I started this project to challenge my hunch that those of us who spent impressionable years of our youth in the 1990s were kind of screwed when it came to pop music, because musically the 90s pretty much sucked. I’m now a fifth of the way through my 100-stop revisiting of 90s music, and though I’ve uncovered a couple of gems I missed back in the day, listening in sequence to every song that hit the top of the charts in 1991 validated my hunch with a flaming shitstorm of vengeance.

It took real fortitude to make it through these 27 songs: 1991 may well have been the worst year for popular music in my 35-year life to date. The top 40 from 1991 is the music they play in hell while you’re having your toenails pulled out. 1991 was where the moat of snot that was 90s music really hit its dropoff, where we had to stop wading and start flailing for dear life if we wanted to stay alive.

Listen to this tepid gunk, I dare you. “The First Time” (Surface). “You’re in Love” (Wilson Phillips). “Baby Baby” (Amy Grant). “I Adore Mi Amor” (Color Me Badd). “Someday” (Mariah Carey). “When a Man Loves a Woman” by goddamn Michael Bolton. I’m not going to bother ranking these songs like I did for 1990, but if I did, I think that the top of the list would have to go to C+C Music Factory, who at least had some rudimentary ability to reach into their asses and dig around until they found a hook.

I turned 16 in 1991. Sweet sixteen, the quintessential teenage year. What did 1991 have for me? Nothing but a cruel taunt, in the sample from Spandau Ballet’s “True” (as famously heard in Sixteen Candles) recycled in P.M. Dawn’s “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss.”

Revisiting 1991’s hit singles, I was reminded of how packed early 90s charts were with songs by artists who we now consider quintessential 80s artists. In 1991 alone, there were #1 hits by Michael Jackson (“Black or White”), Madonna (“Justify My Love,” which was basically just four minutes of heavy breathing), Prince (“Cream”), Whitney Houston (“All the Man That I Need”), Janet Jackson (“Love Will Never Do [Without You]”), Gloria Estefan (“Coming Out of the Dark”), and Bryan Adams (“Everything I Do [I Do It For You]”). None of these artists were at their best—they were like King Odin of Norse myth, reluctantly occupying the throne into his dotage purely out of despair at the haplessness of the next generation.

The last of those songs, though, was the one that reminded me that yes, I actually was 16 in 1991, and yes, I actually managed to hear some of this music between the Bob Dylan tapes I preferred.

“Everything I Do,” the theme song to Kevin Costner’s laughable Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (the video is priceless, with Adams braying in the forest to grand piano accompaniment while Costner and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio swing from vines and look listlessly into each other’s eyes) was the theme for our junior homecoming dance. I remember slow-dancing to that song in the St. Agnes gym—I don’t even remember with whom, but I remember feeling like I was part of some elaborate farce. I can’t blame Bryan Adams, or Michael Bolton, or Marky Mark…but you can’t blame me for thinking that, contrary to what another Bryan sang some years earlier, there must be something more than this.

– Jay Gabler

The 1990s Project is my attempt to give the decade’s music a fair shot at disproving my offhand assessment that the 90s were the armpit of modern musical history. The project started on my Tumblr, and has now moved to The Tangential. My goal is to visit, or revisit, 100 of the decade’s most acclaimed, popular, and/or interesting albums. Here are the albums I’ve written about so far.

1. Radiohead, OK Computer (1997)
2. My Bloody Valentine, Loveless (1991)
3. The Flaming Lips, The Soft Bulletin (1999)
4. Moonshake, Eva Luna (1992)
5. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991)
6. Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville (1993)
7. Erykah Badu, Baduizm (1997)
8. Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998)
9. Fugazi, Red Machine (1995)
10. Matthew Sweet, 100% Fun (1995)
11. Pavement, Slanted and Enchanted (1992)
12. The Bodyguard soundtrack (1992)
13. Marcy Playground, Marcy Playground (1997)
14. 10,000 Maniacs, Our Time in Eden (1992)
15. Shania Twain, Come On Over (1997)
16. Dr. Dre, The Chronic (1992)
17. #1 singles of 1990
18. DJ Shadow, Endtroducing….. (1996)
19. Alanis Morissette, Jagged Little Pill (1995)
20. U2, Achtung Baby (1991)