Musical Musings: Top 30 Albums of the 1990s Pt 1

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This time on Musical Musings we begin something bigger than usual, and it started, as the best arguments do, on the internet. A couple of weeks back a post went round on X with a graphic — “One decade, 30 essential albums” — passed off as Rolling Stone’s verdict on the 1990s, with Alice in Chains’ Dirt at number one. It looked suspiciously AI-generated, it got community-noted for not being Rolling Stone’s list at all, and it has since quietly vanished. My guest Sughosh replied to it with a single word, “Meh,” reckoned barely four or five of the thirty would make his own list, and made the mistake of saying so where the station could see him. So I set him a challenge: never mind Rolling Stone — show us yourthirty best albums of the 90s. He agreed, with a warning I’m going to hold him to: “my list would summarily ignore popular culture of the time.” He wasn’t kidding. Thirty records, arranged chronologically from 1990 to 1999, one track from each, and we’re going to talk our way through all of them over three shows. This first one is a two-hour special taking on the first twelve, from 1990 to 1992.

I’m not going to give the list away, but I’ll say this: these are the three years grunge is supposed to have conquered the world, and Sughosh’s version of them contains not a single flannel shirt. Only two of his twelve appear anywhere in Rolling Stone’s real top hundred of the decade. Instead there’s a San Francisco power-pop band who arrived at exactly the wrong moment, a Liverpool group who made one album and hated it, a record made in Ilkley that you can’t find on any streaming service, and a nine-minute folk song about a sixteenth-century Spanish expedition. There’s a Canadian harpist, a synth-pop masterpiece that started a riot outside a Los Angeles record shop, and a jaunty British pop single about a man drinking himself to death. Some of it you’ll know, some of it you’ll have forgotten, and at least one of them I’d never heard before he sent me the list. Let Sughosh make the (strong) case for the 90s the critics missed.