Smells Like Teen Spirit
1991 · From Nevermind
Four chords, a mumble nobody could decipher, and the riff that ended one decade of rock and started another.
★ 9.9
Browse by time · decade
1990s
1990 – 1999
Showing 1,536 works across all media from the 1990s
Schindler's List
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1993
More people have understood the Holocaust through this film than through any other: Spielberg took no fee, shot it in black and white, and gave the last word to the survivors.
★ 9.7
Nevermind
1991
The baby on the cover was paid two hundred dollars. Four months after release it knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the chart.
★ 9.7
Goodfellas
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1990
Every gangster film of the last thirty years is arguing with this one: Scorsese made the life so intoxicating for an hour that the comedown lands like a physical event.
★ 9.6
Pulp Fiction
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
1994
Young filmmakers were allowed to sound different after this one: Tarantino let two hitmen argue about hamburgers for ten minutes, and an entire decade of American cinema followed.
★ 9.5
OK Computer
1997
Recorded in a fifteenth-century mansion the band rented from an actress, with one track narrated entirely by the computer voice on a Macintosh.
★ 9.4
Illmatic
1994
Ten tracks, under forty minutes, made by a twenty-year-old with the best producers in New York each giving him one beat.
★ 9.3
Ready to Die
1994
The opening traces his life from the delivery room to prison in about three minutes. Puffy made him rewrite half of it for radio.
★ 9.1
The Silence of the Lambs
Directed by Jonathan Demme
1991
Hopkins is on screen for a fraction of the film and won an Oscar anyway: Demme shot the interviews straight down the lens so Lecter looks directly at you.
★ 8.9
Automatic for the People
1992
They set out to make a loud record and ended up with a quiet one. John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin wrote the string parts.
★ 8.9
The Shawshank Redemption
Directed by Frank Darabont
1994
It lost money in cinemas and has sat at the top of IMDb's ranking since 2008: a prison friendship, told patiently, that pays off better than almost anything.
★ 8.9
C.R.E.A.M.
1994 · From Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
RZA looped a lonely piano figure from the Charmels, and Inspectah Deck's second verse became hip hop scripture.
★ 8.9
Nuthin' But a G Thang
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg
1992 · From The Chronic
Dre built G-funk on a Leon Haywood sample, handed Snoop the mic, and gangsta rap reached number two.
★ 8.9
The Matrix
Directed by The Wachowskis
1999
Action filmmaking divides neatly into before and after this one: the Wachowskis fused Hong Kong wire work with a philosophy seminar's premise and everyone spent five years copying it.
★ 8.9
Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
1993
RZA negotiated a deal letting every member sign solo elsewhere, then recorded the group in a basement on deliberately cheap, muddy equipment.
★ 8.9
The Chronic
1992
Dre had session players replay the funk records rather than sample them, which sidestepped clearance and made everything sound warmer and slower.
★ 8.8
Saving Private Ryan
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1998
War films look different since the first twenty minutes of this one: Spielberg put the camera in the surf at Omaha Beach and veterans left cinemas unable to speak.
★ 8.8
The Low End Theory
1991
Ron Carter, who played bass with Miles Davis, appears on one track and made them promise there would be no swearing on it.
★ 8.8
Fargo
Directed by Coen Brothers
1996
Marge Gunderson is the warmest character the Coens ever wrote, and the reason this one lasts: a kidnapping goes wrong in the snow and she is the only calm person in it.
★ 8.8
Toy Story
Directed by John Lasseter
1995
First feature film animated entirely on computers, and the start of Pixar's extraordinary run: it holds up because underneath the toys it is a sharp story about jealousy.
★ 8.7
Unforgiven
Directed by Clint Eastwood
1992
Eastwood spent thirty years building the myth this film takes apart: no western has been harder on the pleasure of violence, or on the men who deal it out.
★ 8.7
N.Y. State of Mind
1994 · From Illmatic
Premier built the beat on the spot; Nas nailed verse one in a take, muttering doubt into the intro.
★ 8.7
Aquemini
1998
Rosa Parks sued them over the song named after her, and the case ran for a decade. The record itself goes everywhere at once.
★ 8.7
Fight Club
Directed by David Fincher
1999
Twenty-five years of argument have still not settled what it is actually saying: Fincher made consumer despair look genuinely thrilling, which is either the joke or the problem.
★ 8.6
A Few Good Men · 1992
Life After Death
1997
It came out sixteen days after Biggie was shot dead in Los Angeles, a double album he had finished and titled beforehand.
★ 8.6
Dear Mama
1995
Pizarro built it from a Joe Sample loop and the Spinners' Sadie, and the Library of Congress later archived it.
★ 8.5
Juicy
1994 · From Ready to Die
Poke and Combs looped Mtume's Juicy Fruit, and Wallace told the rags to riches story that hip hop kept retelling.
★ 8.5
LA Confidential
Directed by Curtis Hanson
1997
Modern film noir does not get better than this: three Los Angeles cops with nothing in common, and a plot so tightly wired people rewatch it to follow the connections.
★ 8.5
The Bends
1995
They were exhausted and sick of being the Creep band, and nearly fell apart making it. Nothing on it sounds anything like Creep.
★ 8.4
Blood Sugar Sex Magik
1991
Producer Rick Rubin moved the band into a Hollywood mansion they were convinced was haunted. Guitarist John Frusciante quit within a year of its release.
★ 8.3
Doggystyle
1993
Snoop was on trial for murder while promoting it. It was the first debut album in history to enter the chart at number one.
★ 8.3
Fear of a Black Planet
1990
Their production team piled so many samples into each track that the record could not legally be made today. Nothing since sounds this crowded.
★ 8.3
Maus
1991 · 300 pages
Spiegelman drew his father's survival of Auschwitz as a comic, Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, and drew himself failing to get along with the old man telling it.
★ 8.3
They Reminisce Over YouPete Rock
They Reminisce Over You
1992
Pete Rock looped a Tom Scott saxophone line, and CL Smooth's eulogy for a lost friend still aches.
★ 8.3
Achtung Baby
1991
They went to Berlin just after the Wall came down, argued badly enough to nearly break up, and got the song One out of it.
★ 8.3
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Directed by James Cameron
1991
Computer effects became believable overnight: Cameron spent more money than anyone ever had, put a liquid metal killer on screen, and every studio in town immediately started writing checks.
★ 8.2
Hallelujah
1994 · From Grace
Buckley learned it from John Cale's version and cut over twenty takes at Bearsville; the edit sounds like one breath.
★ 8.2
Beau Travail
Directed by Claire Denis
1999
Denis turned Melville's Billy Budd into something closer to dance than to drama: Foreign Legionnaires drilling in the Djibouti heat, all bodies and sun and things nobody will say.
★ 8.2
Losing My ReligionR.E.M.
Losing My Religion
1991 · From Out of Time
Buck wrote the riff while teaching himself mandolin in front of the television, and R.E.M. got their biggest American hit.
★ 8.2
California Love
1995
Roger Troutman's talk box over a Joe Cocker sample, and Shakur's first single after Death Row sprang him from prison.
★ 8.2
Groundhog Day
Directed by Harold Ramis
1993
The title became a phrase people use without knowing the film: a comedy about repeating one day turned into the most quietly serious argument about how to live.
★ 8.2
Jurassic Park
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1993
The moment the first dinosaur appears is the moment audiences stopped trusting their own eyes: Spielberg mixed puppets and computers so well that the seams still do not show.
★ 8.2
Enter Sandman
1991 · From Metallica (The Black Album)
Hammett built the riff after Soundgarden's Louder Than Love, and Bob Rock sent Hetfield back to write a child's nightmare.
★ 8.1
Dummy
1994
They recorded their own samples, pressed them onto vinyl, and scratched the records up so the finished album would crackle like something older.
★ 8.1
Heat
Directed by Michael Mann
1995
Police forces train on the shootout and every heist film since has copied it: Mann also got De Niro and Pacino into one diner booth for the first time.
★ 8.1
The Big Lebowski
Directed by Coen Brothers
1998
It underwhelmed in cinemas and then grew a festival, a religion and a vocabulary: the Coens built a Chandler plot around a man whose only ambition is getting his rug replaced.
★ 8.1
Close-Up
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
1990
Kiarostami blurred documentary and fiction so completely that nobody has quite untangled it since: a man caught impersonating a director, with everyone involved playing themselves on camera.
★ 8.1
I Will Always Love You
1992 · From The Bodyguard (soundtrack)
Parton wrote it to leave Porter Wagoner; Houston opened a cappella and held the Hot 100 for fourteen weeks.
★ 8.1
Seven
Directed by David Fincher
1995
The studio wanted the ending changed and Fincher refused, and studios then spent a decade trying to reproduce the atmosphere: a procedural so bleak the rain never stops.
★ 8.1
Shook Ones Part II
1995 · From The Infamous...
Havoc built the beat in his Queensbridge bedroom from a slowed Herbie Hancock piano figure and a Daly-Wilson drum break.
★ 8.1
The Black Album
1991
The producer Bob Rock made them play together in one room instead of tracking separately, which took a year and nearly ended the band.
★ 8.0
Midnight Marauders
1993
A synthesized voice introduces the tracks like a museum tour guide, and the cover is a grid of about seventy other rappers' faces.
★ 8.0
Come as You Are
1991 · From Nevermind
A Small Clone chorus pedal gives the riff its underwater sound, and Cobain nearly withheld the single.
★ 8.0
Sabotage
1994 · From Ill Communication
Yauch's bass line started it, Ad-Rock turned a joke about their producer into a scream, and Jonze filmed the rest.
★ 8.0
Reasonable Doubt
1996
No label would sign him, so Jay-Z started his own with two friends and sold the CDs out of the trunk of a car.
★ 8.0
Karma PoliceRadiohead
Karma Police
1997 · From OK Computer
Named for a tour joke about people behaving badly, with Greenwood's piano circling and a delay unit eating the ending.
★ 8.0
Princess Mononoke
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
1997 · Japan
It held the Japanese box office record until Titanic arrived: Miyazaki staged a war between an iron town and the forest gods and refused to name a villain.
★ 8.0
It Was A Good Day
1993 · From The Predator
DJ Pooh looped the Isley Brothers' Footsteps in the Dark, and Ice Cube spent four minutes on an uneventful day.
★ 7.9
Violator
1990
The band announced a signing at a Los Angeles record shop and around seventeen thousand people came, which ended with riot police.
★ 7.9
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
1998
Hill recorded much of it in Bob Marley's old studio in Kingston, and the classroom scenes between songs use actual schoolchildren.
★ 7.9
Terminator 2: Judgment Day · 1991
The World Is Yours
1994 · From Illmatic
Ahmad Jamal's piano figure, a hook Pete Rock sang himself, and the most hopeful stretch of Illmatic.
★ 7.9
Nothing Compares 2 USinead O'Connor
Nothing Compares 2 U
1990
Prince wrote it for a side project that went nowhere; O'Connor's tears in the video were real, and unplanned.
★ 7.9
Titanic · 1997
Still Dre
1999 · From 2001
Jay-Z wrote every line of it, Scott Storch played the piano figure, and Dre's seven-year album silence ended.
★ 7.8
Gin & JuiceSnoop Dogg
Gin & Juice
1993 · From Doggystyle
Dr. Dre produced it, George McCrae supplied the sample, and Snoop's unhurried drawl became the West Coast blueprint.
★ 7.8
Bitter Sweet Symphony
1997
Built on an Andrew Oldham Orchestra recording of a Stones song; Jagger and Richards returned the credit in 2019.
★ 7.8
No Diggity
1996
Teddy Riley sang lead because none of his group liked it, then it ended Macarena's fourteen weeks on top.
★ 7.8
The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)
1997
Timbaland flipped Ann Peebles into stuttering space, and Hype Williams shot Elliott in an inflated suit through a fisheye.
★ 7.8
Paranoid AndroidRadiohead
Paranoid Android
1997 · From OK Computer
Four sections in six minutes, named for Douglas Adams's depressed robot, cut in a sixteenth-century manor near Bath.
★ 7.8
Boogie Nights
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
1997
Anderson was twenty-seven and announced himself completely: a San Fernando Valley porn crew who treat each other like family, filmed with far more warmth than the subject suggests.
★ 7.8
(What's the Story) Morning Glory?
1995
Noel Gallagher wrote most of these songs in a fortnight. A year later, two and a half million people applied to see the band at Knebworth.
★ 7.8
The Things They Carried
1990 · 256 pages
O'Brien lists what a platoon in Vietnam hauled around, down to the ounce, then tells war stories and takes them back. The invented ones carry the war more exactly than facts could.
★ 7.8
Doo-wop (That Thing)
1998 · From The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Hill wrote and produced it herself, aimed one verse at women and one at men, and debuted at number one.
★ 7.8
Selected Stories
1996 · 412 pages
Munro set her stories in Ontario towns where a woman's life can turn on something said at a kitchen table. She fits more into forty pages than most novelists get into a novel.
★ 7.7
2001
1999
Dre hired live musicians instead of sampling, and had Jay-Z write the words to Still D.R.E. for him. Eminem turns up throughout.
★ 7.7
Mama Said Knock You Out
1990 · From Mama Said Knock You Out
His grandmother told him to knock them out; Marley Marl looped Funky Drummer, and the Grammy followed.
★ 7.7
...Baby One More Time
1998
Max Martin built it at Cheiron in Stockholm after TLC and the Backstreet Boys passed, and Spears was sixteen.
★ 7.7
Say My Name
1999
Rodney Jerkins chopped the beat into stop-start halves, and a phone call full of suspicion became two Grammys.
★ 7.7
Mind Playing Tricks On Me
1991
An Isaac Hayes loop from Tough Guys, three verses by Scarface, and a rap record about fear rather than swagger.
★ 7.7
Under the Bridge
1991 · From Blood Sugar Sex Magik
Rubin found the poem in Kiedis's notebook and pushed for it; Frusciante's mother sings in the choir at the end.
★ 7.7
Creep (Radiohead)
1992 · From Pablo Honey
Greenwood meant those three dead notes before the chorus to wreck the song, and they are what makes it work.
★ 7.7
Everlong
1997
Drums by Grohl, Hawkins not yet in the band, and Louise Post's backing vocals sung down a phone from Chicago.
★ 7.7
Black Hole Sun
1994 · From Superunknown
A Leslie speaker gives the guitars their swirl, and Cornell built the title from a misheard news broadcast.
★ 7.7
American Pastoral
1997 · 423 pages
Seymour Levov has a glove factory, a beauty queen wife, and the whole postwar American promise, until his stuttering daughter plants a bomb in 1968. Roth takes a decent man apart.
★ 7.7
Protect Ya Neck
1993 · From Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
Eight MCs, a beat RZA scrapped and rebuilt, and a 12-inch the group pressed themselves before any label would.
★ 7.7
All I Want For Christmas Is You
1994
Carey and Afanasieff wrote it fast in 1994 from Spector chords, and it reached number one twenty-five years later.
★ 7.7
Basket Case
1994 · From Dookie
Armstrong rewrote it around his undiagnosed panic attacks, cut it at Fantasy Studios, and sold punk to the suburbs.
★ 7.7
Live Forever
1994 · From Definitely Maybe
Gallagher wrote it in 1991, before Oasis had a record deal, pitching plain optimism against everything grunge was selling.
★ 7.7
Infinite Jest
1996 · 970 pages
Somewhere there is a film so entertaining that anyone who watches it stops eating. Wallace chases it through a tennis academy and a halfway house full of addicts he writes with real love.
★ 7.7
The Savage Detectives
1998 · 592 pages
Two young poets calling themselves visceral realists vanish into the Sonoran desert hunting a woman who published a single poem decades earlier. Forty voices over twenty years piece together where they went.
★ 7.7
Disgrace
1999 · 220 pages
David Lurie loses his professorship over an affair with a student and retreats to his daughter's farm in the new South Africa, where three men arrive. Coetzee offers no comfort and no absolution.
★ 7.7
Scenario
1991 · From The Low End Theory
Five MCs passing the microphone, and Busta Rhymes at nineteen turning a guest verse into an entire career.
★ 7.6
Heart-Shaped Box
1993 · From In Utero
Albini recorded it at Pachyderm in a Minnesota winter, and Scott Litt later remixed it to lift Cobain's vocal.
★ 7.6
Endtroducing.....
1996
Built entirely out of other people's records, on a single sampler, in the basement of a Sacramento record shop full of unsorted vinyl.
★ 7.6
Big Poppa
1994 · From Ready to Die
Chucky Thompson built it on the Isley Brothers' Between the Sheets, and Biggie made charm sound entirely effortless.
★ 7.6
Mo Money Mo Problems
1996 · From Life After Death
Kelly Price sang the hook uncredited over Stevie J's flip of I'm Coming Out, a posthumous number one.
★ 7.6
Loser
1994 · From Mellow Gold
Six and a half hours in Stephenson's house, a slide guitar loop, and a hook mocking Beck's own rapping.
★ 7.6
Glory Box
1995 · From Dummy
Barrow looped Isaac Hayes' Ike's Rap II, Utley added the guitar, and Gibbons sings it like a demand.
★ 7.6
Who Am I (What's My Name)
1993 · From Doggystyle
Dre stacked Atomic Dog over Parliament and Funkadelic, and Snoop's debut single walked straight into the top ten.
★ 7.6
Enjoy the SilenceDepeche Mode
Enjoy the Silence
1990 · From Violator
Gore wrote it as a harmonium ballad; Wilder and Flood put a dance beat under it over his objections.
★ 7.6
Grace
1994
Buckley's voice covers about four octaves and he uses most of them. He drowned in the Mississippi three years later, aged thirty.
★ 7.6
Waterfalls
1995 · From CrazySexyCool
Organized Noize's horns, a million-dollar F. Gary Gray video, and the first number one record to confront AIDS.
★ 7.6
The Next Episode
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg
1999 · From 2001
Dre and Mel-Man built it on a David McCallum orchestral cut from 1967, arranged by Axelrod, and Nate Dogg closes.
★ 7.6
Check the Rhime
1990 · From The Low End Theory
An Average White Band loop, Q-Tip and Phife trading lines, and a Queens rooftop that Linden Boulevard still remembers.
★ 7.6
Alive
1991 · From Ten
Gossard's demo was called Dollar Short until Vedder set it to learning who his real father was.
★ 7.6
Hypnotize
1997 · From Life After Death
Herb Alpert's Rise looped into a strut, released five days before Wallace was killed, number one within weeks.
★ 7.6
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
1998
Jeff Mangum wrote it after reading Anne Frank's diary, played a musical saw on it, and then more or less disappeared for a decade.
★ 7.6
Mezzanine
1998
The three of them fell out badly making it, and Elizabeth Fraser sang Teardrop while grieving for Jeff Buckley, who had just drowned.
★ 7.6
The Truman Show
Directed by Peter Weir
1998
Psychiatrists named a delusion after it: a man begins to suspect his whole town is a set and everyone in his life is paid, and 1998 had no idea.
★ 7.6
The Lion King
Directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff
1994
Still the highest grossing hand-drawn film ever made: Disney sent a young cub into exile with a Shakespeare plot, and the opening sunrise raises the hair every time.
★ 7.5