party in another thirty years.
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Ritual de lo Habitual – Jane’s Addiction
As I mentioned in the intro, I was holding on to cock rock into the 90’s, probably a couple years after savvier music fans had jumped ship. When Nirvana hit big, I pivoted right into grunge music, which means I missed out on the rock bands that fell into the seam between those two eras. Some of them, like Sonic Youth, I’ve never come around on. Others, like the Pixies, I would eventually grow to appreciate. I was aware of Jane’s Addiction at the time, primarily through the video for their single, “Been Caught Stealin’”. It was fun, but nothing I gave too much consideration to. Listening to the album for the first time now, I realize how little that track represents the overall aesthetic. Ritual de lo Habitual is a sprawling, acid-drenched record that is often disarmingly beautiful. The album kicks off with a spirited “Here we go!”, as Perry Ferrell sings on the high-energy lead single, “Stop”. The band careens through a handful of thrilling rock tunes, displaying impressive cohesion through a lot of nifty changes, before coming to that jaunty ode to petty larceny I mentioned above. The back half of the album stretches way out into a series of tunes that range from seven to ten-plus minutes, before finally closing on the beautifully sincere “Classic Girl”. On this portion of the album they could have lost the plot, so to speak, had they let those longer songs become self-indulgent, or worse, boring. For a debut album, however, they show remarkable good taste and thoughtfulness in crafting these tunes, and I find it to be the most effective section (“Stop” notwithstanding). Overall, I am really excited to add this to my regular rotation of rock albums, and very nearly as excited to discover something that Dave Navarro is involved in that I enjoy more than Ink Master.
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Cowboys from Hell – Pantera
Pantera has occupied many different personas in their career. There’s the now-infamous Metal Magic hair metal days, the work they did pioneering groove metal, and the odd left turn into rockabilly-core in the late nineties (a period I am looking forward to critically re-evaluating in this series). As soon as you hear Diamond Darrell’s engine-rev guitar opening from “Cowboys from Hell”, it’s clear that this is going to be their thrash album. Though far from novel at the time, the approach of bludgeon-heavy riffs, blistering guitar solos and double-bass drumming on track after track suits the band remarkably well. Lead singer Phil Anselmo is still caught in between styles a bit, with some Rob Halford belting slipping through at times and the genesis of his more aggressive growl appearing in other spots. He shines on “Cemetery Gates”, a song that requires dynamic vocals and even some tenderness. That track, with its ballad elements and tempo shifts, is right out of the mid-80’s Metallica playbook that led to such amazing tracks as “Fade to Black” and “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)”. Those classic Metallica albums seem to be the obvious touchpoint for Cowboys overall, but that isn’t to say that weren’t looking ahead a bit. A song like “Domination”, for example, showcases the demolition crew that the band would become as they shifted more completely to groove metal on their next couple of albums. Even though it’s a transitional work for Pantera, it’s also a coming out party, and stands entirely on its own as one of the great metal records of the era.
Note: I’ve always felt sorry for Vinnie Paul, looking so awkward on the album cover. While the rest of the band was embracing their rock star personas, Vinnie has that pose that says “I’m still the unsure-of-himself fat kid from high school.” Its an impression that feels especially poignant after his death a few weeks ago.
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Empire – Queensryche
Empire is one of the albums from this list that I listened to a lot back when it first came out. Nostalgia has a funny way of attaching disparate things together, especially if one of them is music, and so I immediately associate this record with winter nights and, oddly enough, the movie Nightbreed. It also serves as a token for the seemingly overnight shift in what was perceived as cool once Nirvana hit the scene. I recall a friend returning my Empire cassette to me at a restaurant with other teenagers around, and treating it as covertly as he would pass over a dimebag or a snuff film, lest we both suffer the embarrassment of openly enjoying Queensryche. It was a huge record, though, largely off the back of the single “Silent Lucidity”. That track, an example of the now virtually extinct “power ballad”, still has the capacity to stun all these years later with its soft, lullaby-inspired opening slowly giving way into an orchestral swell and sullen, dramatic singing that seek to mirror the song’s theme of lucid dreaming. It also represents a marked shift for the band. While they had come up in the eighties making heavy metal influenced by glam and prog in equal measures (culminating in the 1988 masterpiece Operation Mindcrime) there are hardly any metal elements to this record at all. It is rock and roll, far more influenced by Pink Floyd than any of their metal peers from the prior decade. Queensryche creates a rich sonic environment that helps tie together individual songs that have no discernible thematic throughline. Here, “Silent Lucidity” sits next to the title track, about drug cartels, and “Della Brown”, about poverty. “Jet City Woman” and “Another Rainy Night (Without You)” are fantastic love songs, their epic choruses suiting Geoff Tate’s soaring vocals better than virtually anything else the band had ever recorded. I suppose I still consider this an uncool record, no doubt influenced by living through the seismic credibility shift of early 90’s rock and roll. That doesn’t stop me from loving it though, and it certainly shouldn’t prevent anyone from giving it a shot in 2018.
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Flood – They Might Be Giants
When I was in middle school, this album brought me abundant joy. Before long, though, I had moved on and pretty much forgot about it for more than a decade. It just wasn’t very cool. I know that I just brought up the perceived coolness of music while discussing Queensryche, but you have to understand that I turned twelve in 1990 – it would be some years before “What I like” scored definitive victory over “What is cool” in my mind. By the time I picked up Flood for another listen, I had a young child of my own, and I was searching for music that we could both enjoy together. It worked, inasmuch as she enjoyed it. Meanwhile, I fell back in love with it, and even discovered some previously unrecognized depth among all the silliness.
It’s not often that I could use a word like madcap to describe the music on this blog, but here we are nonetheless. If you aren’t familiar with TMBG, they specialize in absurdist takes on pop music. The Johns (Flansburgh and Linnell) deploy a grab bag of instruments and styles along with bizarre lyrics to create a surreal experience that is difficult to explain. You could say that Weird Al is their closest analogue in the pop world, but they don’t practice pure satire or index as heavily on humor. Plus, while many of their songs can come across trivial or jokey on the surface, they frequently mask some existential darkness. Take this stanza from “Particle Man”, one of the albums most widely recognized “zany” tunes:
“Person Man, Person Man, Hit in the head with a frying pan, Lives his life in a garbage can, Person man. Is he depressed, or is he a mess, Does he feel totally worthless? Who came up with Person Man? Degraded man, Person Man.”
Similarly, tracks like “Lucky Ball and Chain” and “Twisting” are odd but rueful examinations of soured relationships, and the brief but pointed “Minimum Wage” speaks for itself. Luckily, there is a lot of great song-craft behind this quirky darkness. You could give “Twisting” to a band like Sleater-Kinney, for example, and they would rock the hell out of it. Flood is probably TMBG’s most tuneful album. If it hasn’t gotten any cooler in the subsequent decades, at least I’ve stopped caring. And as a bonus, it still doubles as potent kid’s music: Listening to it in the car while preparing for this post, I stopped to run an errand, and heard my two-year old in the backseat continuing to sing the chorus to “Whistling in the Dark”, a track that had been a favorite of mind all those years ago.
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Moorish Music from Mauritania – Khalifa Ould Eide & Dimi Mint Abba
Out of the 180 albums presented so far in Found or Forgotten, Moorish Music from Mauritania almost certainly represents the one that will be most alien to Western ears. It starts off with a man singing and accompanying himself on a simple stringed instrument known as a tidinit. His singing sounds somewhere between Arabic and African (Mauritania is in fact in Northwest Africa), and the oddly syncopated rhythms are almost shapeless. It’s hard to get your bearings, and honestly a little off-putting. Then, a couple of minutes in, something magical happens. A fascinating beat rises out of the miasma, comprised of hand claps and some sort of big, deep drum. The man’s half chanted, half-sung verses are countered by two or three women (they could almost be children) in precise harmony, singing in a transcendentally beautiful fashion. It’s one of those rare moments in music (and I listen to a lot of music) that strikes such a nerve that I can remember precisely where I was the first time I heard it.
The next track (“Yar Allahoo”) features Dimi Mint Abba singing in conversation with two other women, and now that her voice is separate from theirs, they sound even more pristinely child-like. It’s no hyperbole to say that Abba’s is one of the most accomplished vocal performances I’ve ever heard, combining clarity, beauty and tremendous dexterity into something extraordinary. That magic continues for the rest of the album’s eleven astounding tracks. Despite the language barrier and lack of variation in instrumentation and approach, I find that it holds up for the whole hour-plus. It is remarkable to me how massively disconnected this music seems from the afrobeat that originated in (relatively) nearby Nigeria. In fact, it sounds distinct from any other music I’ve ever come across, and while that can be disorienting at first, it is ultimately thrilling to experience a previously unimagined form of expression.
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Bossanova – Pixies
My first instinct in describing Bossanova is to compare it, inevitably in unfavorable terms, to their masterpiece from the prior year, Doolittle. Yet while this album doesn’t share the same bold dynamic between sweetly sung surf cooing and abrasively chaotic hardcore, that also means it isn’t as jarring of an experience and more conventionally pleasing overall. Surf music is still in the band’s DNA, and no amount of garage rock crunch can distract from that. These are cool, straightforward rock tunes that sound like they could have all been recorded live in the same take. To be clear, I mean that as a compliment, particularly in an era where mainstream rock music had become so slickly produced that it summoned forth a whole flannel-clad sub-culture called “grunge music” to rail against it for several years. There’s a lot to admire about a band getting back to work after a career high-water mark, trusting in their immense talent for song-craft, and clearing the deck with the fruits of that effort a year later. It’s true that individual tracks don’t particularly stand out as a result, but uniformity is not really a problem when the baseline is “very good”. It’s also an album of short songs. More than half the tracks clock in under three minutes, which means they get in and out before you have the time to consider that nothing here quite impresses like “Wave of Mutilation” or “Here Comes Your Man”.
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Wrong Way Up – Brian Eno & John Cale
Brian Eno has always seemed to work at a slightly different frequency than his contemporaries. That was true in the mid-seventies, but it is even more pronounced at the start of the nineties. Amidst all the over-produced hair metal, funk-heavy hip hop and proto-grunge, Eno dropped a sparse, contrarian album that resembles nothing else in the landscape. Wrong Way Up is full of delightful contradictions. Its music is comprised of myriad exotic instruments (such as omnichord, Shinto bell and dumbek), yet they are fitted together with such precision and organization that they feel programmed. iTunes goes so far as to label the album “Electronic”, but I’m not sure there is a single digital element involved. Yet, for all of that fussiness, it is an album of tremendous soul. Part of that is owed to John Cale’s marginally shell-shocked vocals which project a sense of wonder onto each track. Another part is the album’s polyrhythmic beats that sound vaguely African, yet not so specific as to be actual appropriation (looking at you Mr. Simon). It’s as if the music has sprung up from some imaginary nation with its own rich history of cultural evolution, yet populated exclusively by aged, ornery white musical geniuses.
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Honorable Mentions
Rock: Ragged Glory – Neil Young and Crazyhorse; Bloodletting – Concrete Blonde; Apple – Mother Love Bone; Un-Led-Ed – Dread Zeppelin; The Razor’s Edge – AC/DC
Metal: Facelift – Alice in Chains; Screaming Life/FOPP – Soundgarden; Rust in Peace – Megadeath; Persistence of Time – Anthrax
Hip Hop: New Funky Nation – Boo-Ya Tribe; AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted – Ice Cube; Mama Said Knock You Out – LL Cool J; Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em – Eric B & Rakim
Pop/Other: Rhythm of the Saints – Paul Simon; Music from Graffiti Bridge – Prince (et al); Feeding Frenzy – Jimmy Buffet
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