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
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1991
Showing 156 works across all media from 1991
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Terminator 2: Judgment Day · 1991
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
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
Alive
1991 · From Ten
Gossard's demo was called Dollar Short until Vedder set it to learning who his real father was.
★ 7.6
Ten
1991
The band were called Mookie Blaylock after a basketball player until the label objected, and the album is named for his shirt number.
★ 7.4
In Bloom
1991 · From Nevermind
Cobain aimed it at fans who missed the point, and Kerslake's video staged them on a mock Ed Sullivan Show.
★ 7.4
Lithium
1991 · From Nevermind
The only Nevermind track cut to a click track, and Grohl's metronome only makes the quiet-loud lurch hit harder.
★ 7.4
Beauty and the Beast
Directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise
1991
The peak of the Disney Renaissance, and the moment computers earned a place in hand-drawn animation: the ballroom sequence still looks like nothing anyone had done before.
★ 7.3
Can I Kick It?
1991 · From People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm
A borrowed Lou Reed bassline that reportedly took all the royalties, and a call-and-response hook the crowd finishes.
★ 7.3
Give it Away
1991 · From Blood Sugar Sex Magik
Nina Hagen handed Kiedis a jacket from her closet, and Frusciante ran his solo backwards over Flea's jam-session riff.
★ 7.2
Tale as old as time, true as it can be. Barely even friends, then somebody bends unexpectedly.
Beauty and the Beast · 1991
Point Break · 1991
OPPNaughty by Nature
OPP
1991
A loop of the Jackson 5's "ABC," Melvin Bliss drums, and an acronym that carried the group to number six.
★ 6.9
Loveless
1991
Kevin Shields plays with the tremolo arm held bent while he strums, which is what makes the chords sag. It nearly bankrupted the label.
★ 6.9
Boyz n the Hood
Directed by John Singleton
1991
Singleton came straight out of USC film school and filmed the neighborhood he grew up in: South Central rendered as a place where a father raising his son is itself a full-time job.
★ 6.8
I Can't Make You Love Me
1991
Bruce Hornsby's piano behind a vocal Raitt cut in one take, then refused to try again.
★ 6.7
JFK
Directed by Oliver Stone
1991
A film that changed federal law: the outcry over Stone's conspiracy case pushed Congress to pass the JFK Records Act, and the editing that sells it remains the most aggressive in American film.
★ 6.6
Thelma and Louise
Directed by Ridley Scott
1991
Callie Khouri's script did something no American road movie had done: put two women in the car and let the country outside it turn hostile, while the friendship becomes the only reliable thing.
★ 6.6
Nothing Else Matters
1991 · From Metallica (The Black Album)
By Hetfield's account the open-string intro came one-handed during a phone call, and Kamen's strings did the rest.
★ 6.6
Remember the Time
1991 · From Dangerous
Teddy Riley's new jack swing under a nostalgia lyric, with John Singleton staging the video in ancient Egypt.
★ 6.5
Black or White
1991 · From Dangerous
Bill Bottrell played the riff everyone credits to Slash, then rapped the verse himself after eight months of searching.
★ 6.5
The Prize
The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
1991 · 928 pages
Oil is the story of the modern world, Yergin argues, and he follows it from the first Pennsylvania derrick through two world wars that ran on it to Saddam Hussein's tanks in Kuwait.
★ 6.4
The Choice Is Yours
1991
An upright bass loop, a playground chant for a hook, and a remix that so eclipsed the original nobody plays it.
★ 6.3
Mysterious Ways
1991 · From Achtung Baby
Grown from a Dublin jam called Sick Puppy, and Edge's Korg funk-wah setting turned Clayton's bassline into U2's funkiest record.
★ 6.2
But Beautiful
1991 · 240 pages
Dyer imagines his way into the nights of jazz musicians, Lester Young after the army broke him and Thelonious Monk alone at a piano, inventing scenes to reach what no biography can.
★ 6.2
Summertime
1991
Hula and K. Fingers looped Kool and the Gang's Summer Madness, and the duo won a Grammy for it.
★ 6.1
How I Could Just Kill a Man
1991 · From Cypress Hill
Muggs looped Lowell Fulson's 1967 "Tramp" for the guitar and bass, and B-Real's nasal whine arrived fully formed.
★ 6.0
Motownphilly
1991
Michael Bivins raps their discovery story over Dallas Austin's new jack swing, with a doo-wop turn at the close.
★ 6.0
Out of Time
1991
Losing My Religion is built on a mandolin guitarist Peter Buck had just bought and was learning. They refused to tour the album at all.
★ 6.0
Tears in Heaven
1991
Will Jennings helped finish a lyric Clapton wrote after his four-year-old son died; three Grammys followed in 1993.
★ 5.9
Yellow Ledbetter
1991
McCready's riff was a Ten outtake, and Vedder improvised a lyric he has been rewriting onstage ever since.
★ 5.9
Churchill
A Life
1991 · 1088 pages
Having written six volumes of Churchill's official biography, Gilbert put the whole life into one book, from the cavalry charge at Omdurman to 1965, drawing on twenty years inside the papers.
★ 5.9
Into the Great Wide Open
1991 · From Into the Great Wide Open
Petty and Jeff Lynne wrote Eddie's rise and fall as one unbroken story; Johnny Depp played him on screen.
★ 5.8
The Famished Road
1991 · 500 pages
Azaro is an abiku, a spirit child who keeps refusing to die, and Okri sets him loose in a Nigerian slum where ghosts crowd the bar and political thugs hand out poisoned milk.
★ 5.7
The Sorrow of War
A Novel of North Vietnam
1991 · 240 pages
Kien spends the peace gathering the dead from the jungle that swallowed his battalion, and the war returns out of sequence. Bao Ninh enlisted at seventeen among five hundred, and ten came home.
★ 5.7
Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg
1991 · From Ooooooohhh... On the TLC Tip
Dallas Austin stacked seven samples, an Average White Band loop sped up, and Left Eye wrote the rap.
★ 5.6
Marvelous Possessions
The Wonder of the New World
1991 · 202 pages
Wonder was never innocent, Greenblatt argues. Reading Columbus's landfall and the travel writers around him, he catches the moment when amazement at a new world hardens into a claim to own it.
★ 5.6
Shut 'em Down
1991 · From Apocalypse 91... The Enemy Strikes Black
Chuck D aimed it at corporations that profit off Black neighborhoods without reinvesting, and Pete Rock's remix outgrew the original.
★ 5.6
Learnin' to Fly
1991 · From Into the Great Wide Open
Four chords, F, C, A minor, G, looping unchanged while Petty and Jeff Lynne make uplift sound effortless.
★ 5.5
Badmotorfinger
1991
It came out two weeks after Nevermind and got buried. Soundgarden spent the tour opening for Guns N' Roses instead.
★ 5.5
Death Certificate
1991
Cube split it into a death side and a life side. Several chains refused to stock it and Billboard ran an editorial against it.
★ 5.5
I do wish we could chat longer but...I'm having an old friend for dinner.
The Silence of the Lambs · 1991
American Psycho
1991 · 399 pages
Patrick Bateman works mergers and acquisitions, agonizes over the typeface on a colleague's business card, and narrates atrocities in the voice he uses for Huey Lewis albums. Reagan's Wall Street becomes horror comedy.
★ 5.4