1994 was a year of incredible debuts by new artists, and also featured the last great surge of grunge music.
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 #14 in the series. My random number generator tells me that our next year to explore is 1967!
Check out my previous entries here.
The Greatest Albums of 1994
Grunge music, a sub-genre of the “alternative” rock genre (both with lousy names), was reaching its crescendo in 1994. It was still near its peak artistically, as my top ten will illustrate, but it was a movement that burned bright and fast. You can’t exactly tie the end of grunge to Kurt Cobain’s suicide in April of that year, but it was certainly a harbinger. Nirvana wouldn’t survive, naturally, and the other big standard-bearers of the sound would soon head off in different directions (Soundgarden), suffer a dip in quality thanks to their own demons (Alice in Chains), or chug along for years with a rabid fan-base while quietly fading from mainstream consciousness (Pearl Jam). Ultimately, grunge had accomplished what it set out to do, which is displace hair metal as the predominant force in American rock & roll.
In order to fill the vacuum left by grunge, a new breed of rock music was emerging. It had a poppier lean to it, albeit with different styles overlaid on top, like punk (Green Day, The Offspring), garage (Weezer) and even grunge itself (Live). It was a far cry from the slick, hedonistic 80’s stuff, maintaining the shift to more personal lyrics, but it didn’t approach the same level of self-seriousness that had been the immediate reaction to that era. Even though they share some common ground, lumping these groups together under a single banner is somewhat disingenuous. Rock would stay fairly splintered for a few years until nu-metal became the sound dujour.
Meanwhile, East Coast hip hop would come out huge in ’94, clawing back some of the credibility it had lost to Los Angeles with the domination of West Coast gangsta rap in the early 90’s. Rap is a musical style that has rivalry and one-upsmanship in its DNA, but that would all go to a new level in the mid nineties. Not only would it get more personal (no one could mistake the palpable animosity between Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur as professional) but it would expand in scope from rapper-to-rapper or borough-to-borough to encompass America’s opposite seaboards. The 1995 Source Awards, featuring many of the albums in this post, turned into a battleground between Puff Daddy’s NY-based Bad Boy label and Suge Knight’s LA-based Death Row, with the New York crowd turning Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, as well as newcomers, Outkast, into collateral damage.
I was a high school sophomore and junior during 1994, and so I encountered much of this music as a teenager. I’m somewhat surprised at how little my opinions have changed on it over the years. I discovered far fewer new albums while creating this post than for any other year I’ve done so far, and only one of them made my top 10 (also a low mark). We’ll see if that trend holds for the rest of the early 90’s, as I zip up and down the timeline.
1. Grace – Jeff Buckley
Grace is one of those albums that had an outsized impact on me the first time I heard it. I probably have more than a hundred “favorite albums”, but a far fewer number bowled me over like this one did upon my initial listen. I recall a close friend playing it for me, watching intently for how I would react. As he anticipated, I was blown away, and for a couple months all I wanted to do was play it for other people. In fact, that’s how he had discovered it, through the same kind of deliberate cd-listening session with a particularly music-savvy friend of ours. Twenty years later, it still maintains that incredible mystique every time I put it on.
The first three tracks set the tone beautifully, as well as expectations for what is to follow. They are sweeping, dramatic things driven by Buckley’s ethereally beautiful voice. Then, he subverts those expectations somewhat with a spare, elegant take on “Lilac Wine”, informed largely by Nina Simone’s version but hardly a carbon copy. He continues to challenge our preconceptions elsewhere on the album, such as singing an angelic traditional hymn (“Corpus Christi Carol”) juxtaposed next to the brash almost-metal of “Eternal Life”. The most famous track is the cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, which has taken heat in recent years for encouraging some of the worst tendencies in the American Idol televised-karaoke set. Despite every over-blown, melodramatic copy that Buckley’s performance inspired, the nuance and phrasing that he employs is masterful. Cohen’s amazing lyrics have never been imbued with such meaning. Plus, can’t we dock Rufus Wainwright just as equally for his take on the song?
The above fails to account for all the highlights (“Lover, You Should Have Come Over”, “So Real”), because the whole album is a highlight. It would be easy to overrate Buckley’s debut effort, given his heritage and his tragic death during the recording of a follow-up album. I imagine that even a pretty good record would have been canonized due to these external factors. This is much more than a pretty good record, of course, but it is still given some extra depth in light of these things. There is something inherently romantic about his one finished release being such a work of genius, and it’s impossible to listen to the eerie close of “Dream Brother”, and not ponder his mortality. As far as his legacy as the son of the great folk singer, Tim Buckley, Jeff is one of the few children of famous artists who has a legitimate claim to being an equal talent. His voice is far from a facsimile of his father’s, but there is more than a passing resemblance. He also inherited some rich song-writing ability, which is evident in his entire, tragically small, catalog. Setting aside any initial expectations, though, if you approach Grace with an open mind you are likely to come away in a state of delighted awe, much like I did that first time so many years ago.
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2. Superunknown – Soundgarden
Chris Cornell always got away with being a bit more of a rock star than his contemporaries. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder were rock stars, just in a non-traditional, “I don’t want to be a rock star” way. Meanwhile, Cornell was slinking around shirtless in his videos, with that luscious curly hair like he was Slash. Superunkown certainly sounds like grunge, and all the gravity that suggests, but it is also the spiritual successor to Physical Graffiti during the only time in history that it wasn’t cool to be compared to Led Zeppelin. Somehow, Soundgarden got to have it both ways.
On a grand thematic scale, I don’t know exactly how to parse Cornell’s lyrics, but song titles like “Let Me Drown”, “Fell on Black Days” and “Like a Suicide” ought to conjure up a clear picture of the album’s tone. Individual tracks stand out, but it is really the power of the immense whole that takes your breath away. It clocks in at a long 70 minutes, but the band has expanded their palette to include a lot of versatility and nuance without sacrificing the continuity of the music. Kim Thayil, in contrast to Cornell, has never had the makings of a rock star, but his unique guitar sounds deliver big dividends all over this record. From the sludgy funeral march of “4th of July” to the far-eastern strumming of “Half” to the refracted, shimmering chime of “Black Hole Sun”, Thayil adds incredible texture to every song. Still in full command of his golden pipes in ’94, Cornell imbues his vocals with the necessary drama to make them stick, but also shows terrific range and even restraint at times. The whole band would never sound better than they do here.
Superunknown is a triumph of individual performances, but also of song-writing, production and arrangement. The consistency of such a long record speaks to the vision that Soundgarden had and their ability to adhere to it. It’s a contender for best straight rock album of the 90’s.
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3. Ready to Die – The Notorious B.I.G.
Biggie Smalls is the illest. Of all the monumental hip-hop debuts in 1994 (by Nas, Outkast, Redman, Common), Ready to Die stands out. The East coast is all about gritty beats and technical rhyming, which the King of New York is happy to provide (with an assist from Easy Mo Bee, hip-hop’s least-heralded genius producer), but no one else can marry it so capably with the swagger and sense of fun that was the staple of West coast hip hop at the time. Biggie doesn’t skimp on the hardcore elements, but even as he confesses to robbing pregnant women for their “#1 Mom” pendants, he is too charismatic to root against. Unlike his posthumous follow-up, Life After Death, this album avoids unsatisfying guest spots, giving us pure, unadulterated B.I.G. In many cases, he is content to trade rhymes with himself, playing multiple characters on tracks like “The Warning” and “Gimme the Loot”. The one exception is made for Wu-Tang’s breakout star, Method Man. The duo trades laconic, brilliant rhymes on the nihilistic highlight, “The What”. That nihilism is an album-long theme. Much like I previously noted with Soundgarden, you don’t have to look past the titles of songs like the title track or “I Don’t Want to Live No More” to figure out the tone that he is going for. Even tracks that are ostensibly feel-good anthems come across more like fantasies. Take “Juicy”, which predicts the massive success that Biggie would have going forward (largely on the back of that very track, his lead single). It’s telling that the most audacious example of excess that he can come up with is “Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, when I was dead broke I could never picture this”. Throughout the album, Biggie engages in fascinating world-building, marrying the mostly fictitious crime figure with the aspirational hip hop megastar to shine light on a world that doesn’t really exist. In many ways, it’s the opposite of Nas’ reality-based opus, Illmatic. Regardless of how sensationalized the elements are, however, Smalls has a way of making you suspend your disbelief. A track like “Me and My Bitch” is, sure, wildly misogynistic, but also weirdly touching and even heart-breaking at the end. The woman Biggie describes is no doubt made up, but the story he tells has impact because he is such a good story-teller. His mobster cum superstar persona may be bullshit, but he is so convincing that it would soon make him the biggest rap icon on the planet.
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4. Burn My Eyes – Machine Head
Burn My Eyes sounds like an 18-wheeler plummeting down a mountain-side, piloted by Mario Andretti. The riffs are bludgeoning yet precise, punctuated occasionally by Logan Mader’s klaxon-like guitar squeals. It’s still Machine Head’s finest achievement, which is impressive considering it’s the debut album of a multi-decade career (that is still going). It’s a certainty that their surroundings at the time had a lot to do with the ominous sound they ended up producing. Hailing from Oakland, California, the band explicitly addresses the Rodney King riots that had just occurred in the prior couple of years, as well as other national stories like the raid on the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. It was a crazy time in America, where it felt like violence could break out at any point, and especially in that part of the country you got the sense that you were equally at risk from the gangs and the cops. Of course, Machine Head is hardly the first metal band to paint a pitch-black canvas, so it’s good that they have so many excellent songs to make their debut stand out. The album kicks off with the brutal opening salvo of “Davidian”, “Old”, “A Thousand Lies” and “None But My Own”. I recall not knowing exactly what vocalist Robb Flynn was singing about, but his guttural shouts left a lasting impression, whether it was “Let freedom ring with a shotgun blast!” or, more succinctly, “Jesus wept!” The band closes the affair with one of their best tracks, as well, the appropriately nihilistic “Block”. Given the darkness and ferocity of the preceding material, it’s not surprising that Flynn comes to the only logical conclusion in his final exclamation: “Fuck it all!”
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5. Illmatic – Nas
Nas, particularly on this, his debut album, is a hip hop purist. He falls into the same general category as Rakim, the GZA and Black Thought, a group of virtuoso emcees who put their rhymes before everything, even their personality. There is a deliberate contrast to the predominant aesthetic that was coming out of California. Illmatic leverages jazz and soul music as its backdrop as opposed to funk, and eschews meandering skits or humor all together. Most tracks are explicitly about growing up poor in Queens, but the themes are pretty much universal to any urban area. It’s the delivery that sets him apart. While Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and their contemporaries took the tact of glorifying their experiences, Nas presents them straight with no sugar-coating. He is braggadocios at times (it is rap music, after all) but he is content to let the crime, poverty and drug use in his lyrics speak for themselves. He isn’t the first rapper to take the approach, but the album has attained such legendary status because he’s the first one to do so in such a potent, unrelenting manner, and with such masterful control of his skills. At only twenty years old when Illmatic was recorded, Nas entered the scene as one of the top two or three emcees in the world. His style isn’t flashy, but it is passionate and controlled. There is no grand-standing, just his massive vocabulary and a genius for wordplay that has the capacity to mesmerize. Unlike Biggie, whose charisma and flow will have you rapping along with his punchlines by the second time you’ve heard them, Nas’ lyrics are too dense to unpack so quickly. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword that the album is so purely focused, however, because every subsequent release has felt somehow compromised. Regardless, Nas never had to lay down another verse after Illmatic to hold his spot as one of hip hop’s greatest.
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6. Unplugged in New York – Nirvana
Nirvana was never my favorite band to come out of the early-90’s Seattle music scene. I liked them plenty, but I didn’t subscribe to the notion that Kurt Cobain was the voice of my generation. Yet, that’s how he was portrayed in the media, particularly following his suicide. He was widely considered the Bob Dylan or John Lennon of “Generation X”, and in much the same way as those iconic artists stand in for the monolithic category of “Baby Boomers”, members of my generation were immediately associated with Cobain’s worldview and attitudes (insomuch as they could be discerned.) So, when Nirvana released their Unplugged concert, the results were important to me. I felt I had a stake, regardless of the fact that I didn’t actually identify with Cobain any more than any other rock star.
It’s a striking hour of music. It is paradoxically a complete departure from Nirvana’s signature sound yet fits their aesthetic perfectly. The cover songs are diverse, but seem of a piece when performed by this band in this setting. Even the tracks from Bleach, the group’s noisiest, most punk-tinged album, are arranged here with elegant simplicity. For all of the band’s tasteful restraint, and unexpectedly apropos support from cellists and Meat Puppets alike, it is Cobain who stands out. His voice is so ragged, so racked with emotion, that it’s hypnotizing. By the end of Leadbelly’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, he sounds as if he’s going to crack apart and blow off of the stage. His greatest strength, the reason that he did connect with so many people and become the de facto face of grunge, was his emotional core. No matter if he was shouting angrily or mumbling through cryptic lyrics, that emotion shone through.
Ultimately, the album is a vindication. From what? I suppose from being pigeon-holed as apathetic slackers, or wise-ass cynics or whatever else those unknown, un-seen and possibly imaginary forces wanted to label us. If Cobain was our leader, then he (and ultimately “we”) could no longer be dismissed as shallow. Of course, anyone who bothered to pay attention already knew that Nirvana wasn’t the slightest bit shallow based on their previous releases, but it was still easy enough to dismiss those for their loudness or brashness. I’m not talking about music critics here, I’m talking about the 50-year old Springsteen enthusiast or the housewife who flipped on 30 minutes of MTV while she cleaned the kitchen in order to “stay in touch with her kids”. The people that first heard about Nirvana when the Today Show reported Cobain’s death (and propagated his icon status). When Unplugged invaded the world’s consciousness through the constant replay of the show or the singles, that reductive thinking about Cobain (“us”) was off the table. Because no one can listen to this recording and hear anything but pure emotional honesty and beauty. So if that’s his legacy, then I suppose I’m ok with being spoken for.
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7. Jar of Flies – Alice in Chains
If 1992’s Dirt is Layne Staley raging against his heroin addiction, then Jar of Flies is him acquiescing. On the surface, it’s a major left turn for the band – It’s quiet, downbeat, largely acoustic. Thematically, though, it tracks all too well. The EP is all about isolation, much of it self-imposed:
“Let me be, I’m ok.I’m awake, anyway.It’s too bright over there.I can shift, cannot steer, So I drive them away.”
It’s a heartbreaking song cycle, especially in light of Staley’s drug-related death in 2002. It is also really lovely, the same way a sad movie might be. No matter the demons of depression and addiction that Staley, Jerry Cantrell and their bandmates might have been facing, they wrote an excellent collection of songs for this effort. It has a very autumnal feel, a nonchalance towards death and decay that echoes our delight at the “changing leaves”. It isn’t foliage that is deteriorating on Jar of Flies, though, its relationships, health, and willpower. It’s almost too heavy, but at a lean 31 minutes, it is the perfect little mood stabilizer that doesn’t weight you down too much. The band’s subsequent, self-titled release sounds pretty hollow compared to this and Dirt, which pretty much completes the inevitable arc. One can’t help but wonder at what this soulful creativity could have accomplished if it had been redirected instead of ultimately snuffed out.
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8. Weezer – Weezer
This album, also recognized as “The Blue Album”, came out when I was in 10th grade. Yet, I only got into it more than 10 years later. It’s not that I couldn’t relate (“…I’ve got a 12-sided die; I’ve got Kitty Pryde…” – Uh, yeah, that was me), it’s just that I was into listening to music as an escape, not a reminder of my day-to-day life. Looking back, I recognize the value of Rivers Cuomo’s confessional lyrics, even if they are tied so exclusively to the travails of a nerdy high school/college student. In fact, they are pretty smart lyrics in general, and benefit from their candor as opposed to slick wordplay or misguided attempts at depth. Every word rings true (well, maybe not “What’s with these homies dissing my girl…”). I doubt anyone would contend that this isn’t their best collection of songs, and they join Nas, Biggie, Machine Head and Jeff Buckley in the “1994 debut album = best album” club. Everything sounds so punchy and vital, even on angsty relationship tunes like “Undone (The Sweater Song)” and “Say It Ain’t So”. I don’t consider myself a Weezer fan by any estimation; I think Pinkerton was just ok and it’s been diminishing returns from there. I also don’t identify with any of the acts that could be traced back to Weezer when charting their chief influences (I’m thinking Ben Folds or Nada Surf, for example). Yet, I am a big fan of this particular album, with its slouchy approach, small themes, and big hooks.
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9. Stoned & Dethroned – The Jesus and Mary Chain
I could bring up the flaws with Stoned & Dethroned, the meandering mid-tempo flow, the fact that the Reid brothers aren’t strong singers, the lack of dynamics… but none of it really matters because it is a sexy, cool album, and sexy and cool will always trump any other qualifier in popular music, especially rock and roll. The album has a hazy road trip aesthetic, like it’s the soundtrack to a couple of bored teens who think they are in love and set out on the open highway to find something to do, but mostly just get high. It’s not a short listen, but it does breeze by, with the band’s glimmering, jangly sounds carrying you along with ease. The Reids, sharing vocal duties, deliver every verse with an off-hand murmur. Even a track like “Come On”, with a chorus designed to get the crowd pumping, comes across like they are singing to themselves more than anything. When an act is so low-key (e.g. The xx), you subconsciously pay more attention, leaning forward in your mind to stay tuned to whatever they are laying down. And that’s ultimately what The Jesus and Mary Chain are doing, treating us like a girl that they can’t be bothered with, and knowingly attracting our attention by doing so. Like I said, pretty cool.
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10. Resurrection – Common Sense
Today, the concept of anthropomorphizing hip-hop on a hip-hop track is almost passé. It is well-trod ground at this point. In 1994, however, Common Sense pretty much pioneered the idea, or at least executed it to its fullest extent. “I Used to Love H.E.R.” requires two full listens before its brilliance is understood, one to figure out that the subject of the track isn’t just some ex-girlfriend, and a second to decipher the lyrics with that knowledge applied. It is a masterfully realized metaphor, charting both Common’s personal experience with his chosen art form and the brief history of rap music over the prior couple of decades. What it isn’t is a catchy single, the type that could be played at parties and clubs non-stop. That holds true for the whole of Resurrection, an enjoyable but serious-minded album that finds Common (before he lost the “Sense”) spitting tough, cerebral rhymes over sturdy beats with little flourish. Why does it rank above more fun rap albums like Tical or Ill Communication? Well, those records have their own issues, but ultimately it comes down to the rhymes. Common probably gets overshadowed by the arrival of Nas and Biggie in the same year, but he holds his own from a lyrical standpoint with any of his peers. It probably doesn’t help that Chicago was just not seen as a hip-hop city back in ’94, so the NY or LA-based emcees were going to take the lion’s share of the attention. Fast forward to 2017, Chicago might be hip-hop’s hottest city, Common is well recognized for his craft, and Resurrection still packs a punch.
Honorable Mentions
Rock/Blues/Metal: There’s Nothing Wrong with Love – Built to Spill; From the Cradle – Eric Clapton; Far Beyond Driven – Pantera; Unknown Territory – Dick Dale; Wildflowers – Tom Petty; Korn – Korn
Hip Hop: Dare Iz a Darkside – Redman; Ill Communication – Beastie Boys; The Sun Rises in the East – Jeru the Damaja; 6 Feet Deep – Gravediggaz; Tical – Method Man; Southernplayalisticadillacmuzk – Outkast; Genocide & Juice – The Coup; Fear Itself – Casual; Word Life – O.C., Super Tight – UGK
Country/Folk: American Recordings – Johnny Cash; A Night in San Francisco – Van Morrison; What a Crying Shame – The Mavericks; The Brooklyn Side – The Bottle Rockets
Electronic/Other: Selected Ambient Works, Volume II – Aphex Twin; Dummy – Portishead
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