Top 10 Alternative Albums of the 90s

You might remember when MTV still played videos, and music was pretty boring-and then all of a sudden there was a grungy, longhaired guy in an awkward cardigan screaming and mumbling about God knows what. And whatever it was that Kurt Cobain was screaming about didn’t matter. The pall of Guns N Roses, Paula Abdul, Motley Crue was ripped apart. If you were like me at the beginning of the 90s when that groundbreaking video aired, you sold off all of your boring heavy metal tapes and started your CD collection with just one album:

1. Nirvana, Nevermind. The first of only two times I have ever purchased an album and liked every song on it. Every one. This raw, angry and yet incredibly peppy album started it all. And Nirvana’s crossover success alerted young and old alike to the entire world of good, relevant music beyond the iron curtain of conglomerate Top 40.
2. Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes. With lyrics like “So, I want to kill this waitress; she’s worked here a year longer than I” you knew you were in for something special, something new. Something that spoke to you, to the real world. And no one since Jerry Lee Lewis had ever rocked the piano quite like this.
3. Liz Phair, Exile In Guyville. Okay, clearly women were rocking the 90s. A punkier version of Tori Amos, with quirky, unabashedly honest lyrics, Phair’s in-your-face style makes this album seem fresh even today.
4. Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream. Perhaps one of the stranger albums to come out of the Alternative gold rush, Siamese Dream featured the same wall-of-sound and loud-quiet-loud approaches of acts like Nirvana, but melded them with heavy metal guitar solos and arena rock riffs that recently, with Nevermind, had been deemed uncool. And it did this successfully, catapulting the Pumpkins to instant stardom. As an interesting sidenote, the new drummer for the Smashing Pumpkins recently made it known that she was one of the little girls featured on the cover of Siamese Dream, nearly 20 years ago.
5. Counting Crows, August and Everything After. The second time I purchased an album and liked every song on it. Because this album was so undeniably good, so good even a musical simpleton could feel it in his or her bones, it was not poor form to own both August and Everything After and Nevermind-indeed, the two albums stood in the minds of many of America’s youth as two separate father figures, summing up the vast rifts that were opening up in the 90s. Blending rock, pop, folk, blues, piano ballads-Counting Crows did a little bit of everything, but the tortured voice and lyrics of frontman Adam Duritz was the clincher, and this album, coming out amidst the wail of grunge albums, stood its ground and sounded infinitely more mature.
6. Alice In Chains, Dirt. Glam-rockers-turned-alternative-grunge-band they might have been, but Dirt gave them all the credibility they needed. No other album of the time starts off so shockingly, and no voice other than Layne Staley’s reached so far into the lower deep of human existence.
7. Weezer, Pinkerton. After the Blue album knocked the socks off of the entire world, the fans wanted more of the same. Pinkerton did not deliver. It alienated fans, although a very small contingent argued that Pinkerton was superior-and it is. With the quirky-pop sensibilities of Blue sans all of the polish and a far more relevant and personal lyrical palette, Pinkerton was a massive step forward for Weezer; one that, after the venomous fan backlash, they unfortunately would not repeat.
8. Portishead, Dummy. An electronic, trip-hop album in a top-ten alternative list? You bet. Much darker than Massive Attack, and with the alluring voice of Beth Gibbons, Portishead’s debut album blew the heads off of American audiences and opened minds to yet a whole new world of music.
9. Radiohead, OK Computer. A masterpiece of stripped-down guitar rock. Radiohead’s odd chord-changes, coupled with astounding lyrics from Thom Yorke and plain old great songwriting propelled this album into history as one of the finest of the 90s, by a band who is still out there and still moving forward with each album.
10. Nirvana, In Utero. Considered by many the final word in the alternative/grunge saga. By then, the pop/rock section of stores like Best Buy had been relabeled “alternative,” and major labels were signing anyone with a flannel shirt and a guitar. Forsaking the pop sensibilities that had propelled Nevermind to stardom, the sheer force of In Utero was a turnoff to the moms and dads who had earlier bought into Nevermind, but the band’s real fans considered the album a triumph. Despite the band’s label, DGC, accusing them of making a deliberately uncommercial album, In Utero turned out two enormously popular singles and rose up the charts, sealing Cobain’s fate as a reluctant commercial success.