1991 turns out to be an active year, in both politics and culture.
After the U.S. and NATO-led Operation Desert Shield fails to convince Saddam Hussain to remove his troops from Kuwait, U.S. launches the air and land offensive Operation Desert Storm mid-January. Hussain agrees to a ceasefire and Kuwait is liberated by the end of February.
The U.S. and Canada agree to reduce emissions on account of acid rain, and the European Economic Commission begins laying the foundation for the upcoming creation of the European Union. U.S. President George Bush and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev both sign the START I agreement to limit nuclear weapons to a mere 7,950 per side.
And the biggest news of all: After years of Gorbachev-led political reforms (Perestroika) and a failed hardliner communist coup in August, the Soviet Union begins to collapse, first with the secession of the Baltic states in September, followed by the December agreement between Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine that the U.S.S.R. no longer exists. Gorbachev resigns by the end of the year, effectively ending the Soviet regime, and Boris Yeltsin wins the new Russian nation’s first free elections. The decades-long Cold War is effectively over.
In more gruesome U.S. news, the now-infamous Jeffrey Dahmer is arrested in Milwaukee after a man who has escaped from Dahmer’s apartment asks a pair of police officers to remove Dahmer’s handcuffs from his wrist. When the officers investigate, the remains—some carefully preserved, others hidden in the refrigerator—of eleven men and boys are found in Dahmer’s apartment, as well as Polaroids of several human bodies in states of dismemberment.
The arts are active in 1991, too. While people flock to the nation’s cinemas for more of the same—another Terminator movie, another Naked Gun, another Disney fairy tale adaptation (Beauty and the Beast), yet another version of Robin Hood (ditto for Peter Pan)—underground filmmakers are making some classic landmark films. Richard Linklater’s Slacker ambles its way into theaters, alongside the Coen brothers’ brilliant Hollywood send-up Barton Fink, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, and David Cronenberg’s loose but fabulous adaptation of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. John Singleton makes his directorial debut with Boyz in the Hood, starring, among others, rapper Ice Cube. And The Commitments tells the story of an Irish neo-soul bar band.
And some movies wowed critics and moviegoers alike: Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise recast the traditional road movie as a feminist buddy flick, Oliver Stone gets everyone’s conspiracy theory jones satisfied with JFK, and—best of all—Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins play mind games in the fascinating psychological thriller The Silence of the Lambs.
In literature, a generation gets its name in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, and serial killing reappears once more (after Dahmer and Silence of the Lambs) in Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Those weren’t the best novels of the year, of course. (Critics tend to prefer efforts by A.S. Byatt, Ben Okri, Richard Powers, Jane Smiley, Norman Rush, Milan Kundera, Don DeLillo, and Amy Tan, among others. I’ve only read of few of these, so I can’t vouch for them all.)
And in graphic novels, the first volume of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series and the second volume of Art Spiegelman’s classic Maus graphic novel are published. In non-fiction, feminist Naomi Wolf writes The Beauty Myth.
1991 was a pivotal year in rock, of course, as the success of Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten launched the alternative rock and grunge takeover of rock radio, blessedly banishing hair metal to the cutout bins. And when I went back to chronicle it the year in music, I expected to pack my Top 6 with alt-rock classics. But I surprised myself. When I go back and listen, my ears tell me alt-rock was only part of the story.
So there are only two alt-rock album here in my Top 6. (Many crop up further down the list, of course, but the bulk of the prominent alt-rock stuff comes later in the decade.) Instead, I have three (!) rap albums—none of which I knew at the time—and a curious, catchy little album that blended rap and R&B and reggae and soul and pop in the development of what would later be called trip-hop (another album I didn’t know until a few years later).
So here goes….
My Top 6 Albums of 1991
As always, you can jump to the playlist at the bottom of each post to listen while you read.
Within each tier (Top 6, Next 6, etc.), all albums are listed roughly chronologically (all release dates from Wikipedia, unless otherwise noted).
Note: Entries for this post may have been written alongside the Artist Spotlight posts for the respective artists and might therefore contain some similar material.
Massive Attack
Blue Lines
Massive AttackReleased 1991/04/08
I don’t remember when I picked up Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, and it’s bugging me.
I do remember seeing the album on a Rolling Stone best of the decade list as the ‘90s drew to a close—and scornfully thinking that they probably ignored the album when it first came out (or had given it a mildly positive 3½ star out of 5, a rating I noticed Rolling Stone often gave albums they later heralded as masterpieces). I know I bought Massive Attack’s Mezzanine (1998) around the time it came out, and I’m sure I had Blue Lines beforehand, but I can’t place when I got it for sure.
My best guess is that I bought it sometime around the time I was listening most to Tricky, 1995-1996. I seem to have vague memories of listening to Blue Lines in the apartment I lived in back then, but those kinds of memories have let me down before.
Regardless, I suspect most American music listeners, like me, didn’t know Massive Attack until founding member Tricky gained critical traction after the release of his stellar debut Maxinquay (1995). Massive Attack emerged from the Bristol, England music scene, and was a music collective based on collaborative effort. DJ Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles lays down some cool grooves while MCs Adrian “Tricky” Thaws, Robert “3D” Del Naja, and Grant “Daddy G” Marshall share vocal duties with each other and a host of guest vocalists.
Indeed, it’s sometimes the guest vocalists who steal the show. Shara Nelson shares the spotlight with the band on “Daydreaming” and takes a star turn on the excellent “Unfinished Sympathy,” one of the album’s best songs, about a frustrated, unrealized love. When I first listened to the album and that track filled my speakers, I rushed to check out the song title and misread it as “Unfinished Symphony”—an understandable mistake given the exultant ensemble of strings that buoy the song throughout and build and crest at the song’s bridge. Nelson also opens the album strong with the bulk of vocal duties in “Safe from Harm.”
Jamaican reggae artist Horace Andy delivers a soulful performance on album closer “Hymn of the Big Wheel” (co-written with the band and Neneh Cherry), and he adds some texture to the rapping of the three primary MCs plus Wild-Bunch hanger-on Willy Wee on “Five Man Army.” Nelson and Andy also contribute to “Lately” and “One Love,” respectively. And some guy named Tony Bryan voices “Be Thankful for What You’ve Got.” (It’s a good performance—I’m surprised I’ve never heard of him anywhere else.) The only time the band doesn’t share the limelight is on the title track itself.
Blue Lines is known as perhaps the origin of trip-hop, but to me, it only barely qualifies. There are some trippy moments, to be sure—in the swirling wind that opens the disc and the airy drone that floats beneath the beats of the album closer. But most of the songs lack the eerie ambiance I associate with trip-hop. It’s working in that direction, I suppose. But it’s smoother, more soulful and less edgy than their later work and Tricky’s solo efforts would be. It feels a bit like an update—and improvement—on Soul II Soul. Throughout, the grooves here are mellow, and the vibe thoughtful and constructive. So Blue Lines may not yet be all the way to trip-hop, but it’s wonderful all the same.
KMD
Mr. Hood
KMDReleased 1991/05/14 (source: Albumism.com)
The brainchild of brothers Daniel “Zev Love X” and Dingilizwe “DJ Subroc” Dumile, along with with Onyx the Birthstone Kid, KMD may have only released two albums, but they are an essential hip hop listen. And their first album, Mr. Hood, is a real treat (one I didn’t discover until recently).
For their debut, KMD weaves a brilliant sequence of skits between their hip-hop excursions. Most of the skits center around the titular character, the ultra-white, super-square character Mr. Hood, spliced and reassembled from a learn-to-speak-English recording. From the opening “Mr Hood at Piocalles Jewelry” to episodes in which “Mr. Hood Meets Onyx” or “Mr. Hood Gets A Haircut,” the absurd non-sequiturs of the conversations crafted between Hood and the band members are consistently amusing. The more you listen, the funnier they get—the way Monty Python, for example, can seem merely absurd at first viewing but grows hilarious upon repetition.
The raps are great, too. In “Peachfuzz,” Zev Love X pokes fun at the woeful state of his meagre facial hair. “Crackpot” describes a local character who gets too confident in establishing his turf. “Hard Wit No Hoe” tells a tale of three farmers with only one hoe (an allegory for black men who neglect their women and subsequently lose them). Racial politics take an irreverent turn in “Who Me?” in which Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie help kids search for Little Sambo. Elsewhere, Subroc raps rapidly about his mission, at least some of which seems to be to give people unusual haircuts, and later embodies a pimp-strutting preacher. And the folks from Brand Nubian stop by for a choice cut.
Mr. Hood may be a bit too dependent on its influences—most notably 3 Feet High and Rising, which also used language-learning instructional tapes and had frequent mentions of haircuts. But in the end, the sheer exuberance Zev Love and Subroc bring to the table outweighs any minor qubblings.
KMD (which stands for Kausing Much Damage, or perhaps A Positive Kause in a Much Damaged Society) were hard at work on the follow-up to Mr. Hood when Subroc was killed, hit by a car. Zev Love X soldiered on, completing the album alone, and Bl_ck B_st_rds was originally slated for release in May of 1994. But the album was shelved, the group dropped by its label, allegedly due to the controversial cover art. (It would not see release until 2000.) Meanwhile, Daniel Dumille disappeared from the hip hop scene entirely, sleeping on the streets of Manhattan and eventually moving to Atlanta.
Dumille, as is well known in underground hip-hop circles, would reappear incognito several years later, first disguising himself with tights over his head and later donning a mask based on the Marvel supervillain Doctor Doom. As MF DOOM and other aliases, Dumille would release at least one masterpiece—Madvillainy, a collaboration with DJ and rapper Madlib—and several other classic underground hip hop albums. He died in 2020. RIP.
Cypress Hill
Cypress Hill
Cypress HillReleased 1991/08/13
I don’t know why, exactly, but there seems to be a gap in my awareness of rap music. During the last few years of the ‘80s, Sonic Youth and the Pixies had shared the bulk of their time on my turntable with Public Enemy and De La Soul. But somehow, past maybe 1990 or so, I managed to lose touch with much of the current critically acclaimed rap music.
Come to think of it, though, I don’t even remember there being much acclaimed rap at the time. Once Nirvana broke, the alt-rock scene seemed to dominate the critical discussion for a few years, leaving a gaping hole in my rap listening throughout much of the first half of the ‘90s. It’s in retrospect that the rap of the time has been added back into the history books, I feel, in the critical reappraisal. I first heard of now-considered-classic albums by Tribe Called Quest, the Notorious B.I.G., the Pharcyde, KMD, and others much later in the decade (or even more recently).
Cypress Hill’s self-titled debut was one of the few rap albums that my friends and I listened to in grad school, when alt-rock was foremost in our minds. (Even with this album, I was a couple years behind, getting into it sometime 1993-94.)
There are over a handful of songs on Cypress Hill that strike me as absolutely brilliant. The album opens with a clip from a police radio scanner; the sampled groove and guitar squeal of “Pigs” kick off the proceedings in style, as MC B-Real catalogues an assortment of crooked cops, an updated this-little-piggie nursery rhyme. B-Real’s nasally sneer contrasts nicely with MC Sen Dog’s more conventional rapping to create a unique sound for the band.
Through a handful of classics like “How I Could Just Kill A Man,” “Hand On The Pump,” “Hole in the Head,” and “Stoned Is The Way Of The Walk” Cypress Hill take the shocking and threatening themes of gangsta rap and present them in a comical way, with squeaky high-pitched voices, tra-la-la sing-along choruses, and enough marijuana references to get you stoned from standing too close to your speakers. It comes across as a cartoon violence more of a piece with the Simpsons’ Itchy & Scratchy than N.W.A., a brilliant fusion, a thrilling, humorous menace.
Correction / Update, May 15, 2025:
My memory fails me. I had thought a friend of mine in grad school had introduced me to Cypress Hill sometime during the academic year 1993-1994. However, I have unearthed proof that I had their debut CD before that; now I wonder if it wasn’t me who introduced my friend to Cypress Hill, not the other way around. In a recent trip to my parents’ house, they asked me to clear out some of my old stuff. Buried in one box, I found some old CD longboxes I had saved; included among them was the longbox for Cypress Hill. I still don’t know when I bought it—could’ve been way back in 1991, or not long before I moved to Boston for grad school in late summer of 1993—but I most definitely had it earlier than I’d falsely remembered. (A fact check reveals that the longbox packaging was phased out in April of 1993.)
Nirvana
Nevermind
NirvanaReleased 1991/09/24
I first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in the kitchen of a Pizzeria Uno in Houston, Texas, where I was waiting tables after graduating from college. Some of the waiters who were even younger than I was were into Nirvana and had cranked it up when it came on the radio after the restaurant was closed and we were cleaning up.
I liked it, but I was a bit skeptical. It sounded like a slick version of what I’d already been listening to for a few years. How good could it be if I was hearing it on mainstream radio? If this stuff was all the rage, I mean seriously popular, then what did that do for my love of albums like Sister and Surfer Rosa?
Of course, I hadn’t formed my aesthetics merely in opposition to what was popular—I loved Prince, for instance—yet I was accustomed to the majority of my music being underappreciated and misunderstood by mainstream listeners. And were these Nirvana upstarts just mainstream copycats, mining the music I loved for its more saleable qualities?
But a roommate of mine had a Sub Pop Sampler with “Dive” on it, which was terrific. I don’t remember the exact timeline, but I think it may have been hearing the earlier “Dive” that convinced me to finally buy Nevermind. Regardless, it didn’t take me long to check out the album.
And of course I loved it. By now, the bulk of the album’s songs have become so embedded in popular culture that to comment on them seems almost pointless.
I wasn’t a big MTV watcher back then (never was, except for a brief span of a year or so mid-‘90s when I had big cable-TV-watching roommates). But the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” feels to me like one of the greatest ever, the sheer thrill of rebellious destruction encapsulated perfectly, a dull high school pep rally transformed into a punk rock mosh pit in a mere three minutes. That song, like most of the album, is filled with seemingly paradoxical truths, like “I’m worse at what I do best / And for this gift I feel blessed.” Cobain’s lyrics had a way of connecting with people, even when it wasn’t clear literally what he meant.
“Come As You Are” opens with an irresistible and unforgettable guitar line (sounding like a bassline in both its style and in how it’s played at such a low pitch for a guitar) that repeats throughout the song. Contradictory lyrics abound in almost every line. Come as you are, or how I want you to be? They aren’t the same, for sure. The song features a rare Kurt Cobain guitar solo, which—true to form—fits the music perfectly without any virtuoso showboating. (Alt-rock in general and Nirvana more specifically disdained the wanking guitar solos of hair metal.)
“Lithium” takes the emotional wavering and second-guessing and the paradoxical statements to manic-depressive extremes. When Cobain sings “And just maybe I’m to blame for all I’ve heard / But I’m not sure,” it seems almost impossible not to get lost in confusion along with him. Elsewhere, “In Bloom” makes fun of fans who like Nirvana’s “pretty” songs and like to sing along, “Drain You” critiques the co-dependency of traditional relationships, and “Territorial Pissings” mocks ‘60s positivity in a pummeling, two-and-a-half minute onslaught of noise.
In many of these songs, Nirvana alternates compellingly between quiet and loud passages, but at moments they show they can go beyond that formula. The hushed, chilling “Polly” is told from the point of view of an abductor and rapist. And “Something in the Way” closes the album in a haunting murmur.
Not enough attention is paid, I feel, to how funny Nevermind is. The humor of the cover works so perfectly it almost becomes cliché the instant you first see it, its irony so obvious it’s a wonder no one had ever thought to create the image before. And the songs are amusing too, in unexpected ways. The album’s most famous song, for example, is named after a brand of deodorant marketed towards teenagers. Cobain’s ironic use of Teen Spirit as a means of arriving at an entirely empathetic expression of teenage angst and confusion shows his ability to dance a fine line—of poking fun at a feeling and affirming it simultaneously.
Cobain was both a lover and a hater, a speaker who was self-aware enough to see through his own bullshit and take himself to task. His lyrics were infused with compassion but also tinged with a mockery and scorn, often directed inward, at himself. And his raspy voice, too, could convey all the nuances of this range. I remember reading somewhere (after Cobain’s death) the idea that some view life as a tragedy, others as a comedy—and a rare few, like Cobain, have the ability to see it as both. It was the 17th century French playwright Jean Racine who said, “Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.” Cobain couldn’t help but think and feel, all at once. Nowhere is this more evident than on Nevermind.
So back in late 1991, Nevermind still felt slick to me—I was still a touch wary of the band until I picked up the earlier Bleach, and then Incesticide when it came out, and saw the progression of the band from its origins. By the time In Utero came out and confirmed my estimation of Nirvana’s greatness, I didn’t need convincing.
So add it up: The most iconic album cover of the decade, the most thrilling video, and the album—although not a shoo-in—would certainly have to be up for consideration in any serious discussion for the greatest of the decade. Quite an accomplishment.
A Tribe Called Quest
The Low End Theory
A Tribe Called QuestReleased 1991/09/24
I’d been a big fan of De La Soul ever since their groundbreaking 1989 debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, so it’s a bit surprising to me in retrospect that I didn’t know A Tribe Called Quest at the time. I’d heard of them, of course. Tribe MC Q-Tip was featured on the track “Buddy,” one of 3 Feet High’s best. But I’d never heard them, never searched them out. And I didn’t know The Low End Theory until years later, when I saw it on a best of the decade retrospective (SPIN magazine, I believe).
Jazz and rap fusion is the subject of the lyrics and music both, right from the jump. “Excursions” opens with a jazzy upright bass groove (sampled from an Art Blakey tune) as Q-Tip posits hip-hop as his generation’s equivalent of his father’s jazz. The beats are minimal and crisp, the embellishments spare, leaving Q-Tip’s cool rapping the center of attention. The song ends with a chaotic Last Poets sample.
The excellent “Jazz (We’ve Got)” and “Check the Rhime” continue in the same fashion, with Q-Tip and Phife Dawg playfully trading off vocal duties. The posse cut “Scenario” wraps up the album with flair, as the group collaborates with the Leaders of the New School—Charlie Brown, Dinco D, and most notably Busta Rhymes, all of whom take a turn on the mic alongside Tribe’s Phife and Q-Tip.
A Tribe Called Quest’s laid-back, socially conscious rap provides a pointed contrast to the aggressive gansta rap of the time. Social, political, and personal concerns dominate the lyrics. Like almost all rap, there’s some macho posturing involved here, but it’s tempered with humility and occasional self-deprecation; there’s nary a burst of violent bravado to be found. In a genre chock-full of self-professed criminals, the Tribe come off as a real class act.
My Bloody Valentine
Loveless
My Bloody ValentineReleased 1991/11/04
Back around 1990 or so, during the tail end of my undergrad days, I had a friend who just loved My Bloody Valentine. He lent me Isn’t Anything (1988) and after a few listens I bought my own copy. I liked it—it seemed like a bit of a Sonic Youth rip-off to me, but, hey, in my mind Sonic Youth was the great, important band of the time.
And then came Loveless, in which My Bloody Valentine broke more free from their influences and removed the propulsive drive of rock, leaving only an ambient cloud of swirling guitars, a hazy molasses of droning guitar washes. I preferred their earlier, more varied disc, but Loveless was pretty good, too—a kind of a curiosity, a singular vision, almost a cookbook of fascinating guitar textures and effects.
Not all ears were accustomed to more fuzz and static than melody in music, and perhaps for this reason Loveless was a paradigm-changer for many. But less so for me. Sonic Youth was already doing that type of thing in smaller stretches, and they were the band that had blown that particular aspect of my mind (and several others) a few years earlier. (And the hazy swirl that remained after MBV ditched the driving rhythm was similar in effect to what I’d already admired with Cocteau Twins.)
At the time, Loveless seemed to me destined to become an interesting minor curiosity in the annals of rock history, the kind of unique album that quite justifiably gets at least a token mention in the back end of many a top 100 of the decade for the varied picture it helps paint of our music.
Nowadays, when I see Loveless ranked at #2 on Pitchfork’s best albums of the ‘90s (or even #1, depending on which version of the list you find)—ahead of Nevermind and In Utero, ahead of Slanted & Enchanted, ahead of Dry and To Bring You My Love, ahead of Maxinquay and Dummy, ahead of Mellow Gold and Odelay, ahead of Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, ahead of Live Through This, ahead of Exile in Guyville and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and Either/Or, in front of Dig Your Own Hole and Play, behind only OK Computer (on some versions of the list)—I just kind of scratch my head. I admire the rebel spirit of the thought, I suppose. But the album just wasn’t quite the blow-your-mind event it’s sometimes made out to be—at least not to anyone who’d been paying attention. I guess I can understand why some people would revere it, but I don’t completely revere it the same way myself.
That said, Loveless is very good, has held up extremely well over time, and is certainly essential for any serious alternative rock collection. I find I like it much better now than I did then, in fact. I suppose that’s probably an indication of its greatness.
“Sometimes” was the track that captivated me most at the time, and it still bewitches, a glorious grinding buzz of sound. “Loomer” howls like a tuneful vacuum cleaner, and “Come In Alone” features a high-pitched whine and whistle over a cloud of reverb. “Only Shallow” opens the album with a churning wail of guitar distortion that threatens to run you down, slowly. Throughout, the vocals wash up in a languorous haze, adrift on the guitars, the lyrics themselves barely registering; it’s as if they’re merely another instrument.
A couple choice tracks are pulled from earlier releases. From the Tremolo EP (released earlier in 1991) comes the cavernous “To Here Knows When,” with its disorienting, off-kilter phasing. 1990’s Glider EP provides the catchy, propulsive “Soon” to energetically wrap up the album.
The friend who introduced me to Loveless had already gotten me into bands like Cocteau Twins, Throwing Muses, Dead Can Dance, and other 4AD acts. We played two Pixies songs, plus one other song I can’t recall, as part of a makeshift, one-shot band for a small-scale university talent show, the only time I remember trying to perform rock in public. Good times.
Here’s the 1991: The Year in Review playlist for you—three tracks per album.
I’ll be building the playlist as I go, adding to it as I complete different tiers of commentary. By the time I finish all Year in Review posts for the year, the playlist will be complete!
Enjoy!
More 1991, The Year in Review
More Years in Review of the 1990s…
Cover Art Citations:
- Blue Lines: By Derived from a digital capture (photo/scan) of the album cover (creator of this digital version is irrelevant as the copyright in all equivalent images is still held by the same party). Copyright held by the record company or the artist. Claimed as fair use regardless., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=209054
- Mr. Hood: By Derived from a scan of the album cover (creator of this digital version is irrelevant as the copyright in all equivalent images is still held by the same party). Copyright held by the record company or the artist. Claimed as fair use regardless., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7459978
- Cypress Hill: By [1], Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1988925
- Nevermind: By May be found at the following website: http://www.geffen.com/artist/releases/default.aspx/pid/831/aid/257, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=194286
- The Low End Theory: By Derived from a digital capture (photo/scan) of the album cover (creator of this digital version is irrelevant as the copyright in all equivalent images is still held by the same party). Copyright held by the record company or the artist. Claimed as fair use regardless., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=195617
- Loveless: By musiclog.7438.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53621653
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