Acclaimed Music Top 30 Albums from 1992 poll

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Dirt vs. Slanted and Enchanted vs. Dry vs. Lazer-Guided Melodies for me.

Automatic For The People.

Angel Dust

Dry or Check Your Head. dgaf about most of the rest, at least not in 2015.

Before I check for myself, any thoughts on how 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life of... sounds in 2015? I'm nervous.

1. Selected Ambient Works 85-92
2. The Chronic

oh man no Love Deluxe? if i'm honest with myself, SAW 85-92

Sugar's Copper Blue is the best rock album here.

I intensely love some of these albums but I might love U.F.Orb the most. It was utterly transformative.

After loving so much from 90-91, there's only one album I've really listened to from the list: UFOrb. A lot of classics, that I've checked out at times, but only UFOrb have I really dug into. There must be a bunch of 12'' and EPs which isn't on the list.

so many quite good albums by so many great bands in this list. Aphex, Pavement, RATM, REM, Tom Waits, Beastie Boys, FNM - and yet none of these are my favourites by any of the acts.

Slanted and Enchanted

SAW 85-92, just over Automatic for the People. Also really love Dirty, Copper Blue, Check Your Head and a few others but this doesn't look as strong a list as 1991.

Albums that I had actually heard in '92 and that were most important to me then, in rough order of importance:

R.E.M. - Automatic for the People
Faith No More - Angel Dust
Tori Amos - Little Earthquakes
Beastie Boys - Check Your Head

Sugar over Disposable Heroes for me, and I do love me some DHOH.

it's weird how clearly this is the year that i began to grow disappointed/estranged from pop. Bone Machine and Sugar are the most diagnostic of this, but Pavement in a weird way too. After some of the atomic bombs of '91 this shit just seemed so lame. I probably could have easily gone in the electronic music direction if I'd encountered the right things then or been hanging around with the right ppl but I went in the classical/experimental direction instead. Honestly to my tastes the only great collective surge about early 90s pop was east coast hip hop and I didn't get that at the time.

Pavement.

I ruined a perfectly good guitar trying to make the noises Tom Morello made on the RATM album so they have to win my vote.

it's weird how clearly this is the year that i began to grow disappointed/estranged from pop.

I'm right there with you. I'm an unabashed fan of the bulk of popular music from, like, the early '60s through about '92 or '93. There's still stuff I like from that point on (and there was certainly a fair share of crap before that), but finding the good stuff involves a lot more cherrypicking. One of the main culprits in the mid-'90s in particular was the increasing popularity of the blandest AC imaginable.

Have to go with It's a Shame About Ray, such a great little album.

This thread has got me listening to Automatic For The People again. It's such a beautiful record, and it's not hard to see why it was what it was at the time. At one point, I thought I'd burned out on the singles from this album, and certainly during the time I was listening to a lot of R.E.M., I found myself listening to this one not as much as the others simply because I felt I'd overplayed the hell out of it. At the moment, though, the singles from this album feel a little bit more fresh to me, although it's mainly the album tracks that I'm drawn to: 'Monty Got A Raw Deal', 'Star Me Kitten', 'Find The River', 'Try Not To Breathe' etc.

Oh shit, 'Find The River' was a single! I'd totally forgotten about that... probably because it wasn't as ubiquitous as 'Everybody Hurts', 'Man On The Moon' or even 'Nightswimming'.

a good year. Copper Blue and Lazer-Guided Melodies are probably the two that I've returned to the most over the years.

since we have a holiday here in the US this next week, this will be the last year for a few weeks.

SAW vs Angel Dust

Ten more great ones that come to mind: Pale Saints, Catherine Wheel, Unrest, Beat Happening, Iris DeMent, Gang Starr, Bettie Serveert, The Chills, Saint Etienne, Mega City Four. What a year, esp. for debuts. Though of those only Pale Saints would have challenged my R.E.M. vote.

Spiritualized

Aphex or S&E. I guess the former, if I'm being honest but I do adore so many times on S&E.

Cuh. Tunes.

i love that Pale Saints album, one of my favorites from this year along with starting my love affair with the Boo Radleys with the release of Everything's Alright Forever.

here are the next 20:

32 Neil Young - Harvest Moon
33 Cesaria Evora - Miss Perfumado
34 Helmet - Meantime
35 L7 - Bricks are Heavy
36 Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Henry's Dream
37 Lou Reed - Magic and Loss
38 Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth - Mecca and the Soul Brother
39 Screaming Trees - Sweet Oblivion
40 Prince & The New Power Generation - O(+> ("Love Symbol Album")
41 Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan - Devotional Songs/Devotional & Love Songs
42 Mary J. Blige - What's the 411?
43 En Vogue - Funky Divas
44 Manic Street Preachers - Generation Terrorists
45 The Tragically Hip - Fully Completely
46 Ice Cube - The Predator
47 Buffalo Tom - Let Me Come Over
48 The Cure - Wish
49 Basehead - Play with Toys
50 Freedy Johnston - Can You Fly
51 Bikini Kill - Bikini Kill EP/The C.D. Version of the First Two Records

i would vote for wish and if it was a choice it would probably even get my vote over the original 30.

That Tom Waits album was my first Tom Waits album (but I didn't listen to it until the early oughts), and the album that got me into Tom Wait's catalog, so....

Also, I 13 years old in 1992, but I have yet to hear most of these albums, so I'm interested to see how this poll goes. Even though the 90s covered ages 11 through 20 for me -- and I probably listened to as much music then as I do now -- the 90s is probably my least favorite decade from the last 55 years of pop music. I just find that most canonical albums from that decade just don't hold up as well compared to what came before or since.

the 90s is probably my least favorite decade from the last 55 years of pop music. I just find that most canonical albums from that decade just don't hold up as well compared to what came before or since.

Yup.

I can't even remember what I listened to from 90-95 or so, and my cd shelves aren't offering any clues. Punk and jazz, I guess.

I've actually spent some time in the last year or two trying to reconnect with things I liked in the 90s. It works sometimes, but mostly it doesn't. And what almost never happens is me finding something from the 90s that I've never heard before and it adding anything of value to my life. Really, except for the first couple years' worth of shoegaze/baggy/hip hop/grunge, the 90s is a total dead zone.

I probably like all of these as much as anything that made the Top 30:

32 Neil Young - Harvest Moon
40 Prince & The New Power Generation - O(+> ("Love Symbol Album")
44 Manic Street Preachers - Generation Terrorists
47 Buffalo Tom - Let Me Come Over

Also, I get that Erotica wasn't well received at the time, but it doesn't even rank in the Top 50?!

My problem with the 90s primarily is that the disparity between one half and the other in terms of visible, 'canonical' stuff is huge.

Your Arsenal. No competition.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

ratm's debut more acclaimed than saw85-92? gtfo

It's between S+E and UFOrb for me. S+E had a bigger impact on me at the time, but I'm probably more likely to listen to UFOrb nowadays...

If Heavenly's Le Jardin De Heavenly was here, I'd be sorely tempted to vote for that.

This list makes me sad because I was the ideal age to appreciate these albums at the time, and I do remember bits and pieces of many of them, yet not a single one means anything to me today. I haven't even listened to any of them in 23 years except for Dirty, and that only because reading Kim Gordon's book reminded me of it.

the 90s is probably my least favorite decade from the last 55 years of pop music. I just find that most canonical albums from that decade just don't hold up as well compared to what came before or since.

irl i know no one who thinks this

90s so >>>>>> 80s for me

albeit through haze of nostalgia, slanted & enchanted (no question) for me

the 90s is probably my least favorite decade from the last 55 years of pop music. I just find that most canonical albums from that decade just don't hold up as well compared to what came before or since

I think I can pretty much endorse this statement, although there are a scattered few albums from 1990-1993 that I might go back to today, though it's not extremely likely

That statement is utter horseshit, especially in the realms of dance, techno and hip-hop.

also there are three albums in the next 20 (Wish, The Predator, Funky Divas) that are better than everything in the top 30

A lot of my favorite albums were released in the '90s. However, while I regularly discover, say, albums from the '70s that are surprising and amazing and that sound fresh and great and new, I don't seem to have that experience as much with '90s albums that I'm only now hearing for the first time.

Part of this is living through the 90s as someone aware of and capable of hunting down cool, interesting albums as they were released rather than being a child or unborn.

This is true. It's definitely the decade when I was the most on top of what was being released at the time.

The idea that the '90s were drought years for pop is insane to me. As soon as R&B and hip-hop started charting on the Hot 100, radio became so much more awesome.

Not sure how Mom afforded it but having MTV in the 90s was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

MTV was literally the only inlet for new music during my first two years of high school (early '90s) while living in the middle of nowhere (and then to only a slightly lesser degree during the following two years spent a touch nearer to civilization). Its impact on my musical taste cannot be overstated.

Well, it's true that at the time it seemed like there was plenty of new and interesting kinds of dance/techno/hip-hop stuff to listen to, even on the radio, but for some reason I don't feel very emotionally connected to that music today, as good as it may have been. I still get a kick out of putting on an old disco LP or an '80s freestyle record, but most of the '90s stuff is mentally filed away as stuff I liked back then, for just a moment. It may have something to do with what kind of dance music is imprinted on you at whatever your impressionable age was.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I was aged 16-25 over the course of the 90s and was on top of all the music as it was happening and was really excited about it at the time, but look back on nearly all of it now with disinterest or contempt. No idea why that is, as I don't have particularly bad life associations with the decade. I just think most of the music isn't as good as I'd convinced myself it was.

kiko deserved a vote

All of these acts released music during the 90s that I consider to be among the music I've ever heard:

Orbital
Portishead
Squarepusher
Aphex Twin
Erykah Badu
Wu-Tang Clan (as a group and solo)
A Tribe Called Quest
De La Soul
TLC
Toni Braxton
PJ Harvey
The Jesus and Mary Chain
The Prodigy
Outkast
2Pac
Snoop Dogg
Babyface
Madonna
Nine Inch Nails
Ice Cube
Underworld

I'd follow suit but the list of the music I've ever heard would be super, super long.

In seriousness, though, there's also a lot of overlap in my own personal Venn diagram of 'best music ever' and 'best music of the '90s'.