1990: Was it really that bad of a year for music?

my 1990 section looks kind of thin. most of it is the dean benedetti recordings of charlie parker. there was a good bastro record. doc corbin dart's "patricia". some decent metal - a good tape by dreadnot, records by nocturnus and obliveon that are pretty good. robyn hitchcock's "eye". ant-bee's "pure electric honey". good albums by vexed and uncle wiggly.

maybe it was a good year for music, but there's not a lot of stuff i listen to that came out that year.

There definitely seems to have been better singles than individual albums in 1990. From the UK Top 50 of 1990, I'd say all of these were close to undeniable:

2 "Nothing Compares 2 U" Sinéad O'Connor
5 "Killer" Adamski
7 "Dub Be Good to Me" Beats International
8 "Vogue" Madonna
12 "A Little Time" The Beautiful South
14 "It Must Have Been Love" Roxette
18 "Black Velvet" Alannah Myles
19 "Dirty Cash (Money Talks)" The Adventures of Stevie V
26 "Groove Is in the Heart"/"What Is Love" Deee-Lite
30 "Unbelievable" EMF
31 "Naked in the Rain" Blue Pearl
32 "Tom's Diner" DNA featuring Suzanne Vega
38 "Better the Devil You Know" Kylie Minogue
43 "Justify My Love" Madonna
45 "Hold On" En Vogue
48 "What Time Is Love? (Live at Trancentral)" The KLF featuring the Children of the Revolution
49 "Got to Have Your Love" Mantronix featuring Wondress
50 "Step On" Happy Mondays

However, there was a lack of a "big pop group" to help boost the market like a Take That or Spice Girls, and commerical dance music still seemed to be getting its shit together. Still better than most years in the 2010s, though.

Torch of the Mystics! Plus Weeville, and God Ween Satan (I'm pretty sure that's '90, anyway).

yup. not to mention Blood Guts & Pussy

uh, My Bloody Valentine's 'Glider' was released in April of that year and contains "Soon" which remains my favorite song ever recorded so 1990 is actually the best year ever for music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMEEiGe4Tk8

also lol at one of the most undeniably classic songs having the year right there in the title

it was also time for the guru iirc

Is Turrican an AI created by feeding Rate Your Music mailing lists into a neural net? 1990 was an amazing year for music and I don't know who'd say otherwise

No mention of Reading, Writing & Arithmetic by The Sundays yet. That would join Heaven Or Las Vegas and Behaviour in my top three of the year.

Jordan: The Comeback, Listen Without Prejudice Vol.1, Pod, Step In The Arena, Livin' Like Hustlers, Boomania and The Comforts Of Madness are a few other favourites that haven't been mentioned yet.

badalementi - twin peaks soundtrack

badalamenti*

Vol. II: 1990 - A New Decade

Is Turrican an AI created by feeding Rate Your Music mailing lists into a neural net? 1990 was an amazing year for music and I don't know who'd say otherwise

― shackling the masses with plastic-wrapped snack picks (sic), Friday, November 3, 2017 3:39 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, hardly anyone seems to bring up 1990 as some sort of gold standard year for music, hence the thread, which isn't designed to criticise the year, but to discuss the music that came out that year.

Great attempt to try and derail the thread by trying to provide me with something to negatively react to, though.

There definitely seems to have been better singles than individual albums in 1990.

Yeah, this is the kind of stance that I'm leaning towards, although I really like Odysseus' list.

'Nothing Compares 2 U' remains a great single, but how often do folks listen to the album these days? Does anyone here still really listen to World Party in 2017?

Anyway, great posts dorsalstop & Custard Cream :)

1990.... time for the gooroooo

1990 / Time For The Souffle

1990 was the year I discovered pop music. I was only 9 years old but receiving a radio and listening to it almost constantly opened up a world back from which I'd never come back. Lots of (in retrospect) bad dance-pop music, but I loved it. I wasn't old enough for albums, other than the two Now comps that came out that year. My big hits of that year:
Dub Be Good To Me, The Power, U Can't Touch This, Ghetto Heaven, Tricky Disco, LFO (loads of great ravey stuff), Birdhouse In Your Soul. I especially liked the rave stuff because it sounded nothing like my parents' music.

this is what i got:

Codeine - Frigid Stars
Galaxie 500 - This Is Our Music
Babes In Toyland - Spanking Machine
The Blue Aeroplanes - Swagger
Cocteau Twins - Heaven Or Las Vegas
Mazzy Star - She Hangs Brightly
A Tribe Called Quest - People's Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm
Prefab Sprout - Jordan: The Comeback
Fugazi - Repeater
Crime And The City Solution - Paradise Discotheque
Soul II Soul - Volume II 1990: A New Decade
The KLF - Chill Out
The Jesus Lizard - Head
Gang Starr - Step In The Arena
Wolfhounds - Attitude
Revolting Cocks ‎– Beers, Steers & Queers
Shut Up And Dance - Dance Before The Police Come!
Unrest - Kustom Karnal Blackxploitation
Thin White Rope - Sack Full Of Silver
Nice Strong Arm - Stress City
Electribe 101 - Electribal Memories
Pale Saints - The Comforts Of Madness
Bongwater - The Power Of Pussy
Paul Simon - The Rhythm Of The Saints
The Clean - Vehicle
Half Japanese - We Are They Who Ache With Amorous Love

one of my favourite 1990-ish things now though is watching old dance energy clips w/ normski

back from which I'd never come back

this ever changing world in which we live in

1990 definitely has its very own aesthetic that seems quite apart from 89 and 91. You had those sort of festival-goth people with velvet stovepipe hats and tinted Lennon specs; and the music videos were either shot in a city in black and white or in a studio with the most lurid, frenzied superimposed backdrops ever seen. Bring back the ITV Chart Show

that reminds me, i think that both the best Fields of The Nephilim album and maybe the worst Sisters of Mercy album were from 1990

The only 1990 album in my entire iTunes library is Neil Young's Ragged Glory. I guess there has to be a couple more that I'm forgetting.

Let's not forget The La's.

Never understood why people rate that Black Box single over any of their others from the same album.

1990 was an amazing year for music and I don't know who'd say otherwise

Seriously, genuinely not aware of any particular consensus otherwise (other than maybe based on some pathetic idea that Nevermind was more important than anything from the previous eighteen months) but the question is more why pay attention to that nonsense rather than where is it even coming from.

1990 was a transition year for me - in the fall I moved to Boston and finally had access to 'alternative' radio stations like WFNX, WBCN and all the great college stations. Not to mention all the record stores a quick T ride away. It really opened up my musical world. Shoegaze was big for me - Lush, Ride, Pale Saints, etc. And the whole Flying Nun stable was off the charts great - The Chills, Straitjacket Fits, Able Tasmans, etc all released great albums in 1990. Looking at the Rate Your Music lists, I'd guess a retroactive top ten / most listened to in 1990 would be:

The Chills - Submarine Bells
Robyn Hitchcock - Eye
Prefab Sprout - Jordan: The Comeback
The Blue Aeroplanes - Swagger
The Jazz Butcher - Cult Of The Basement
The La's - The La's
Ride - Nowhere
Killing Joke - Extremities, Dirt And Various Repressed Emotions
Lloyd Cole - Lloyd Cole
The Fatima Mansions - Viva Dead Ponies

It's pretty easy to come up with a handful of great albums for any particular year. I think the original question asks if it was memorable, impactful or otherwise felt like music was consistently engaging. And to all of those it's clearly 'yes' for me.

yeah I think the good year/bad year stuff is totally bogus, there's always great and good and mediocre and bad music being made in quantities that would be impossible to even listen to it all

so any judging of a year as good or better is just some amalgamation of received wisdom/press narratives, your own life circumstances and age at that time, etc

come on, man. Just for the Hip Hop releases:

Amerikkka's Most Wanted
One For All
The Devil Made Me Do It
To the East, Blackward
Wanted: Dead Or Alive
Funky Technician

ANd then there was

Daniel Johnston- 1990
The Clean- Vehicle
Superchunk- s/t
Dwight Yoakum- If there Was a Way
Blue Rodeo- Casino

I don't think it's so much that people talk about 1990 as a 'bad year', it just doesn't get brought up so much in the same way a lot of people will wax nostalgic about, say 1994, 1991, 1977, 1968 etc. It's an overlooked year really.

'Nothing Compares 2 U' remains a great single, but how often do folks listen to the album these days?

A few times a year at least. A perfect album if such a thing exists.

I don't think it's so much that people talk about 1990 as a 'bad year', it just doesn't get brought up so much in the same way a lot of people will wax nostalgic about, say 1994, 1991, 1977, 1968 etc. It's an overlooked year really.

― Shat Parp (dog latin), Friday, November 3, 2017 2:11 PM (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yup, precisely!

Musically, 1990 in many ways feels more like the very tail end of the '80s to me than the beginning of the '90s.

Anyway, there's some great stuff coming up un this thread... some obvious classics, but also quite a few things that seldom get talked about.

*in

https://www.fantasiescometrue.com/images/medium/fct_28cfc991c0fcf04.jpg

Never understood why people rate that Black Box single over any of their others from the same album.

It may partly be because it was pretty ubiquitous at the time, in a way the others weren't (at least in my corner of the world). I very strongly associate that particular moment with that song.

Surely Ride on Time is the most celebrated / overplayed Black Box single?

Yeah, the moment anyone mentions Black Box, I think "WHOOOOOOOA HO! WHOOOOOAAAA HO! WA WHOOOOOOA HO! WA WA WA WHOOOOOOOAAAA HO!"

The premise of this thread is pretty dumb, it's not like we're talking about 1975 or 1986 or 1998 or another one of those weird in-between years, 1990 had several huge and pivotal scenes absolutely booming, I don't think anyone seriously makes the case for it being a bad year.

x-post to dog latin

It may be a difference between UK and US. US chart for

Everybody Everybody:

UK Singles (The Official Charts Company)[10] 16
US Billboard Hot 100[11] 8
US Billboard R&B Singles [11] 2
US Billboard Hot Dance Club Play[11] 1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everybody_Everybody_(song)#Charts

UK Singles (Official Charts Company)[5] 1
US Billboard Hot Dance Club Play[29] 39
US Billboard Hot Dance Music/Maxi-Singles Sales[29] 44

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ride_on_Time#Charts_and_certifications

I do like Everybody Everybody better though, for whatever reason.

(x-post)

Okay, then maybe instead of being snarky, you could come up with some theory as to why it remains one of the lesser talked about years? Even '75, '86 and '98 get talked about more. I can't actually think of a year more overlooked post 1962. If so many scenes were indeed booming, why isn't the year spoken about to the same degree as other years where the same thing was happening?

Personally, I cluster 1989-1991 together, when it comes to what I was listening to. It seems like trends shifted in 1992 (and at the very least my listening habits shifted). New music in 1989-1991 for me was mostly hip-hop, some R&B, the occasional house crossover hit in the US, and Psychic TV (and to some extent Coil).

xp transitional year. better known for singles than albums maybe? Do people think of 2000, 1980, 1970, 2010 as particularly remarkable years for music? Yes, blah blah, no such thing as a bad year etc, but is there a psychological effect at play where the first year of a decade feels like the closing of one door and the opening of another, therefore making that period harder to define as typically 'of its time'? Like you were saying, rather than feeling like the beginning of a new era, 1990 could be seen as more of a victory lap of the eighties. Sometimes it takes a few years into a decade to really get what it's all about and what defines it. Like the idea that there were 'two eighties' the one that spanned 1978-1985 and the one that lasted 1986-1992). This is all very conjectural and subjective of course, and buys into the idea that people are subliminally affected by the idea of years and decades..

Because unless it's the Summer of Love or coinciding with some huge moment in history, most people don't really talk about years when they talk about music? They talk about things that were happening at the time, and 1990 was hip-hop getting bigger and bigger, plus acid house and baggy and Pacific NW rock and a load of other stuff. Maybe because it's a plateau year rather than a pivotal year?

1987-94 is a bit of a mini-era in itself really.

I think Rudipherous and Matt are OTM; 1990 and 1991 feel like extensions of 1989 to me so whenever I wax nostalgic about '89, I'm really talking about a 3-year period of awesome music.

xp for dance music definitely.

1989-1992 ... about as good as it got for pop-house dance music

I think it's interesting, the distinction between musical years that you can say empirically were good or bad and years that you were either too young or not yet alive to appreciate.1990 was an exciting year for me musically but can I really say that 1975 was a good year or not?

For one, I was 3 years old and who knows if I would have bought Hissing Of Summer Lawns or Another Green World and nerded out on them if I had been old enough to.
But if I had done, it would have made my musical year for sure.

goes without saying that this all depends on your age, where you were living and what interests you kept. I have a real blind-spot for late-80s music because I came to pop right at the beginning of 1990, so from my POV it's a year zero in terms of developing a taste for music. To this day, music from the years prior feel like warming-up.

Looking through that American Top 40 list, I guess a lot of the attendant albums must be from '89 because they would otherwise be in the playlist I'm jamming. I've got Tommy Page and Michel'le on the way, at any rate!

Just started Was (Not Was) - Are You Okay?. Will report back.

Equivalent UK chart for same week. There’s some horrors in it but feels like something special especially the run between 11 and 18.

1 12 THE POWER SNAP!
2 2 LOVE SHACK THE B-52S
3 6 STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER CANDY FLIP
4 3 BLUE SAVANNAH ERASURE
5 1 DUB BE GOOD TO ME BEATS INTERNATIONAL FEATURING LINDY LAYTON
6 7 LILY WAS HERE DAVID A STEWART FEATURING CANDY DULFER
7 5 I'LL BE LOVING YOU (FOREVER) NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK
8 17 BIRDHOUSE IN YOUR SOUL THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS
9 4 THAT SOUNDS GOOD TO MEJIVE BUNNY AND THE MASTERMIXERS
10 8 HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO LIVE WITHOUT YOU MICHAEL BOLTON
11 10 INFINITY (1990'S TIME FOR THE GURU) GURU JOSH
12 14 DON'T YOU LOVE ME 49ERs
13 11 MOMENTS IN SOUL JT AND THE BIG FAMILY
14 15 THIS IS HOW IT FEELS INSPIRAL CARPETS
15 19 EVERYTHING STARTS WITH AN 'E' {1990} E-ZEE POSSEE
16 16 LOADED PRIMAL SCREAM
17 28 CHIME ORBITAL
18 34 MAMMA GAVE BIRTH TO THE SOUL CHILDREN QUEEN LATIFAH AND DE LA SOUL
19 9 THE BRITS 1990 VARIOUS ARTISTS
20 13 NOTHING COMPARES 2 U SINEAD O'CONNOR
21 36 ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE JAM TRONIK
22 New DON'T MISS THE PARTYLINE BIZZ NIZZ
23 33 ALL I WANNA DO IS MAKE LOVE TO YOU HEART
24 New GHETTO HEAVEN FAMILY STAND
25 21 HANDFUL OF PROMISES BIG FUN
26 32 READ MY LIPS (ENOUGH IS ENOUGH) JIMMY SOMERVILLE
27 New BETTER WORLD REBEL MC
28 New PICTURES OF YOU THE CURE
29 18 NATURAL THING INNOCENCE
30 New KINGSTON TOWN UB40
31 New ESCAPADE JANET JACKSON
32 20 ENJOY THE SILENC DEPECHE MODE
33 48 BLACK VELVET ALANNAH MYLES
34 Re SHE BANGS THE DRUMS THE STONE ROSES
35 New WHAT U WAITIN' 4 THE JUNGLE BROTHERS
36 New I REMEMBER YOU SKID ROW
37 22 I DON'T KNOW ANYBODY ELSE BLACK BOX
38 29 HERE WE ARE GLORIA ESTEFAN
39 40 YOUR LOVE TAKES ME HIGHER {1990} THE BELOVED
40 38 TOO LATE TO SAY GOODBYE RICHARD MARX

Old Lunch, I think you need to listen to World Clique again. And again. And again. Keep listening to it. You must. Do not stop. Just play it again. Now. And forever. Our clique is the world. The world is our clique.

xp top 10 starts strong, ends very badly

Forgot about that weird Brits 1990 megamix single

I'd managed to completely forget about Jive Bunny

I still own a cassette of the Jive Bunny LP, I remember being disappointed that it didn't include their abysmal Christmas single.

"Here We Are" is among my favorite guilty pleasures from that era.

Ain't nothin' guilty about the pleasure of an Estefan ballad.

Seems like an early victim of 'must fill every available minute of time on this new CD format!' bloat.

The CD has half a bonus track over the LP; the cassette has four.

Orbital Top 20 singles artist. Oh yeah.

Again, for me - something I find common in this period - is the “indie” stuff stinks the chart up more than anything else (not a big Madchester/baggy person so there is that); the chart looks more interesting without it

Goddamn, I had thought 'This is Ponderous' (1991)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gYIbMwswKM

was some sort of unfortunate outlier from this era, but there are tracks exactly like it on the Was (Not Was) and Will to Power albums from '90. WTF was happening.

From a purely anecdotal standpoint, listening to albums from this particular year feels incredibly schizophrenic to me inasmuch as, between the summer of '90 and the fall of '91 (when singles from some of these albums were still charting), I lived in four different cities (we moved at the end of my seventh grade year, then again in the middle of eighth grade, and then again just before my freshman year). So I have an array of geographical associations with these songs, and then also the thing where a song hits big in one part of the country long before another catches up, etc. The fact that 'U Can't Touch This' and 'Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Move)' were released in the same year seems to strain all temporal credulity.

Defining the Poppy Bush Interzone.

Yes, I always forget but, upon remembering, greatly appreciate your coinage of the PBI. It is an extremely resonant era of pop for me.

Phenomenal year.

The slate from yesterday and this morning...

Was (Not Was) - Are You Okay?
Vanessa Williams - The Right Stuff
Will to Power - Journey Home
Wilson Phillips - s/t

...has been fine I guess, fair-to-middlin', not many album tracks exceeding the better singles that I already knew, occasionally real bad (about half of that WNW album...sheesh), mostly making me wonder how inclined I am to continue with this project.

But hey whattayaknow, listening to Salt-N-Pepa's Black's Magic rn and it's real effing good. Which may be news to precisely no one but me.

was some sort of unfortunate outlier from this era, but there are tracks exactly like it on the Was (Not Was) and Will to Power albums from '90. WTF was happening.

Bands just felt really compelled to do an updated 90s take on Eric Burdon and War's "Spill The Wine".

These songs are a much different animal (no pun intended). It makes me wonder if Joe Frank just started to blow up around then.

I heard punk broke, not sure if anybody fixed it.

A corporation did

I'm sorry to have to report that it died