Jamwise #46 - Best Albums of 1994

Featuring: Soundgarden, Green Day, Jeff Buckley, Nas, Portishead, Oasis, Weezer

1994 is widely considered one of the best-ever years in music. There are classic debuts, genre-definers in the midst of gaining their now-legendary status, not to mention the powerful nostalgia we tend to feel for music when it turns 30. It was impossible to choose a reasonable amount of great albums to start with, so I just started with the ones I felt most like listening to. I’m not even going to try to rank these albums - this is going to be more like a survey because of the sheer volume of stuff to get through.

As always, I’d love your recommendations! I fully expect to be bowled over by all the music from this year. Woe is me.

Superunknown - Soundgarden

Soundgarden’s breakthrough to the mainstream via the top of the charts was a long-deserved cashing in of all the hard work they’d put in. As Soundgarden was widely credited as one of the formative forces of the Seattle sound that was everywhere in 1994, this album was released with super high expectations - and it more than delivered. It hit right in the midst of the Grunge and alt-rock frenzy in the US, finally putting Soundgarden in the charts after they watched their neighbors Pearl Jam and Nirvana dominate the airwaves in the previous couple of years.

Chris Cornell had one of the most iconic voices in rock history. His versatility - going from a throat-shredding scream to a haunting melodic tone in a heartbeat - is one of a kind. There aren’t many rock singers who have so much unique timbre in both their scream and their “standard” singing voice - but no matter which style you hear, you know instantly you’re listening to Chris Cornell. I actually discovered Cornell first through Audioslave, who was releasing albums as I grew up, but when I traced his history back to Soundgarden I instantly fell in love. As a completely talentless singer, I’ve very rarely had the “guitar hero” moment when I hear a singer and imagine myself in front of a stadium performing their songs, but Chris Cornell had that effect on me.

If you’ve never heard his cover of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” you should. The live version is my favorite - even 20 years after the band’s peak, when he recorded this in 2015, he still had it. It was released after his death on the perfectly titled compilation No One Sings Like You Anymore (after a lyric from “Black Hole Sun”), and it gives me the goosies.

Superunknown is a little more musically challenging than some of the other mega grunge acts - but only relatively speaking. This is still grunge (plus a little metal), and it’s just as guitar-driven and dark and gloomy as you’d expect from the genre. But this album hints at stretching the form into something a bit larger, a little bit more poetic and spooky rather than just in-your-face pissed off gloom. It was trying to move both towards and away from the popular mainstream - although the popular music scene ate this up. And for good reason.

Dookie - Green Day

Green Day had such a good feel for album construction. You wouldn’t guess it from their pop-punk sound (or some of their later albums) - they act like they DGAF, but musically they very much GAF, like they’re punks with music degrees that won’t let them truly do anything outside the boundaries of music theory. “I declare I don’t care no more” are the first lyrics on the album, which might be true about life in general, but musically the sentiment is clearly not applicable. The songs feel crafted with a disgruntled kind of love, with grunty vocals and crunchy guitars arranged like a simple classical piece. Songs flow into each other like an album of old, it’s one unit and a bunch of dope singles all at the same time. I can’t say if there’s a true concept uniting this album other than the inside of Billie Joe Armstrong’s disillusioned head, but maybe that’s enough.

This album, the band’s first on a major label, was perfectly timed to capture both the rise of multiple guitar-driven rock-adjacent genres and the gap in the rock soundscape left by the decline of punk rock in the late 70’s (depending on your definitions). Just as Oasis revived British pop-rock, Green Day revived 70’s punk. And both bands’ popularity broke through into the mainstream as a result of a potent mixture of talent and nostalgia.

I think Green Day, even compared to the other behemoths of 90’s rock in all its forms, may well be the most iconic and remembered sound of the 90’s 50 years from now. The instantly recognizable sound is already becoming emblematic of the era, despite the band’s more recent and more forgettable albums (which in my mind are already forgotten); how much more will this effect grow over the coming decades? It seems plausible that children of the 2050’s will consider Green Day’s sound as quintessentially 90’s as we currently consider Sinatra emblematic of the 50’s.

Grace - Jeff Buckley

Another great album that Rolling Stone dismissed when it came out. Am I just 30 years late in realizing they seem to hate anything that’s not already a platinum-seller? In the years when alt rock was taking over the charts, the main criticism they could come up for Grace was essentially “this isn’t the next great alt rock thing we were hoping for. Meh.” This album was moderately successful on release, but took off into another stratosphere after Buckley’s untimely death. I’ll bet the 20th anniversary RS review was glowing.

Spotify’s writeup calls this album “Van Morrison meets Led Zeppelin”, which seems to be a common refrain, at least in the larger publications. Now I’m no 70’s kid, but I know a thing or two about Zep and Van - that comparison sounds pretty lazy to me, mainly true on the surface level and only at times. Sure, there’s the occasional Zeppelin-esque guitar riff or strumming part on Grace. And there are some arrangements that recall Van Morrison here and there. You could also squint your ears and hear Robert Plant in a few of the high-register screams on songs like “Grace.” And I think the legend is made even stronger by the fact that Buckley was said to be last seen singing a Zeppelin song while swimming under a bridge the night he passed away. But there’s so much more here, enough that even a comparison to Zep is doing the music a disservice because it shoehorns Buckley into a box that doesn’t fit.

Now don’t get me wrong - any album billed as Van Morrison meets Led Zeppelin will immediately have all of my attention. So sure, keep using that comparison to introduce completely new listeners to Jeff Buckley if you want. But I don’t think there should be many deep-dives exploring those comparisons, because they’d be reaching at best, making shit up at worst. Buckley’s music is something entirely his own.

Jeff Buckley sounds like an artist searching for the absolute limits of his voice, experimenting with anything and everything to see what creates the thinnest possible veil between his brain and the listener. Listen to this one with good headphones - every nuance you can catch adds an extra little hit of emotion when you’re least expecting it, and you can put yourself into the same headspace that Buckley seems to have on the album cover, listening to the music and forgetting the world.

Dummy - Portishead

There’s no doubt that if I’d known about this album as a kid, my musical trajectory would have changed completely. The music resonates so well with me now that I have complete FOMO for what I missed - the trip-hoppy beats make me do a stank face every time, like a guitar player grimacing out a powerful solo. Instead of pursuing the alt-rock/grunge/classic rock obsessive path I chose growing up, I might have been tossed headfirst into the world of electronic beats and industrial sounds at an early age, following them all the way through to the albums they influenced in the rising industrial/trip-hop sound of the later 90’s.

Electronic and electronic-adjacent bands can get a lot of flak for relying on computerized sounds to carry their music rather than on songwriting or more universally accepted musical practices. But that’s an issue for all kinds of artists - the 70’s were littered with rock and roll bands who thought a distorted electric guitar was a worthy substitute for actual lyrics or songwriting skills. Hell, I’ll bet when the acoustic guitar was invented there were people out there calling it a gimmick, that you couldn’t have real music without a bow vibrating the strings. New technology is new technology, and songwriting is songwriting, no matter where you are in the timeline.

But Portishead, even in a genre that’s seen by outsiders as full of gimmicky sounds, is impossible to classify as anything but song-driven brilliance. The beats and sounds they choose fit the songwriting perfectly, adding to the atmosphere or the emotional content at any given moment. It all aligns perfectly, the new sounds and inventive songwriting producing an additive effect, a true 1+1=3 situation.

This album has quickly become one of my favorites ever, and will be in heavy rotation for a long time to come.

Illmatic - Nas

Last week I said I was becoming a West Coast hip hop guy. Nas must have heard me, because this one made me question my loyalties completely. It’s a little more hardcore than I typically prefer, but it brings the best parts of the 90’s east coast style together - the jazz influence, the underground freight-train-like beats, the gritty New York attitude of pretending to love living in the city because it makes you tough but low key hating every minute of it. (Side note - I feel like Stockholm syndrome could be renamed New York City syndrome. Might just be the country kid in me. Or the fact I live in a beach town where everybody’s from the Northeast US and spends all their time talking about how great NYC is, but for some reason never go back there).

Nas’s flow is smooth and he uses these multi-tiered rhymes that make you pause for a second to savor - but a second is too long to pause because you’re going to miss stuff. Listen to this one with the lyrics in front of you - I like using Spotify’s karaoke mode which follows along with each line - and you’ll fall into a trance trying to keep up. It feels like a movie to me, and it’s hard to believe this is a debut album.

Definitely Maybe - Oasis

I want to preface this by saying that I love this album as much as anyone. It’s good-time rock ‘n roll, and it’s impossible to hate in my opinion. Keep that in mind as we explore this album - I do love it, but it raises questions for me about why we love Oasis so much, and I’m not sure that’s due to the band’s talents alone.

I think this album, while great, has become insanely overrated in our collective memories. There’s a rule known as the rule of 20 which states that pop culture trends are cyclical, coming back around into the mainstream every 20-ish years. (or 15 years, or 40 years, depending on the area of pop culture we’re talking about). Any Millennial who’s watched Gen Z embrace the horrific calf-length socks of our parents’ generation knows what I’m talking about - high socks are making their 20 year cycle return. As was foretold.

I think this is one big reason for the 90’s revival we’re seeing in 2024. True, the 90’s were 30 years ago (holy crap) but the 20 year rule is loose. 90’s culture is everywhere in 2024 - half of Gen Z’s lingo is from early 90’s hip hop, from what I can tell - and it seems like Oasis’ popularity is benefiting from that trend as much as anybody. Their alleged reunion is well timed in 2024 - it’s caused mass hysteria among alt rock fans and nostalgia-seeking elder Millennials.

But in Oasis’ case, the 20/30 year rule runs even deeper. In 1994, Oasis was essentially an early Beatles/Stones revival band. Their sound in the 90’s was catnip for the nostalgic 70’s kids entering their 30’s and 40’s. So in 2024, we’re actually experiencing a form of inception - a revival within a revival. We’re harking all the way back to the 60’s and 70’s when we go nuts for Oasis’ reunion tour. Add that to the fact that this reunion was said to be completely impossible, and I can’t even tell if people are excited about the music at all, or if it’s simply the legend of Oasis (and by extension, the Beatles/Stones) that’s causing all this enthusiasm.

Musically, this album is about as straightforward as music can be, just wistful enough to get your feelings going, but not in ways that are too difficult to sort through. It’s the perfect guitar pop formula - nothing invented, nothing destroyed. Liam Gallagher sounds like an enthusiastic kid doing John Lennon karaoke, with just a touch of grit and more than a touch of teenager in the sound, and mostly relegated to just a few notes above and below center. It’s unhateable and fun, and even though I can’t see that it broke any new ground, it’s such a huge part of 90’s culture and my musical upbringing that it’ll always have a place in my playlists.

Weezer - Weezer

Weezer’s debut album is geeky, self-aware, and completely unforgettable. Many other words came to mind, but Weezer’s press kit for the Blue Album prohibits most of them:

“All of these words are officially forbidden from use in describing Weezer. Hopefully, after studying this list, you will listen more carefully and find your own non-trendy descriptions:

Quirky
College
Retro
Fun/Funny
Goofy
Wacky
Pop/Punk (may be used separately but never together)”

So, the challenge has been laid down. I’ll do my best, but I can’t guarantee I’ll live up to Weezer’s standards for describing their debut.

Weezer’s take on the early 90’s alternative / 70’s power pop revival / guitar rock explosion / mainstream angst scene was unique in the level of self-awareness; it’s almost self-mocking at times, but at the same time there’s plenty of room to appreciate the music at face value or to listen to it with a hint of irony at the blatant power-pop sound. No matter which way you take Weezer, it’s undeniably great. And many people seemed to take Weezer at face value - to the point where the band basically seemed to say in subsequent albums, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” and went full-tilt for the power pop sound.

I can’t say why I find it so satisfying that Weezer knew exactly what they were doing; from their look to their sound, they were cheekily recreating power pop with the intent of making fun of it, and if they made the genre even better it was entirely by accident.

Even if you totally miss the point of Weezer, there are still plenty of reasons to love Weezer. If that’s not genius, I don’t know what is.

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