'90s

1992 was a transitional year for R&B and hip-hop. The first wave of bass was coming to an end, New Jack swing was beginning to wane, and East Coast and mainstream hip-hop had yet to transition between the golden age of the ‘80s and the boom bap of the mid-90s. One era hadn’t quite ended, and another hadn’t quite begun, and there was a bit of schizophrenia; the charts were populated by Southern rap bohos (Arrested Development), and Northwestern rappers who appropriated the sound and subjects of Miami bass. This truly awesome playlist by Spotify user John Cunningham is interesting because it captures this dynamic and operates from a very specific critical perspective and rejects the usual nostalgia associated with these type of playlist. It also really bangs. His original playlist was originally named simply “B96,” and we cleaned the title up a little bit to be more descriptive.

What’s This Playlist All About? The folks at WXPN, the member-supported radio service of the University of Pennsylvania, set out to prove that 1993 was one of the most important years in music with a list of over 50 pieces of evidence.What You Get: Alt-rock’s biggest mainstream success stories (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, The Breeders) collide with groundbreaking hip-hop (Wu-Tang Clan, Souls of Mischief, A Tribe Called Quest) and R&B (Janet Jackson, Me’shell Ndegeocello). You also get a healthy taste of the bubbling indie-rock underground (Yo La Tengo, Archers of Loaf, Bettie Serveert), as well as landmark works from now-icons like Bjork and PJ Harvey.Best Surprise(s): Two one-hit wonders—US3’s “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)” and Crash Test Dummies’ “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm”—may be the best examples of how wonderfully weird and all-inclusive the year 1993 really was.So, Was 1993 the Greatest Year in Music? While there are arguably some definitive moments captured here, not too many of these songs stand out as the GOAT of anything. Still, we have to admit the playlist creators make a compelling case, proving that 1993 was quite a watershed year for a wide range of genres. It was a year you could find just about anyone moping to Mazzy Star, thrashing to Dinosaur Jr., swaying to Janet, and rapping with Snoop Doggy Dogg all in one setting—and that’s pretty incredible.

It’s been said that the defining sounds of a particular decade don’t truly take hold until the midway point, be it Motown and psychedelia in the ’60s, punk and disco in the ’70s, or hip-hop and hair metal in the ’80s. However, the ’90s turned that theory on its head. Its big-bang moment—Nirvana’s Nevermind—occurred very early in the decade, sending shockwaves through the mainstream and underground alike, and transforming “alt-” into an all-purpose badge of outsider cool that could be affixed to anything from country to hip-hop. Kurt Cobain punched out in ’94, but the ripple effects that his band triggered continued to cascade in his absence, and 1995 was the year the alt-revolution hit its peak.

It was the moment when Dave Grohl discovered there was life after Nirvana; Radiohead realized they could be so much more than a post-grunge U2; iconoclasts like Björk and PJ Harvey dropped defining works; Alanis Morissette and Garbage pushed edgy feminist pop into the Top 40; and Oasis, Elastica, and Pulp provided the soundtrack to Britpop’s halcyon days. It was also arguably the last era when certified weirdos like Royal Trux, Mercury Rev, and Mike Watt could be given free rein on a major-label budget, and the last moment when one could credibly hold on to the sincere beliefs that Pavement had crossover potential and Sonic Youth was a logical Lollapalooza headliner. It was also a particularly glorious moment for one-hit wonders that wouldn’t have broken through in any other era, like Hum’s “Stars” and Spacehog’s “In the Meantime.”

But there was ample evidence that grungy guitar rock’s dominance of alterna-culture was on the wane: The debuts of No Doubt and blink-182 signaled a shift toward more palatable pop-punk; The Pharcyde, The Roots, and the Wu-Tang were inspiring teens to trade their flannels for backpacks; and the likes of Moby, The Chemical Brothers, and Goldie were turning stage-divers to ravers. In hindsight, the year portended the era of fragmentation we currently inhabit, as what initially felt like a generational movement became corporatized or broken down into subcultural niches. But with this playlist of 95 from ’95, we present a virtual mosh pit where freaks of every stripe are forever welcome.

Trip-hop took college campuses, or at least my dorm room, by storm in the mid-90s, and then very quickly fell out of view. A lot about the psych hip-hop genre still seems overcooked, underwhelming and redundant, but certainly not all of it. This is the sort of list that FACT usually knocks out of the park, and this is no exception. The list provides a good overview of the micro-genre, though well quibble with calling Meat Beat Manifesto trip hop. It also works great as a playlist as trip-hop songs have a uniformity of sound that translates well into this type of mix.Note: Some of the songs here simply arent available online, so we didnt quite make it to the full 50.

You read that right: This is 90s "alt-pop," not "alt-rock." If alt-rock represented the commercialization of 80s indie-rock, then these artists represented the commercialization of alt-rock. These are the diluted descendants of Nirvana, Green Day, Beck, and other legit underground-to-mainstream crossovers, artists who didnt have to worry about selling out, because, with few exceptions, they had no indie cred to begin with. They were "alternative" only by virtue of existing in the 90s, when any rock act that wasnt Aerosmith was ostensibly "alternative." Theyre the artists who made Kurt Cobain roll over in his grave more vigorously than most.But if each of these songs represented a nail in the coffin of the freak-scene utopia that Neverminds success briefly promised, today they function as a portal to an equally distant and inaccessible realm: i.e., a more innocent pre-9/11 era, before our hearts were perpetually filled with despair over the state of the world, before social media was clogging our brains with a 24/7 dose of aggravation. Lets go back to a world where our sunshine never got stolen.

Unpacked is a playlist analysis of new and classic albums where we highlight key tracks alongside their influences, collaborators, and sample sources to encourage a deeper understanding and appreciation of the record. After loading up 1989’s cult classic Paul’s Boutique with a dizzying array of samples, the Beastie Boys refocused on live instrumentation in the more litigious ‘90s, drafting keyboardist Money Mark as one of the group’s many honorary “fourth” Beastie Boys. But while Check Your Head, which turns 25 this week, contains fewer samples than Paul’s Boutique, it still features dozens of them, drawing on the crates full of punk, classic rock, funk, and comedy records that informed the bratty white rappers’ revolutionary fusion of styles. Check Your Head’s opening track “Jimmy James” sets the densely referential tone: It features no fewer than three Jimi Hendrix Experience samples from three different albums. (The title itself is a nod to Hendrix’s early stage name.) But first, you hear “this next one is the first song on our new album,” as spoken by Robin Zander on Cheap Trick’s 1978 live album At Budokan in his introduction to the future classic “Surrender.” And then, the beat that kicks in is taken primarily from The Turtles’ novelty track “I’m Chief Kamanawanalea.” More than perhaps any album in history, Check Your Head blurs the line between samples and original recordings. Some of the blasts of distorted guitar are played live by Ad-Rock, while others are taken from Thin Lizzy and Bad Brains. On “Finger Lickin’ Good,” MCA and Mike D begin a sentence in 1992 that is finished by Bob Dylan in 1965. One of the most straightforward punk songs on the album, “Time For Livin’,” is actually a revved up Sly & The Family Stone cover. And while “The Biz Vs. The Nuge” features Biz Markie riffing in the Beasties’ studio over a Ted Nugent sample, “So What’cha Want” samples Biz vocals from both his 1988 Big Daddy Kane collaboration “Just Rhymin’ With Biz” and the Check Your Head outtake “Drunken Praying Mantis Style.”

This playlists/post was originally supposed to highlight the Shoegaze Love Songs station from Pandora, as that’s a pretty great concept. Shoegaze, a genre of rock that sprang up from the UK in the late ‘80s and sought to negotiate the distance between Phil Spector’s wall of sound and the Velvet Underground’s columns of noise, may have ostensibly made love as its central lyrical focus, but it was a opaque, narcotic and disheveled take on the subject. Saying that shoegaze bands made love songs is like saying that Master P made rap songs about starting small businesses. It’s true, but it misses the point. Still, it’s interesting to look at it from that perspective, and it would’ve been the subject of this blog post if not for the fact that Pandora is a radio service and the user is unable to view tracklisting. For a high-concept, edutainment that seems like an achilles heel. But we love shoegaze, and we hope you do (or will) as well. Here’s a good beginners guide from Ella Fraser-Thoms at the Guardian.

"Everybody hates a tourist," a wise, skinny man once sang. So lets leave "Wonderwall" at the karaoke bar and rediscover some quality overlooked choons from the Britpop era, which, in our unscientific opinion, begins with Suedes self-titled 1993 debut and stretches all the way to 2000, if only to remind you that Gay Dad and Elasticas The Menace werent all that bad. (Really!) Were also abiding by a fairly liberal definition of Britpop here, because tracks like Spiritualizeds "Lay Back in the Sun" and Shacks "Natalies Party" are as eternally splendorous as anything produced by their NME-mugging peers.After listening to this playlist, youll be left wondering why Oasis "Hey Now" wasnt as big as "Supersonic," why the Boo Radleys werent as big as Oasis, why Pulps "Sylvia" isnt considered Jarvis Cockers career-defining performance, and why the only way to experience Echobellys "Insomniac" on Spotify is through the Dumb and Dumber soundtrack. Youll also be reminded of that fleeting moment when Ride went mod-rock, The Stone Roses turned into Led Zeppelin, and Radiohead were just a bunch of alt-rock chancers who named their first album after a Jerky Boys sketch. And if 2018 brings us a Catatonia revival, then our work is done.

A hip-hop cannon was created in 1994. Nas, Notorious B.I.G., Outkast, Gang Starr, Beastie Boys and Scarface all released breakout albums that were epochal and genre-defining. Some of these tracks -- "One Love," "Juicy," "Mass Appeal" -- have been so rhapsodized and overplayed that its difficult to listen to them with fresh ears, or to even believe that there was a time in hip-hop when these tracks were new. Illmatic, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik and Hard to Earn were all released within the span of a little more than a month. Hip-hops bench in 1994 was also deep, and Mosi makes a point in his write-up to state that these "were the years when hip-hop became universal." Classic tracks also came in from the West Coast ("Captain Save a Ho," "Playaz Club") and the South ("Front, Back and Side to Side"). As a note, Mosi uses singles released in 1994, even if their albums came out in the previous year, which explains the presence of tracks from Doggystyle and Enter the 36 Chambers .

Its a bold move from Rolling Stone: Even with the recent resurgence of nostalgia for the decade, by now the ‘90s have been done to death. But, arguably, the ‘90s are also fertile ground for track-mining, the sheer breadth of genres and musical stars and styles it created proving unprecedented. And while this playlist collates an impressive compendium of tracks, it tends to read less like a celebration and more as an attempt to prove the curators collective savvy. This works in places, with such gems as Heliums “XXX” and Liz Phairs “Fuck and Run” making welcome appearances, but at times this approach is jarring: with all the Whitney tracks to choose from, does Faith Evans-collab “Heartbreak Hotel” really belong here? There are also a handful of glaring omissions, largely on the hip-hop front: where is Skee-Los “I Wish”? Salt-n-Pepas “Push It”? Naughty By Natures “Hip Hop Hooray”? Beats Internationals “Dub Be Good To Me”? House of Pains “Jump Around”? Dead Prezs “Its Bigger Than Hip-Hop”, Jurassic 5s “Concrete Schoolyard”? This mix might better be termed Introduction to the ‘90s, and if that were the case, its a solid offering: props, in particular to the inclusion of Geto Boys “Mind Playing Tricks On Me”.