The Best 90s Album In The WorldEver!

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The Bomb Squad and Cube’s crew, Da Lench Mob, worked 20 hours a day for 26 days straight, trying to make sure Cube not only came with it, but came with it before N.W.A released their next single. The internal and external pressure produced a roiling, thunderous work that hits all the glandular response buttons—repulsing with violent misogyny (“You Can’t Fade Me”) and seducing with superliterary tales from the ‘hood (“Once Upon a Time in the Projects”). “I know we’re all addicted to sex and violence,” Cube said in 1993, “but you’ve got to put some knowledge on top of that, so you can get the medicine you need to fight this beast we’ve got to fight.” AmeriKKKa’s“knowledge” is ugly at times—and on Cube’s later albums, it turned dull and rote—but combined with the Bomb Squad’s unparalleled production, it was frighteningly undeniable. TONY GREEN

Björk’s career has been a series of test cases to determine just how much strangeness a song can contain and still work as pop. On Post, the Icelandic eccentric revelled in the possibilities opened up by the multiplatinum success of 1993’s Debut (her first solo album after quitting the Sugarcubes). Instead of playing it safe, Björk brought the weirdness—from jazz fusion’s edgy tonality to dance music’s rhythmic science. In retrospect, she’d felt that Debut had been too tame. “I had very safe pop songs…and I was sort of shy and humble toward the whole thing,” she said in 1995. “This time I felt more at ease.”Lauryn Hill’s aggressive faith may be her sweetest sacrilege. “I’m not embarrassed to mention God in songs,” she said in 1998. “Some people find that corny. Some people find that offensive. And it’s always funny to hear that people think I’m too goody-goody because there’s so much baddie-baddie.” That album gave the world a good representation of Cuban music,” says 72-year-old singer Ibrahim Ferrer, who was shining shoes in Havana when Cooder recruited him. “It made people realize that true Cuban music still exists.” TONY GREEN Jagged Little Pillmarked Alanis’ jump from small-time Canadian starlet to international phenomenon. Huge singles, such as the bitter yet empowering You Oughta Know and Ironic (which, ironically, doesn’t involve true examples of the concept) drew plenty of attention to a singer who at the time was just taking her first steps into stardom. Featuring work from Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea and an abundance of post-grunge production, Alanis’ magnum opus is perhaps the most “90s” album on this list of the best albums of that decade, but that’s not to say it’s merely entry-level; her a cappella performance of Your House is one of the most forthright portrayals of adultery and its impact on confident young women. The programme will be available from Saturday 7th October (00.01am) on BBC Sounds and broadcast on Radio 2 on Saturday 14 October (1-3pm).

Nowell was reportedly so dope-addled during the sessions for Sublime that he was shipped home before the album was finished. The completed record is a tragic contradiction: a confident, clearheaded work by an artist coming into his own and at the same time losing control. “When you’re strung out, you get a deeper sense of reality,” says Sublime drummer Bud Gaugh. “The things you’re talking about might seem sweet, but the way you’re feeling is bittersweet. You’re standing outside.” Not a path to honor, perhaps, but a document too vital to ignore. ERIC WEISBARD

Bell Biv DeVoe: “Poison” (1990)

The results weren’t pretty, and they only got worse with time. There was the Vanity Fair article suggesting that Love had used heroin while pregnant with Frances Bean and the battles with musicians from Axl Rose to Kathleen Hanna to Sonic Youth. Nastiest of all, perhaps, were the allegations that Kurt had secretly written Live Through This. Not a shred of evidence has been offered, though The Stranger, a Seattle alt-weekly, recently reported that “Old Age,” which Love has said she and Cobain did write together, and which appeared credited only to her on a Hole EP, exists full-formed on a tape of Nevermind demos—from before Love and Cobain became involved. No decade is a musical monolith, but seeing the best songs of the ‘90s listed all in one place, the era seems especially scattered. History has boiled it down to grunge and gangsta rap on one end, boy bands and Britney Spears at the other, but it’s the stuff in the middle and on the fringes that makes the period difficult to sum up. The Official Most Streamed Albums of the 90s chart features the Top 40 most-streamed albums from that decade, based on UK streams, as compiled exclusively by the Official Charts Company for National Album Day. In the show Liam Gallagher comments, "All right, this is Liam G and I’m here to congratulate Definitely Maybe for being the second most streamed album of the 90s. Love that record, without it god knows where I’d be and god knows where we’d all be! I’ll be celebrating it in my own way next year by doing some gigs, so stay tuned and listen out for details in a bit.”

Oasis are the chart toppers AND take the silver medal position with (What’s the story) Morning Glory? at No.1, and Definitely Maybe in second place. 2001 by Dr Dre is at No. 3 and fourth and fifth positions are both held by Nirvana, with Nevermind and In Utero. The rundown also features records by Westlife, Spice Girls, Destiny’s Child, Metallica, Shania Twain and more. In England, Oasis and the rest of the Britpop lot left nearly as big a mark as Nirvana and the other Seattleites. Hip-hop took over the world, and seemed to change shape every few months. Remember when electronica looked like the future? Where do mischief makers like Pavement, Beastie Boys and A Tribe Called Quest fit in? And that’s to say nothing of the totally random ska and swing revivals…although that’s all you’ll hear about it here. Tragically, on March 9, 1997, just as Biggie was celebrating the birth of a son and the impending release of his second album, Life After Death, he was murdered in a still unsolved Los Angeles drive-by. But in a genre of here-today-gone-tomorrow superstars, Ready to Die assures that Biggie will live on. CHEO HODARI COKERCibo Matto’s debut seemed to spring from nowhere (Italy? Japan? New York?), yet it bore recognizable markings: hip-hop beats, piquant samples, ESL food poetry, and girl-power signifying that suggested superhero Venusians who’d learned to smoke from the Beastie Boys. In fact, Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda were Japanese transplants to the East Village who had consumed everything from riot grrrl to Brazilian jazz and Yoko Ono while concocting their own mastermix. Says Tim Carr, the A&R man who signed them to Warner Bros.: “Their music reminded me of Nabokov in the U.S. in the way they came here and conquered American pop music in a way nobody who had it as their first language would.” And like Björk, Cibo prove technology and female intuition can groove together, yin-yang-style. “ Viva! La Woman has that element of Miho and I sitting in our living room and talking very privately,” Honda says. “We wanted to celebrate the womanhood.” KATE SULLIVAN Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. The Chronic rolls on drum-machine beats, like most rap albums, but Dre revolutionized the genre by deemphasizing samples, bringing in a Moog keyboard, live horn players, and crucially, multi-instrumentalist Colin Wolfe, who played the bass lines and eerie, high-pitched synths that provided the outrageously catchy hooks. Recreated P-Funk, Isaac Hayes, and Donny Hathaway melodies complete the essence of “G-Funk”: cold-compress grooves applied to street-corner static, a budded-out haze that makes the anger seem serene and spacious. The cast was pulled from the 50 or so people who dropped by “the Lab” on a typical day to get high and get heard—MCs That Nigga Daz, Kurupt, RBX, the Lady of Rage. But the album’s secret weapon is Snoop Doggy Dogg, a young Crip who’d recorded the underground hit “Deep Cover” with Dre the year before, and whose dry, graceful drawl dominates the record (“I guess I just wanted it a little more than everyone else,” Snoop says). As he drops “a jimmy joke about your mama that you might not like,” Snoop sounds lighthearted, almost giggly, like nothing can touch him. Having spent the preceding decade as one of music’s most revered experimental pop acts, for 1999’s The Soft Bulletin, the Flaming Lips jettisoned some of the problematic, self-consciously fey trappings of their previous work and distilled the elements that worked best about their distinctive take on modern pop into song structures that were as accessible as they were adventurous. The result was a deliberately constructed, refined new sound and a landmark album that was both influenced by and superior to the music of its era and which, in retrospect, stands as one of the finest, most important and influential albums of its decade. A testament to careful, selective editing, The Soft Bulletin recast the Flaming Lips as far more than a quirky cult act and laid the groundwork for their commercial and artistic breakthroughs in the years that followed. Keefe