Let’s say you own a rock radio station in 2016. First, condolences. Second, there’s a very good chance that you will base your playlist off of six albums that were released in August and September of 1991: Nirvana’s Nevermind, Pearl Jam’s Ten, Metallica’s Metallica (a.k.a. “The Black Album”), Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik. If ’90s rock is the new classic rock, then these albums have assumed the “deathless warhorse” mantle previously bestowed on much-played records by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and the Who.
Incredibly, they all came out within about six weeks of each other. Somewhat less incredibly, I’ve decided to determine which 1991 rock classic is most important.
How do you go about making this unnecessary but nonetheless extremely necessary distinction? First, you need to establish some criteria, such as the following:
1. Historical significance, i.e. how these albums are regarded now.
2. Day-of-release excitement, i.e. how people regarded these albums back then.
3. Innate ’90s-ness, i.e. the degree to which each album encapsulates the era, for better or worse.
4. Music videos, i.e. the quality of the music videos that the albums spawned.
5. Cultural penetration, i.e. the degree to which the average person, particularly a non-fan, is familiar with each album.
6. Musical quality, i.e. the degree to which I, the person writing this story, personally like these records.
Now that we have our criteria, we must rank the albums in each category. Then, we will compile an average ranking for each LP, and arrange these average scores from lowest to highest. The album with the lowest score wins. (For the sake of this discussion, the Use Your Illusion albums will be considered a single entity.)
Make sense? Didn’t think so, but let’s proceed anyway.
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE
1. Nevermind
2. Ten
3. Metallica
4. Blood Sugar Sex Magik
5. Use Your Illusion I and II
“Historical significance” is a slippery term most often associated with long-term critical acclaim and record sales. For our purposes, we’re going to table the conversation about record sales for a brief moment, and focus solely on critical acclaim. To keep it simple, let’s rely on Rolling Stone‘s Top 500 Albums list from 2003, which functions as a convenient (if imperfect) snapshot of how these classic albums have come to be regarded by critics.
Nevermind, unsurprisingly, comes out ahead at no. 17, distantly followed by Ten (207), Metallica (252), and Blood Sugar Sex Magik (310). Neither Use Your Illusion album ranked in the top 500. (GNR did clock in at no. 61 for Appetite for Destruction, however.)
Of course, you don’t really need statistics to know that Nevermind is the most revered rock record of 1991. After all, Nevermind has been the subject of roughly 942 hours of critical analysis in the form of books and documentaries. Whereas the Use Your Illusion albums merely contain 942 hours of music. The difference is pretty obvious.
DAY-OF-RELEASE EXCITEMENT
1. Use Your Illusion I and II
2. Metallica
3. Nevermind
4. Blood Sugar Sex Magik
5. Ten
In September 1991, Nirvana was an up-and-coming indie band about to put out its eagerly anticipated major-label release. They were about as big as Car Seat Headrest is now. The Chili Peppers were known primarily for a crappy but popular Stevie Wonder cover. Pearl Jam was a brand new band and virtually unknown to anyone who hadn’t bought Mother Love Bone’s Apple.
The only bands that carved out actual cultural moments on the respective release dates were Guns N’ Roses, probably the biggest band in the world at that time, and Metallica, the most popular “underground” metal act. “The Black Album” did incredible business in its first week, moving nearly 600,000 units, but GNR was a true behemoth, selling an estimated 500,000 albums in just two hours after both Use Your Illusion LPs went on sale at midnight on Sept. 17, 1991.
Anecdotally, I don’t think I’ve ever personally anticipated anything musically as much as the Use Your Illusion albums. I was 14 when the Use Your Illusion tapes dropped, which means I had been waiting for a new GNR album for nearly 25 percent of my life. Was it worth the wait? Let’s consult the Use Your Illusion I Wikipedia entry.
David Fricke has ruled in the affirmative. Let’s move on.
INNATE ’90s-NESS
1. Blood Sugar Sex Magik
2. Nevermind
3. Ten
4. Metallica
5. Use Your Illusion I and II
I’m afraid I don’t have any hard data to support these rankings. All I have is this screen-shot from the “Under the Bridge” video, an image that will forever signify “summer of 1992” in the annals of history.
More anecdotal evidence: Blood Sugar Sex Magik (along with the Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head) ruled most kid spaces in the early ’90s. In my experience, that meant sleepovers and driveway basketball games. The kids at my school liked Nevermind and Ten, but those albums seemed a little over-played. And you didn’t want to play that music at night when your parents were trying to sleep. “Sir Psycho Sexy,” on the other hand, could only be played at 2 a.m., in the midst of a 10-hour Tecmo Bowl marathon.
MUSIC VIDEOS
1. Ten
2. Use Your Illusion I and II
3. Nevermind
4. Blood Sugar Sex Magik
5. Metallica
It might seem crazy that Pearl Jam would come out ahead of Guns N’ Roses in this category given that 1. Axl Rose cared way too much about GNR’s Use Your Illusion era videos and 2. Eddie Vedder despised music videos. But as much as I love the thoroughly bonkers “Don’t Cry”/”November Rain”/”Estranged” triptych, those clips arguably hastened the end of GNR’s supremacy. The early ’90s simply weren’t amenable to muddled hard-rock psychodrama involving past lives, Stephanie Seymour, and magic dolphins.
Meanwhile, music videos were extremely important to Ten‘s popularity. MTV played the “Evenflow” video so many times it was practically a Clearasil commercial. Only instead of acne medication, MTV was now hawking Pearl Jam’s invigorating live show right as the band was about to barnstorm the country on the Lollapalooza tour.
And then there was this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS91knuzoOA
Look, you can make fun of the “Jeremy” video if you want. By 2016’s standards, it is screamingly melodramatic. (In 1992, it was only noticeably melodramatic.) But when I saw it for the first time, I thought that “Jeremy” was probably the greatest video I had ever seen, just as I thought Dead Poets Society was probably the greatest movie I had ever watched. (Use of suicide as a dramatic device factored highly in my artistic assessments at the time.) “Jeremy” made your own mundane middle-class teenage angst seem epic and profound and metaphorical for, like, the nation’s problems. Every 14-year-old feels like a sad martyr draped in the American flag. If you don’t still get chills when Vedder goes “whoooooa!” you weren’t having your butt kicked by puberty in the early ’90s.
CULTURAL PENETRATION
1. Metallica
2. Ten
3. Nevermind
4. Use Your Illusion I and II
5. Blood Sugar Sex Magik
Now, it’s time to discuss album sales — the bottom here is pretty lofty, with Use Your Illusion I and II and Blood Sugar Sex Magik each being certified seven times platinum. Nevermind has sold over 10 million in the U.S., and Ten has moved an estimated 13 million units.
But the champ here is Metallica — with more than 16 million copies sold, it was declared the best-selling album of the SoundScan era in 2014. But, again, let’s go past the numbers: Metallica is the album you’re most likely to still hear at sporting events, at the car wash, when you’re pumping gas, at any bar that serves hot wings, in your uncle’s garage, etc. If there is an assembly of more than six doughy, heterosexual white dudes between the ages of 25 and 44, federal law mandates that “Enter Sandman” or “Sad But True” play in the background at some point, no matter the innocent bystanders who happen to also be in the vicinity.
MUSICAL QUALITY
1. Nevermind
2. Ten
3. Use Your Illusion I and II
4. Metallica
5. Blood Sugar Sex Magik
To be honest, I don’t really have any desire to hear these albums ever again. But even if I did, I doubt I could truly listen to them anyway. At this point, I don’t know what I’m hearing when I play “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Alive” or “November Rain” or “Nothing Else Matters” or “Give It Away.” Am I hearing the song or my impression of the song shaped by my own experiences and the overbearing cultural context?
So, I’m trying to remember how I felt about these albums in 2001, when I wasn’t quite as sick of them as I am now, and yet had a little perspective on how I initially felt about them as a teenager. In ’01, Blood Sugar Sex Magik already seemed embarrassing, Metallica seemed like it was half good and half okay filler and 1/12th “Don’t Tread on Me,” and Use Your Illusion I and II was something I only wanted to hear when I was wasted and felt the need to replicate Slash’s guitar toss from the “November Rain” video with a case of Natty Ice.
So, it comes down to Nevermind vs. Ten. In a way, Ten is the album I prefer now, mostly because I used to skip deep cuts like “Garden” and “Deep,” which kept Ten fresher longer when I revisited the album and came to like those songs later on. But that could just be my Nevermind fatigue talking. There’s no doubt that 2001 me would’ve picked Nirvana. I still enjoyed playing Nevermind at that time, which is a pretty impressive run considering how overwhelming the album’s narrative had already become. Now, you can’t play “Drain You” without thinking about how Nevermind set Kurt Cobain up for his grand collapse. It’s become the album that scores the middle act of Nirvana documentaries. The narrative ate Nevermind.
FINAL RESULTS
1. Nevermind (2.2)
2. Ten (2.5)
3. Metallica (3.2)
4. Use Your Illusion I and II (3.3)
5. Blood Sugar Sex Magik (3.7)
We have proven scientifically that Nevermind is the most important rock album released in 1991. Feel free to utilize this data in future music discussions.
