They are craftsmen, and their craft is the manufacturing of ambivalent emotion.ħ. But due to the experience I did have, it represents what I want most from this group. If that hadn’t been the case, I’d (possibly) view this album as an interesting acoustic experiment. record by a wide margin, although I say that as someone who never listened to R.E.M. AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE (1992), R.E.M.: This strikes me as the best R.E.M.

PINKERTON (1996), Weezer: A record nobody likes, except for those of us who like it too much.Ĩ. But you know what? I think they were right in 1991, assuming you only focus on the songs and pretend that society doesn’t exist.ĩ. This somehow became an evergreen embarrassment for the magazine, and when I worked there in the early 2000s (when we were still putting Kurt Cobain’s corpse on the cover once a year), there was a vague, unspoken sense that this ill-fated decision wasn’t something we were even supposed to joke about. BANDWAGONESQUE (1991), Teenage Fanclub: In 1991, Spin magazine named Bandwagonesque as its Album of the Year, with Nevermind coming in at #2. I used to like the short songs but now I prefer the long ones, particularly “Locomotive (Complicity),” though I’m still unsure what I’m being complicit with.ġ0. USE YOUR ILLUSION I & II (1991), Guns N’ Roses: This is technically cheating (because it’s two albums), but I bought them on the same night and I think almost everybody views this as a double album that was bifurcated for wholly egocentric reasons. It was basically Mechanical Animals, the vibe on “Celebrity Skin,” two or three songs off the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack I can’t remember, and this underappreciated album from two British brothers who ate a lot of Chinese food.ġ3. SPACEHOG (1994), Spacehog: It was difficult to find good glam when Bill Clinton was president. FEAR OF A BLACK PLANET (1990), Public Enemy: I fearlessly played this on a Sony Walkman while walking around the campus of the University of North Dakota, an exceptionally unblack planet.ġ4. I guess I can see the logic either way.ġ5.

Helmet seemed to constantly lecture me about how I wasn’t using common sense and that I needed to distrust the motives of my closest friends, while Alice in Chains merely tried to convince me to sit in an oversized chair and try heroin. The other key exception was Alice in Chains, although that lyrical experience was quite different. As I look over this list, I recognize how strange it was that I didn’t listen to much heavy music during the nineties that wasn’t recorded in the seventies. BETTY (1994), Helmet: The loudest concert I ever attended was Type O Negative, but the second loudest was Helmet and the third-loudest was Helmet’s soundcheck before that show.

Chuck klosterman the 90s