A couple weeks ago, I finished my year-by-year overview of the '90s with my 50 favorite albums and 100 favorite singles of 1990. Having done that for every year of the decade, I now have about 500 albums and 1000 singles to draw from if I do some kind of big '90s list somewhere down the line, maybe next year. In the meantime, I thought I'd do something extra nerdy and crunch the numbers from all that data and try to figure out who my favorite artists of the decade were, not based on any gut feeling but just on the sheer math of who had the most records ranked highest on those lists. Rather than trying to combine the data from both sets, here's two separate lists, based on albums and based on singles.

My Favorite Albums Artists of the 1990s: 

1. Superchunk
2. Sonic Youth
3. Fugazi
4. Pearl Jam
5. A Tribe Called Quest
6. 2Pac
7. The Posies
8. Jay-Z
9. Ice Cube
10. Smashing Pumpkins
11. UGK
12. Nirvana
13. Gang Starr
14. R.E.M.
15. Pulp
16. They Might Be Giants
17. Nine Inch Nails
18. Soul Coughing
19. Scarface
20. Outkast

One thing I will say is, it'd be easier to make it onto this list with less music than for a similar list for other recent decades. The 1990s was the peak of the music industry maximizing the profitability of each album, milking it for as many singles and videos and tours as possible. And in the CD era, albums got longer, so even smaller acts would tend to release a 60 or 70-minute album every 2 or 3 years rather than a 40-minute album every year or so, as was standard up through the '80s. So while I clearly love Superchunk and already called them "the best band of the 1990s," they had a big advantage here in that they released 7 albums in the decade (plus rarities comps), where pretty much every other artist there released 5 albums at most (I only count 2Pac's five albums completed in his lifetime, including the album as Makaveli, haven't checked out any of the posthumous ones).

But just releasing a good number of albums isn't everything; I weighted these by how they were ranked by year, so how much I liked stuff mattered a lot. Pavement released 5 albums, all in the '90s and all of which I own, but I've soured on that band big time since the '90s, so they weren't a factor. Soul Coughing only made 3 albums total, but they were all in the '90s and I loved them all, so they got in. Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails scraped by with only two '90s full-lengths and some non-LP releases (EPs and live/compilation/remix albums, etc.). I would never rank Sonic Youth's '90s work as much as highly as their '80s work, but they had several ranked EPs and non-album releases in addition to their 5 albums that pushed them up high, and they were certainly a really major band to me during the decade.


My Favorite Singles Artists of the 1990s: 

1. Pearl Jam
2. Jay-Z
3. Metallica
4. Notorious B.I.G.
5. Dr. Dre
6. Busta Rhymes
7. Snoop Dogg
8. R.E.M.
9. Janet Jackson
10. 2Pac
11. Mary J. Blige
12. Nirvana
13. U2
14. Nine Inch Nails
15. DMX
16. Smashing Pumpkins
17. Red Hot Chili Peppers
18. A Tribe Called Quest
19. The Black Crowes
20. Mariah Carey
21. En Vogue
22. Soundgarden
23. Puff Daddy
24. LL Cool J
25. Guns 'N Roses
26. Foo Fighters
27. Erykah Badu
28. Stone Temple Pilots
29. Juvenile
30. Bjork
31. R. Kelly
32. TLC
33. Aaliyah
34. Gang Starr
35. Ginuwine
36. Prince
37. Third Eye Blind
38. Counting Crows
39. Alice In Chains
40. Tom Petty
41. Beastie Boys
42. Ice Cube
43. Soul Coughing
44. Big Punisher
45. Sonic Youth
46. Green Day
47. They Might Be Giants
48. Rage Against The Machine
49. Lenny Kravitz
50. INXS

The singles list was more fun because, well, there was a lot more to draw from -- artists that might've only had one or two quality albums (or none) had half a dozen awesome singles, and so on. Plus it's just a much more diverse field than the "all alt-rock and rap all the time" field of the albums list. I was unsurprised by Pearl Jam's triumph -- especially since I filled the list with not just their many singles but also the several big rock radio hits they had that weren't officially released as singles. I was surprised that Jay-Z's '90s catalog edged out Biggie, although I guess even the years of the decade that Jay-Z was a star lasted a little longer than Big's whole career, after all. And with Metallica, I'm just an unapologetic fan of all The Black Album's singles and scattered later hits ("Hero Of The Day," "Fuel," "Whiskey In The Jar," etc.). I'm probably most alone in thinking The Black Crowes are one of the most consistent rock radio bands of the '90s, though.

Tabulating this one got a little dicey because of collaborations and such -- Dre and Snoop are both in the top 10 primarily from songs they did together. But for the most part I just went with my gut on how to count things. If I gave entries to individual people, Dave Grohl and Timbaland would be in the top 5, as would Q-Tip, but it didn't seem right to lump his solo singles and features on "Groove Is In The Heart" and "Got Til It's Gone" together the same way I counted Junior Mafia and Puff Daddy singles towards Biggie's total. Some artists I think should be higher, but somehow overlooked some of my favorite singles by them when assembling the year-by-year lists, but I didn't wanna go crazy with revising those just to make this list more 'right,' I think it looks like a pretty damn accurate summary of my taste as is.

Here's the yearly lists if you missed them: 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 24, 2013 at 4:36 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.