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Q Albums of the 90s: 1992

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Welcome back to the Q Albums of the 90s thread. If you weren’t here for 1990 or 91, this is a thread where we get the chance to review Q’s choices for the top albums from each year between 1990 and 1998 as published in the December 1999 edition of Q.

So, let’s see which 10 albums Q thought were the pick of 1992 (“The Year Was Pissed Off”):

Tori Amos – Little Earthquakes
Ice Cube – The Predator
Lemonheads – It’s A Shame About Ray
Manic Street Preachers – Generation Terrorists
The Orb – U.F.Orb
Pearl Jam – Ten
Lou Reed – Magic and Loss
Stereo MCs – Connected
Neil Young – Harvest Moon
R.E.M. – Automatic for the People

1992. Election year in the US and UK. The year of the riots provoked by the acquittals after the Rodney King beating (hence the “Year was Pissed off” title). Barcelona had quite a year, hosting the Olympic Games, Expo and the Blaugrana won the European Cup for the first time. Madonna released her Sex book. Seinfeld had its breakthrough season (The Bubble Boy, the Cheever Letters and The Contest). And finally, the European Championships produced one of international football’s greatest shocks when Brian McClair scored a goal for Scotland (Denmark winning it was also unexpected).

What do you think of the list? Does it represent 1992 for you? What’s missing? And of course, how many have you got?

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Comments

  3. God. Q magazine and the Stereo MCs. I’d forgotten about that.

    Dunno about this list. The Predator over The Chronic? No Rage Against The Machine? No Prodigy Experience? No Vulgar Display Of Power?

    Guess they were limiting themselves to just the one Hip Hop record, as Check Your Head and Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde both came out that year.

    Also missing; Dirt by Alice In Chains, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 by Aphex Twin, Dirty by Sonic Youth (great record), Slanted and Enchanted by Pavement, Funky Divas by En Vogue, Lazer Guided Melodies by Spiritualized, Love Deluxe by Sade, Dry by PJ Harvey.

    Did Neil Young just make the list every time as a matter of course at this point?

    That said, at least It’s A Shame About Ray is there. Love that album.

      • To be fair, Selected Ambient Works was ahead of its time. Not sure how many people actually heard it in 1992.

        Couple of notable soundtrack omissions…

        The Bodyguard ate the year, is one of the best selling records of all time, and is pretty great.

        Juice is (for my money) one of the best Hip Hop soundtracks ever released, contains Know The Ledge by Eric B and Rakim (who also released a great album in 1992), and comes from an absolutely brilliant music-based movie which I keep meaning to write something about because I believe it had an outside impact on the decade.

        • Ah, the hell with it – if I don’t write it down now, I never will.

          Tupac Shakur was one of the most influential musical figures of the 1990s. His impact on Hip Hop, in particular, was enormous, and is still felt to this day, but there’s also an argument that US culture in general might look quite different without him.

          Tupac was the first of a very specific breed, in that he fused his mic skills with his persona, his persona with his broader life. He wasn’t a cartoon character – he was a mess of contradictions. He could be incredibly tender, and yet recklessly violent. He could speak with an unusual degree of empathy towards women (see: Brenda’s Got A Baby) one minute, and then preposterous misogyny the next (see: Wonda Why They Call You A Bitch). He clearly understood well the traps into which young black men are so often pushed by American life, and yet he often rushed towards them.

          Tupac was famous at 22 and dead at 25. But he blazed like a comet: he released several classic albums, beefed with anyone who looked at him sideways, (quite literally) fought the law and characterised for an entire generation a brand new archetype; a rebel who recognised the injustices of the system and responded to them with a sort of hyper-individualised counter aggression. Me Against The World. Only God Can Judge Me. The rallying cry for a whole generation of narcissists. Tupac was “the main character” before the main character was ever a thing, and people followed suit in their droves. Look at society today and you will see a billion Tupacs. They may not shoot at cops or orchestrate gang rapes, but they can tell you all about the unfairness of the world and why it justifies their bullshit.

          Of course, it didn’t hurt that Tupac was a perfect pop star. He looked sensational; utterly distinct, movie star good looks, the soulful eyes and trade mark tattoos. He moved like a panther onstage and brought with him an aura which would surely have seen him continue his pivot to Hollywood had he lived. He was also no slouch on the mic (albeit he never got near Biggie). For me, his cultural impact has always been greater than the volume of his actual classic records, but he had an immediately recognisable flow, full of character and urgency. He rapped like he knew he wouldn’t live long, and with a voice that simultaneously evoked both rawness and warmth. More importantly still, he very often spat the truth. Ugly, confusing truths that people weren’t used to hearing, and he spat them with a passion that reflected a life spent thinking about injustice.

          Most of the above is familiar. What may not be familiar is the critical role the movie Juice played in defining Tupac and solidifying the persona he would eventually take to market. To understand that, we need to go right back to the start.

          Born to Afeni Shakur, famously a member of the Black Panther Party, and named after Tupac Amaru II, the Andean revolutionary who attempted to forge a new Inca Empire in 18th century Peru, Tupac was “woke” before the term even existed. He grew up in an environment that saw him schooled on systems of oppression, US racial politics and economic injustice.

          Shakur was an intelligent and sensitive young man, but also surrounded by criminality. Numerous family members were convicted of violent crimes during his youth, and his mother was, by his own account, a drug addict. In the mid-80s, the family relocated from New York to Baltimore, and Shakur enrolled in the Baltimore School for the Arts. There, he wrote poetry, studied Jazz and ballet, and performed in numerous productions of Shakespeare.

          There’s a video of Tupac, taken while he was still at high school, talking about his perspective on the world. It’s well worth watching; he’s erudite, thoughtful, hopeful and composed. He also speaks with a gentleness and lack of machismo that is perhaps surprising, given this later persona. He was 17 years old at this stage.

          In the late 80s, Shakur moved again, this time to San Francisco, from where he decided to leverage his poetic skills and obvious charisma to launch a music career. Initially he was a backing dancer for Digital Underground, and by 1991 he had released his first album and was making moves. But it was the second album, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z, released in early 1993, that really saw Pac catch light. And between those two albums, something very important happened. That important thing was Juice.

          Juice is a 1992 movie directed by Ernest Dickerson. Dickerson had been Spike Lee’s cinematographer for 5 movies, culminating in Do The Right Thing. He would later work on The Wire. He was and is enormously talented, and Juice was his directorial debut. If you haven’t seen it (and you probably haven’t, it’s hard to get hold of these days), it’s well worth watching and the soundtrack is pure gold. Trailer below.

          Juice tells the story of four friends who are gradually dragged into a life of crime. The movie deals with police harassment, gang culture, and the difficulties of escaping a life of poverty by legitimate means. In addition to being Dickerson’s first spin in the director’s seat, it was also Tupac’s first proper movie role, playing Bishop – the group’s most nihilistic and self-destructive member, and the movie’s antagonist. Bishop is a classic character in Black American cinema, serving as a sort of Id figure for the culture. He’s rash, he prizes respect over everything, he intends to get his and he doesn’t care who he hurts to do so, himself included. He’s the product of a broken environment, he’s been treated as worthless and his response is anger and violence: if you don’t value me, I won’t value anything. Emerging just a year after Boyz N The Hood, Juice tackles numerous of that movie’s same themes, and was part of a first wave of Black American cinema to attempt to fully address the socio-economic challenges faced by African Americans, and the challenge of self-determination in the face of tremendous negative pressures.

          Juice essentially charts Bishop’s descent. Early on, the group witness an armed robbery and are shaken. But not Bishop. Bishop emerges from the encounter positively glowing; for him, witnessing the robbery is witnessing a man seizing control of his own destiny, and he cannot wait to follow suit. Over the next 90 minutes, he cajoles, intimidates and threatens his friends into going along for the ride with him. Shakur’s performance is utterly brilliant – he fully inhabits the character and achieves a level of ominous malevolence that sits right up there with Robert Mitchum in Night of The Hunter. There are numerous classic scenes I could call on here, but I’ll go with the below, which is an absolute classic – particularly the way he positively spits that final “Partner”. In many ways, the first sighting of Tupac Shakur in his final form.

          Midway through the movie, Bishop delivers a soliloquy on crime as a route to self-determination that can be effectively seen as the maxim by which Tupac would go on to live the rest of his life:

          “You gotta snap some collars and let them motherfuckers know you here to take them out anytime you feel like it! You gotta get the ground beneath your feet, partner, get the wind behind your back and go out in a blaze if you got to! Otherwise you ain’t shit!”

          In addition to containing some fairly bracing imagery, the statement is both a charter for a man who does not plan to live long, and 90s Hip Hop’s great “will to power” moment. In an environment where you’re being given nothing to live for, why not find something to die for? A dangerous idea, if ever there was one.

          After the movie wrapped, Tupac spoke at length about how the experience had changed him. He worked very hard to embody Bishop – he’d deployed aspects of Method Acting, and tried to remain in character as much as possible. But he’d evidently also seen something in Bishop that resonated deeply with him. Some aspect that chimed with his own experience, or which allowed him to express and amplify a version of himself. There’s an excellent article here on how Pac came to embody the role: https://crookedmarquee.com/dont-sweat-the-technique-tupac-shakur-juice-and-method-acting/

          The Tupac that emerged from Juice was not the same as the Tupac from beforehand, and his meteoric ascent to global fame began almost immediately after the movie wrapped. Simply put; the Tupac Shakur persona as it came to be known, was minted on that set, refined, packaged and then sold to the world. It’s part of what explains how the 17 year old we see in the video above, whose body language and tone occasionally borders on effeminacy, becomes the swaggering, hyper-macho, take-on-all-comers of Hit Em Up, probably the most scalding and notorious diss track ever recorded (and origin point of one of the Internet’s best recent memes):

          Months after Juice released, Tupac would meet Biggie Smalls. The two were initially friends, but quickly fell out, leading to one of music’s most famous and violent feuds. Within 18 months of the release, he had engaged in a road rage shooting incident, been shot while working in the studio and convicted of first degree sexual abuse. The latter is a detail which often seems to be curiously edited out of accounts of his life. Of the sexual abuse conviction, Shakur later complained to Arsenio Hall that he could not believe “a woman would accuse me of taking something from her”, because he had been raised in a household filled with women. That stark duality again; the man who cried on the set of Poetic Justice when upbraided by Maya Angelou for his misogynistic lyrics, able to understand and vocalise the pain of women but unable (or unwilling) to refrain from his own complicity in it.

          Shakur emerged from prison in late 1995, straight into the arms of Suge Knight and Death Row records. If Tupac was performing the part of Bishop, Suge was the real deal – a monster of a human being who had lived the life Tupac was idealising for far longer than he had, and who understood very well its limitations and requirements. The relationship only served to turbo-charge Tupac’s increasingly nihilistic nature, but it also helped make him, for a time, arguably the biggest musical star on the planet. He became the living embodiment of Hip Hop, in that he characterised its rebel tendencies, its occasional self- destructiveness and its vulgar materialism. He was, in many ways, a vision from a hyper-individualised American future, landed in the mid-90s to show everyone the shape of things to come.

          It wasn’t entirely surprising to learn of Shakur’s death in late 1996, but it was still a lot to take in, and a seminal moment in that rather sleepy decade. There were, of course, rumours that his death was connected to that of Biggie Smalls, but the greater likelihood is that it was simply payback for a stupid, pointless fight into which he had entered with gang members earlier in the evening. His persona had written an awful lot of cheques in a very short space of time, and eventually he came to write one that his body simply could not cash.

          In death, Tupac became an American icon. He had achieved a remarkable level of impact and notoriety in a relatively short space of time, and had foreshadowed his own death almost constantly while doing so. More curiously, in death he also completed a morbidly similar character arc to that of Bishop. It is difficult to think of any other major figure in pop culture who came to be so defined by his public persona, and whose public persona was informed so heavily by an early-career acting performance, and it remains a fascinating footnote in the history of the 1990s.

          • I applaud your dedication to the cause, and this is a passionate and erudite appraisal.

            However, I’m not a Tupac fan, despite liking a lot of hip-hop, and have never knowingly enjoyed listening to one of his records! It’s me not you! Vive le difference!

            • I wouldn’t consider myself a massive fan either.

              I’m a fan of his flow, and there are several songs of his I love (most obviously Do For Love, Keep Ya Head Up, Hail Mary, Rather Be Ya, and the magnificent pairing of Changes and Dear Mama), but I never reach for the albums and I enjoy his thespian work more than his music.

              Regardless, I can still see the influence he’s had, including on a number of musicians who I do love. Oh, and I absolutely love Juice. It’s fantastic.

            • What a wonderful post, Bingo.

              A lot of what you say about Juice reflects the way I feel about Super Fly twenty years earlier.

              My favourite Tupac album is Me Against The World, recorded after a brush with death and before his prison sentence. This is the tender, humane, reflective Tupac who is fully aware of the predicament he is in. He is defiant but there isn’t much gangsta on this LP and he’s very forgiving of his mother. Contrast with the All Eyez On Me, his first for Death Row, a sprawling, double album worth of material conjured up in jail. Here is the full-on Gansta. It’s sobering listening to one after the other.

              • I can confirm from my work with teenage offenders that he’s still quite an icon among them, from the Only God Can Judge Me tattoos to their artwork.

              • Super Fly is a great comparison, and a similarly wonderful soundtrack.

                I agree on both the albums. I remember reading somewhere or other of Native American tribes who believed that each individual has within them two people fighting for control. I can think of few public figures more befitting that description than Tupac – his short life really was a struggle between two conflicting North Stars.

          • Fantastic post, Bingo. Thank you for taking the time to draft it. Hip hop and Rap is so far removed from my comfort zone and tastes, but articles like that provide a lot of ins to something I wouldn’t normally listen to.

    • I was going to add Dirty to my 1991 list but, luckily, looked it up first. So I’m now going to add it to my 1992 list. A great art-rock record, released on a major label.

      Dry was great, but much better live.

  7. 1992 was Joe Henderson’s year. He released two of his best albums. He was 54 and described as a veteran. I was twenty years younger and accepted that description without a second thought.

    The first featured a quintet including Wynton Marsalis on trumpet but his beautifully recorded sax dominates. Lush Life: The Music Of Billy Strayhorn.

    Miles Davis died in September 1991. Joe gathered together three ex-Miles musicians: John Scofield guitar, Dave Holland bass and Al Foster drums. The result, So Near, So Far (Musings For Miles), is the best Miles tribute album I’ve heard.

  8. Only 6 from this years list – missing the Ice Cube, Lemonheads, Manics & Stereo MCs

    A few that I would have included…
    Lindsey Buckingham / Out of The Cradle (his best solo album(
    Corduroy / Dad Man Cat
    Mary Coughlan / Sentimental Killers (includes her superb version of Magellan Laundry)
    Suzanne Vega / 99.9F (Blood Makes Noise is an epic track)
    Roger Waters / Amused To Death
    XTC / Nonsuch (some days its my favourite of theirs)

    • Oh yes – a good call on the Suzanne Vega album. Excellent. I love “In Liverpool”.

      I think that Mary Coughlan track was “Magdalen Laundry”. Wasn’t Magellan some Portuguese guy who sailed round the world or something? Mind you, at the end of a voyage like that, you’d probably have a LOT of laundry, so one could certainly write a great song about how many of old Ferdinand’s shirts needed to be washed. Arf!

    • 99.9F is a fantastic album and a genuinely surprising one. It seemed to be a strong reaction to the middling reviews that met the release of Days of Open Hand. But it’s not only the sound of the album that marks it out, it also had some of her best songwriting. Blood Makes Noise, In Liverpool, Bad Wisdom and When Heroes Go Down are all great songs.

    • 1992 was a miserable year for me. Didn’t like my work; didn’t like my home. Suspect I didn’t buy much music that year as a result, so I only have Tori Amos from that list. I am glad that its was some years later before I bought Nonsuch, so it didn’t get associated with a rubbish time of life. Nonsuch is a delight.

  9. Generation Terrorists – that’s a prime candidate for “better as a single album”.
    It was supposed to be their one statement and then they would split up.
    Didn’t happen, and they went on to release better albums

  10. Eight from this list. The only ones I didn’t get were the Lou Reed and the Pearl Jam albums.

    The Predator has the most exciting first few tracks of any album but it’s patchy thereafter. The DJ Muggs tracks are a highlight.

    The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion is all the Black Crowes that I will ever need and was very much right place, right time as I bought it as I set off interrailing. Hard to listen to it now without thinking of Amsterdam.

    Psalm 69 by Ministry and Honey’s Dead by the JAMC (with the Rollercoaster tour) were both great albums. Certainly, the best of Ministry before a downturn.

    Generation Terrorists…one double album they said! Then break up. It has its moments but it’s not that good. The highlight of seeing them at Manchester University was when Fight The Power came over the PA after the band left the stage.

    Red Heaven by Throwing Muses…I was loyal and it had some good songs but it’s neither as good as Real Ramona nor University.

    • I’m glad someone has mentioned The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion its often the first thing I think of when I wonder what my favourite album is. They never bettered it but there’s a lot to like in the rest of The Black Crowes output.

  11. This looks like the year that got away as far as I am concerned, although I expect that may continue to be the case through the decade. I only have one of those (REM) and listened to two of the others in the year, the Lemonheads and Neil Young. The REM has its moments of course, but I don’t remmber being wildly impressed with the other two.

    It was the year Bruce released two of his weakest records (at least up to that point), and I couldn’t be bothered to get Bob’s Good as I Been To You. I htink the new record I probably listened to the most was Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Come On Come On, and Annie Lennox’s solo debut Diva was Mrs BB’s record of choice. But bringing up two small children meant that The Wheels on the Bus was probably the most played tune in our household…..

  12. My second year at University, which means I have better representation from this set.

    Evan Dando gets regular airplay around here, and that album, in particular, is heavily played.

    I’m going to swim against the tide on Generation Terrorists. I found the album via the Another Infectious Disease track that I think Q issued on a compilation.

    I love it, and won’t usually hear a bad word against it. I have very fond memories of standing in front of Star Force, a pint off to the side, and a stack of 10p coins and wasting at least one degree classification shooting aliens listening to this at full volume.

    It’s Rik if he got into a band. Except the band makes music that sounds great played at 11. It isn’t subtle, lyrically or musically. I wasn’t buying into the whole “Richie” thing. It worked its way through my filter mechanism: does this sound good played loud? K. And the lyrics are about what again?

    I’ll be happy if I never hear AFTP again – it was the break up album for a fella two doors down from me.

    • One of the good things about these threads is going back to listen to albums from this time. As well as The Predator, I had a listen to Generation Terrorists this morning.

      It wouldn’t be the album it is without Richey, who probably brought the grandstanding with him. Double album, have it produced by The Bomb Squad and then break up. Instead, they got the guy who produced The Cult, got one track mixed by Nick Sansano and stayed together.

      But for all that, there’s a bunch of great songs on there. Love’s Sweet Exile, You Love Us and Motorcycle Emptiness. All good. But I still remember the falling away of the scales from my eyes with Slash And Burn and Another Invented Disease. If I’d wanted Guns’n’Roses…

  13. Happy with Tori Amos, Neil Young and REM. This was my playlist for that year:

    Uh-Oh (David Byrne)
    Ingenue (k d lang)
    Joshua Judges Ruth (Lyle Lovett)
    Nonsuch (XTC)
    Goin’ Back to New Orleans (Dr John)
    Gordon (Barenaked Ladies)
    Sweet Old World (Lucinda Williams)
    Hollywood Town Hall (Jayhawks)
    The Future (Leonard Cohen)

  14. A year that was a bit meh, from looking at the Q list – worthy but dull. The Neil Young was the only one from the Q list I went for, it’s a slow burn with nothing like the rawness of the rock from Freedom or Ragged Glory, but memorable songs nevertheless. I liked the Stereo MCs, but not enough to buy the album.

    Here’s my list of memorable records from 1992

    June Tabor – Angel Tiger
    some mighty songs on here – 10,00 miles, Hard Love, All Our Trades Are Gone, All This Useless Beauty – how I learned to love the cold austere passion of her voice. *shiver*
    Annie Lennox – Diva
    The one album where I think she recaptured some of the directness and boldness of the early Eurythmics
    En Vogue – Funky Divas
    Whatta Man, Free Your Mind – great sass
    The Moonflowers – Hash Smits
    Big in the Bristol area, but not much elsewhere – they were like a hippy Stone Roses with funky drumming and psychedelic sounds and a great stage presence. I miss them
    Luna – Lunapark
    the first of the Dean Wareham project that caught me unawares and liking as a good second division band – no stardust, but great songs to get lost in, full of umami sounds.
    Aphex Twin – selected ambient works
    mentioned elsewhere, one of the few alternative electronic sounds from a year that seemed bland, overall
    James – Seven
    correctly placed now, a big sound with no greater ambition than that.
    Chumbawamba- Shhh!
    Nice bit of subversiveness, particularly Stitch That! They crammed their ideas into really hummable tunes
    Spectrum – Soul Kiss
    Floating away in a gentle bubble of sound – not very memorable, but enjoyable while listening to it
    Sophie B Hawkins – Tongues & Tails
    Damn I Wish I was Your Lover – another mainstream release on my list. This oozed sensuality
    Soundtrack – Northern Exposure
    Wondrous diversity of songs that introduced me to many new artistes – Etta James, Nat King Cole, Lynyrd Skynard, MIriam Makeba, etc
    Twinkle Bros – Inna Polish Stylee
    I love a good mash up, and reggae with folk music? Only done better by Edward II & Red Hot Polkas

  15. Lemonheads, REM and Stereo MCs for me (and just bought Ten but not actually played it yet).

    There are some MAJOR ommissions for me;
    Copper Blue by Sugar – Bob Mould’s greatest and most accessible record.
    Going Blank Again – Ride, one of my favourite albums ever. Certainly top 10.
    Fragments of a Rainy Season – John Cale, possibly the greatest live album for me (better even than Concert and VU1969)
    Hips and Makers – Kristin Hersh – 2nd favourte of hers after the Strings EP a couple of years later
    Dirty – Sonic Youth
    Dry – PJ Harvey

    And also to be considered –
    Mysterio by Ian McCulloch, my favourite of his solo albums
    Does the Hit Parade by The Wedding Present count?
    Singles Soundtrack – pretty much the Seattle sound, but particularly Paul Westerberg

    No takers for Your Arsenal? Ok, I admit I’m just doing this to be provocative now.

    • I’m surprised Your Arsenal didn’t make it. He was less controversial in 1999.

      There is some Morrissey in future years (you can probably guess which one). But I think Your Arsenal is his best solo album.

    • I had a lot of time for Your Arsenal in ’92, especially due to the punchy Mick Ronson production, despite the clear and present signs that had begun to emerge that Morrissey might not be quite as benevolently liberal as might have been hoped.

      But for me, miserable in my first year on a pointless parent-pleasing degree course at the Dudley campus of Wolverhampton University, ‘Going Blank Again’ was non stop on my Walkman. It was (and is) an exceptional album, but the cassette was jammed in there, meaning I couldn’t remove it on endless lonely bus journeys to and from campus. I can still hear every warp and wobble from my copy now, whenever I hear the intro to ‘Leave Them All Behind’.

  16. I’d definitely put in Check Your Head

    The opening 1-2 kick off of Sting Me and Remedy from Southern Harmony is still one of the most exciting starts to an album I’ve ever heard

    Amazing that Copper Blue didn’t make the original list. I once had a fairly serious arguement with a friend in the pub in 1992 by insisting it was better than anything Husker Du had done.

  17. That Stereo MCs album took forever to come out. I saw them support EMF on 16th January 1991 (i know because 3 live EMF tracks were released on a 12″ single). Needless to say, the MCs blew EMF off stage. The album was released in October 92.

    They did it again when I saw them support Happy Mondays at Brixton (when Bez had his arm in plaster, and Shaun was so out of it he could barely stand).

  18. I bought the Morrissey – it was pretty good, Mick Ronson producing.
    Also:
    Lemonheads – like it a lot, especially My Drug Buddy.
    Lou Reed – Magic and Loss. Decent but prefer Songs For Drella.
    Neil Young, REM. Perhaps reacting to the hard rock, grunge godfather tag Neil goes more country and soft and it’s his next best of the 90s. Part of his best period since the 70s peak. REM? Not as enthusiastic about this as others but it’s got some great suff on it. My favourites would be Drive and Find The River.
    The Cure – Wish. I played it a fair amount. Can’t remember much about it. Friday I’m In Love is a classic though.
    Nirvana – Incesticide. This is an odds and sods thing but it hangs together very well. Some great things like Aneurysm.
    I’m reminded of Kristin Hersh – Hips and Makers, by a comment above, which has the ‘hit’ with Stipey. Something I can listen to still.
    Pearl Jam – 10 is a bit stodgy for me, sort of hard rock not played that well. Bit harsh maybe.

    Seems like a bit of a more of the same year. I feel like I could have been more adventurous with my purchases. Lemonheads win I guess.

  19. 7 this year for me, which is the average so far.

    REM is one of the greatest albums ever made, the Manics showed promise, but would move on to much better things. Never play Tori. Very strong albums from “veterans” Lou and Neil who were in their 40s probably! Strongish year

  20. Well, I certainly bought and enjoyed the Neil Young and Tori Amos albums from the original Q list.

    I was also grooving to the following platters, most of which have been mentioned by other Afterworders above.

    Sugar – Copper Blue (One of Bob Mould’s three greatest records)
    June Tabor – Angel Tiger (“Hard Love” is such a brilliant opening track)
    Oysterband – Deserters
    Lyle Lovett – Joshua Judges Ruth (contains his best-ever song, “Family Reserve”)
    Peter Gabriel – Us (strange that no one’s mentioned this yet)
    Mary Chapin Carpenter – Come On Come On
    10,000 Maniacs – Our Time in Eden
    Baaba Maal – Lam Toro
    Leonard Cohen – The Future (mainly brilliant)

    But 1992 is probably the only year where I’ll agree with Q Magazine’s choice of Best Album: R.E.M.’s “Automatic for the People”. I have all the R.E.M. albums, and for me it’s clearly their masterpiece. Twelve cracking songs – I can’t fault any of them. I still listen to the album regularly and never tire of it.

  21. Looking at other lists of 1992 albums, the one that I played most at the time and that I’ve played most over the years was Brian Eno’s Nerve Net. Following on from the Eno Cale collaboration Wrong Way Up, this still sounds contemporary and there is quite a variety in the tracks. It’s quite the showcase for his production and collaboration skills.

  22. 1992 was the year my dad died, soundtracked by Automatic For The People. I went years without listening to it at all but, nowadays, I can spend all day in its company. (I’ve posted elsewhere about this in some detail.) The release that united my parents and I was Elvis Presley – The King Of Rock And Roll: The Complete 50s Master, probably the best box set ever.

    Looking at that Q list and beyond the top ten, it was a pretty good year for albums. Certainly, better than the two years before. I dug out Television after the recent death of TV and it is excellent. There were plenty as good, if not better in 1992.

  23. Has anyone mentioned Henry’s Dream by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds? It’s one of my favourites by the raven-haired coronation attender. Very atmospheric and the band is tremendous – a real “..& The Bad Seeds” record.
    As Bingo said, there were quite a few decent hip hop albums knocking about: Paris, The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy, Arrested Development and The Goats to add to those mentioned.
    From the Q list I only bought the Stereo MCs which, as luck would have it, I dug out for the first time in years only about a month ago and was surprised by how much I liked it. In ‘92 I was flush for the first time in a while so, when buying records, I tended to buy my “new” alongside something class to fill out my collection. As it happened I bought Connected the same day as a rather spiffing Curtis Mayfield Best Of, so it got kind of lost and, in my memory, became a “three big singles and the rest” album..

    • I like Henry’s Dream. I don’t think it’s as good as The Good Son, but I prefer this Nick Cave to the post-Boatman’s Call Guardian Weekend Nick Cave.

      I remember reading that he didn’t like the production on the album. It’s true that it’s a bit raggedy-arse, but I think that adds to the charm.

  24. I bought four of the Q top ten during 1992 –
    Tori Amos, Lou Reed, Lemonheads and REM.

    However, My 1992 top albums, all purchased that year:
    Bill Frisell – Have a Little Faith
    Tom Waits – Bone Machine
    Sugar – Copper Blue
    Nick Cave & Bad Seeds – Henry’s Dream
    Suzanne Vega – 99.9F
    Jethro Tull – A Little Light Music (live)
    Little Village – same (got an undeserved kicking, IMHO)

    Also, the Crimson box set, Great Deceiver – one of the best of many live archive sets from Fripp, the 73/74 band in action. And the Onobox.

    After the fact, I bought Fragments of a Rainy Season, Harvest Moon, That What is Not, Black- Eyed Man and Main Offender.

  25. Again in the singles chart other stuff is happening – The Prodigy and The Shamen are leading the charge of rave (as it’s now called, not acid) into the charts. The Shamen’s previous album, En-tact, is much better than Boss Drum but it’s that one that sold in its millions and got schoolkids chanting ‘E’s are good’. M People are starting to have big hits and will take the Mercury next year, another sign that dance is the new indie. The Orb release a 40-minute single and play chess on toppie… Altern 8 are wearing their masks (way ahead of their time) and birthing happy hardcore. Artists like SL2 are coming from nowhere to have a number one then sinking back…

  27. The albums I listened to in 1992 included some of these-
    Lemonheads- Shame about Ray
    Corduroy- Dad Man Cat
    Spiritualized- Lazer guided melodies
    PJ Harvey- Dry
    Moonflowers- Hash Smits
    Aphex Twin- Selected ambient works
    Orb- UFOrb
    Thousand Years Stare- Hands on
    Sonic Youth- Dirty
    Leatherface- Mush
    Telescopes- Telescopes
    Spectrum – Soul kiss

    Probably the only two I listen to regularly now are Dry and Lazer guided melodies, with the occasional Shame about Ray and Mush. I came to check your head, copper blue, Henry’s dream and automatic for the people later (thought copper blue was 1991, oh well). Oh, I picked up Connected whilst on my travels in ’93.

  28. Not a great music year for me, not only do I own exactly zero of the Q list (and have never actually listened to any of them, so neither did my friends at the time), but looking through my WMP the only albums from -92 are The Jayhawks – Hollywood Town Hall (brilliant, but I only bought it later), XTC – Nonsuch (even better, didn’t buy that one in -92 either), and Iris DeMent – Infamous Angel (heard it sooner but didn’t buy it until this year or late last year). Plus the only ones I bought at the time: Papa Wemba – Le Voyageur (OK, but not his best), Sting – Nothing Like The Sun (I was still a loyal Police fan at the time, but it was wearing rather thin with each Sting solo effort, although all of them had a few good tracks), and The (Prince) Love Symbol Album… (only three tracks ripped from that one, so not a favourite!)

    What I did buy in -92 were some great compilations: Floored Genius (J Cope), The Eternal Dance (Earth, Wind & Fire), Erasure Pop! The First 20 Hits, Divine Madness, Twice Upon A Time (Siouxsie), Squeeze Greatest Hits. I was very poor at this point in time, so couldn’t afford to take many chances, so stuck to what I knew.
    I still always look for cheap CDs from the 90s in charity shops, especially Swedish albums, because I couldn’t buy them back then.

    • The early 90s was a good time for CD compilations. My C90 of the Marc Almond/Soft Cell comp accompanied me around Europe when I went interrailing. The Specials Singles, mentioned by Rigid in the 1991 thread was also good.

      It can’t be repeated often enough that Siouxsie and the Banshees were a great singles band.

      • Interesting… ABBA Gold and Divine Madness in the same year..

        Must be something in that. Perhaps 1992 was the year that we fully embraced late 70s and early 80s pop?

      • If you weren’t letting yourself get brainwashed by ABBA as they shot to fame, growing up in Sweden in the 70s was quite a traumatic musical experience, ABBA songs being played around the clock absolutely everywhere at the time.
        So I was still not convinced of their greatness in -92 and wouldn’t have been caught dead buying the compilation. I don’t mind them now, but I don’t love them either…

  29. Two missing from me.

    Denim – Back in Denim. At the time I was unbelievably excited by Lawrence’s return after what seemed like years (2 in fact). I was too young to get most of the references so it’s only got better with age. Hard to believe it wasn’t the proper hit it would surely have been a couple of years later. He’s never got close since.

    Julian Cope – Jehovahkill. The second half of what I still consider to be one of the best double whammys in music history. The Drude ruled 91/92 for me. Still love the fact that that side 4 of the vinyl was an etching of a stone circle. The t-shirt was great too.

    Shout out too for the already mentioned Lazer Guided Melodies. Still listen today and wish I still had the t-shirt.

  30. 1992 was for me a years of ups ( better than expected degree result) and lows ( General election and a bad breakup). Ambient and 90s techno in emergence. Additional choices:

    Pavement – Slanted and Enchanted ( their best album but presumably not a Q favourite)
    Spiritualized – Lazer Guided Melodies ( mentioned above but I too still rate it)
    Stereolab- Peng! ( their tentative debut album)
    New Fast Automatic Daffodils- Exit Body Mind ( forlorn second album that I played at the time)

  32. Just thought of something else musical which made a big impact in 1992. Not an original album, but the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack was massive at the time, and I think kickstarted a new sense of retro/cool/kitsch which underpinned the 90s and which you can still feel in evidence today. Very influential, certainly to me and my musical taste. Little Green Bag, Hooked on a Feeling, Stuck in the Middle with You… some great tunes rescued from relative obscurity. Tarantino took the Scorsese “jukebox soundtrack” approach and really ran with it.

  35. Only just catching up on this wonderful thread (will go back to 1990 & 1991 shortly), pretty certain my 2 fave albums havent been mentioned…..Paul Weller (1st solo album after a couple of years in wilderness, lovely shades of Style Council included) and 0898 by The Beautiful South (always been a sucker for Paul Heatons writing)….couple more not mentioned, Hey Babe by Juliana Hatfield and Change Everything by Del Amitri ….oh yes and being an old Jam fan I was thrilled by the Extras compliation….

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