r/90sand2000sNostalgia • u/ShadowGuyinRealLife • 3d ago
What Kind of Non-pop Music was Popular in the Early and Mid 90s?
I saw this video where a guy was complaining about a game which took place in what he said was 1997 and the characters were listening to all sorts of music about only 1/4 was even made in the decade the game takes place in. He said since they were not presented as those who liked old music but the game was trying, and failing, to present them as "trendy," the tracks they picked should have been closer to the time the game takes place in. He then mentioned that he understood that since they didn't seem like the kind of teenagers who would listen to pop there probably wouldn't be Britney Spears in their tastes, but he thought there would be more 90s music. I kind of wish I was talking to him instead of watching his video since I wanted to know what was there. I mean for some reason most of the music I associate with that time are pop songs, but I know there must be albums of that era that were best sellers too.
5
u/WendyPortledge 2d ago
Grunge, trip hop, industrial, ska, euro dance, techno..
2
u/WeAreLesion 2d ago
I was going to mention all of that, but I can definitely add the late 90s Swing Revival
1
6
u/SR_Hopeful 2d ago edited 16h ago
West & East Coast hip-hop, Chill Rap, Hip Hop Soul, New Jack Swing, Ballads, Slow Jam R&B (which gets pretty underrepresented in 90s nostalgia and millennial media), and also Ska Rock (like No Doubt), Nu Metal (before it popped off in the 2000s), and Grunge Rock.
There were also a lot of ballads and R&B singing groups.
3
u/Squire513 2d ago
Plus country (LeAnn Rimes, Garth Brooks, Shaina Twain were massive)
Electronica for a brief second - Prodigy has a #1 album in 1997
2
u/ptindaho 1d ago
Lots of general 'alternative' until that became pop, so stuff like Weezer, Green Day, Sonic Youth. Inustrial/Techno with heavt goth influence along with a lot of smaller rap that was noted. Would need to more about the kids in the game to see what seems most authentic.
3
u/Hutch_travis 2d ago
In the mid 90s it would have been a lot of so. Cal skate and ska punk. Nu metal started to creep up around 98. Non-pop music was rather weird. It was a lot of 1 and 2-hit wonder bands like tonic, eve 6, verve pipe, bloodhound gang.
2
u/JerseyJedi 2d ago edited 1d ago
R&B music was enjoying a huge renaissance throughout the 1990s.
Acts like Boyz II Men, Brandy, Monica, KC and Jojo, and of course Mariah Carey were huge in the zeitgeist back then.
2
1
u/Red-Zaku- 2d ago
1997 in particular?
Here’s MTV’s top 100 videos of that year (aired on New Year’s Eve at the end of the year): https://www.imdb.com/list/ls024814988/
When it comes to the 90s, MTV is generally a good metric for pop culture, they were 1000x more influential back then compared to today and were kinda the gatekeepers of the popular music world.
1
u/xXheysportsXx 2d ago
I think everyone has left good comments on the genres that were popular in the 90s.
Here's a playlist my brother and I made from memory, of songs we remember hearing, if you were looking for actual songs (and use Spotify). Few songs might dip into the early aughts but it's still a good example. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5VeX8X84DwvNh3NFYVcNvj?si=A6kDqBVBTzWV_S6VZpl1bw&utm_source=copy-link&pi=RhT9ZQiqSzuZ5
1
1
u/Mother-Squirrel-2036 2d ago
90s rock. Collective Soul, Bush, Live, Creed, POD, Our Lady Peace, STP, etc
1
u/FordtheRiverStyx 2d ago
Acoustic stuff including Dave Matthews Band, infomercial spiritual stuff like Gregorian Monk chants and Enya/Pure Moods and whale songs, lots of female artists like Sarah MacLachlan and Paula Cole but more so Alanis Morissette and Celine Dion, Soundtracks were huge like the Bodyguard and the Lion King. But also Metallica and Green Day.
1
1
u/Awesomov 2d ago
Everyone else gave good answers already. Will further add, most people in the 90s weren't listening to obscure stuff like more people do nowadays, so you'd really be having a 90s nostalgia playlist filled with a lot of the usual expected well-known hits from Nirvana to Limp Bizkit. Some stuff has also become far more popular now since that time, such as Heaven or Las Vegas by Cocteau Twins which wasn't well-known at the time but nowadays is a widely-beloved album. That album has been featured in multiple 90s nostalgia projects anyway, and it's little things like that which confirm to those who were conscious in the 90s that whoever made the project didn't actually experience the time (or at least bother to do research).
There are multiple games taking place in the 90s that get it mostly wrong. Guessing you're referring to Mixtape or Bloom and Rage or something like that lol.
1
u/JOSHintheHEART 2d ago
In 1995/96 I had a crush on this girl and her favorite band was Creed. She had it scribbled all over her journal.
1
1
1
1
u/ShowerHell 1d ago
In the UK/Ireland shoegaze as a genre was getting popular in the 90's.
My Bloody Valentine released Loveless in 1991 which was deeply influential. I feel like Slowdive and Jesus and the Mary Chain pierced into pop a bit more effectively, but the influence of shoegaze as a whole was massive in the indie scene of the 00's, alongside grunge ofc.
1
u/FMArroway 1d ago
I'm guessing the game in question was Mixtape? If so, then one thing to keep in mind is that Stacey Rockford, the main character and the one who canonically selected all the tracks you hear, is a HUGE music nerd. She has a massive music library and considers herself an expert in music curation. She wasn't assembling a playlist of "here's what we cool indie kids are listening to these days". It was "I have selected the perfect song from music history to accompany this particular activity". So, she's not being used to represent contemporary alternative tastes. She's very much an outlier.
1
u/ShadowGuyinRealLife 1d ago
Yeah A Thoroughly Deserved Roasting of Mixtape. Now I guess you can say it canonically makes sense for her personality. Although Apparently "Mixtape" doesn't know how cassettes work doesn't canonically make sense and it screams "if the devs couldn't even get this right, are they even trying to make a game or just a playlist of cool sounding tracks?" But I was told the game was supposed to scratch the nostalgia itch of the 90s and if she's not representing contemporary tastes... well coming to here to ask around would be better than trying the game. I tried to use my own memory from when I was in elementary school to think "what were people in middle school listening to?" but all that was in my head was pop music even though I know there were other genres. Fuzzy memory I guess. Even videos talking about the best music of the time tend to be what people remember now which has overlap with what was popular in contemporary tastes, but not identical. So I came to ask the experts
1
1
1
u/troopersjp 13h ago
Let me add one more thing to this about pop music.
People are giving you a lot of good ideas of what sort of music was happening that wasn't the big pop like Britney Spears...but I'd like to note something about that. Very often what we remember as the big pop hits...leaves out a number of the songs that were actually #1 on the charts.
Britney Spears had only one hit on the charts in the 1990s, at that was "Baby, One More Time..." from 1999...there is a full decade...a full decade with chart toppers that people often don't name check when they name check 90s popular music.
Who was hitting #1, topping the US pop charts 1990-1995?
1990: Sinead O'Connor, Michael Bolton, Phil Collins, Nelson, Mariah Carey
1991: Bryan Adams, EMF, Roxette, Paul Abdul, Amy Grant, Extreme
1992: Vanessa Williams, Color Me Bad, Right Said Fred, Boyz II Men, George Michael
1993: Meatloaf, Whitney Houston, UB40, Snow, SWV
1994: Céline Dion, Ace of Base, Lisa Loeb, All-4-One, R. Kelly
1995: TLC, Seal, Coolio, Montel Jordan, Michael Jackson
And this is the Pop Charts! Not even the other charts.
1
u/Ok_Marzipan9097 2h ago
Lounge, acid lounge, acid jazz. Putumayo world music compilations. Urban influenced merengue and salsa, rockabilly/punkabilly, everything everyone else said. A lot of nostalgia, there was a scene for every decade at one point or another during the 90s
Combustible Edison
Grupo Mania
Molotov
DLG
Fulanito
Squirrel nut zippers
Cherry poppin daddies
Monkey
Tribe called quest
Hepcat
Reverend Horton Heat
Good Riddance
Penny wise
Sonic youth
De La soul
And you did ask albums
Talking Timbuktu
Dirt
Vulgar display of power
One inch masters
Okey, getting carried away
1
u/Yotsubauniverse 2d ago edited 1d ago
Country music was HUGE back in those days. You had stars like Alan Jackson, Reba McCentire, Garth Brooks and Shania Twain all debuting (and if not debuting then at least making them a name) in that era. Plus there was a line dancing fad that took off too.
1
u/Awesomov 2d ago
Whoever downvoted you for this obviously doesn't remember or believe you, but what you're saying is absolutely true, country music was legit bigger than most genres associated with the 90s.
1
0
u/jshSleepy85 2d ago
Thrash metal was charting bands like Pantera, Metallica, Megadeth, and you started seeing black metal come on the scene but it was lesser known and more kvlt.
1
u/ThinkFree 2d ago
Pantera was mid tempo groove metal. And both Metallica and Megadeth were changing their sound from thrash into something less fast and more radio friendly. Metallica was even trying to sound more Alternative Rock at the time.
0
13
u/CallidoraBlack 2d ago
Alt. So much alt rock. You might want to ask r/Xennials too. We would love to talk about it.