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The 10 Best Albums of 1992

These are the best albums of 1992 as selected by Slant’s music writers.

The 10 Best Albums of 1992

In my introduction to Slant’s list of the 100 Best Albums of the 1990s, I described nostalgia for the decade as “an idealized vision of a time when Bill Clinton was the fresh, young Democrat on the block, beepers were the hottest new tech items, and every major record label and Top 40 radio station was scrambling to discover the next big alternative to run-of-the-mill pop.” I went on to lament: “It’s human nature to look back on things with irrational fondness and nostalgia, overlooking the bad and romanticizing the good. But while the ’90s had its fair share of ‘crap,’ it’s hard to deny that the ‘good’ was exceptionally good.” So good, in fact, that we decided to dust off our lovingly curated list of over 400 albums to compile individual Top 10s for each year of the ’90s. Many of these titles are already widely—and rightfully—celebrated, but these lists also give us the opportunity to honor some typically overlooked gems. Sal Cinquemani

Honorable Mention: Sade, Love Deluxe; En Vogue, Funky Divas; Rage Against the Machine, Rage Against the Machine; Arrested Development, 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life of… ; Alice in Chains, Dirt; Sophie B. Hawkins, Tongues and Tails; Aphex Twin, Selected Ambient Words 85 – 92; Deee-Lite, Infinity Within; Mary Chapin Carpenter, Come On Come On; Sugar, Copper Blue


The 10 Best Albums of 1992

10. The Pharcyde, Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde

“Too black, too strong.” The Malcolm X mantra opens Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise,” but it applies in spades—as Maude Findley said, no racial connotation intended—to the Pharcyde’s debut album, a raucous house party with enough lyrical verve and scruffy jazz sampling to match the South Central posse’s straight-outta-the-gate flair for boastful good times (“Niggas on my Snoopy like the bird Woodstock/Getcha hands off my dick because I hold this cock”) and heartrending pathos (the tearjerker “Passin’ Me By,” a threnody for a childhood love evaporated which reveals the likes of Arrested Development’s “Mr. Wendel” for the clumsy Sunday-school parable it is). Eric Henderson


The 10 Best Albums of 1992

9. Prince and the New Power Generation, Love Symbol

He may have been a tiny man, but Prince had the biggest balls in pop music. Consider the unpronounceable symbol he used to title his “Love Symbol” album, the fact that he later changed his name to said symbol, that he declared the album to be a “rock soap opera,” and that it includes spoken-word interludes from Kirstie Alley. Putting every bit of that business aside, it’s still damn near impossible to believe that Prince and the New Power Generation, easily the finest of his backing bands, were able to get away with an album of such deep funk and such a filthy take on contemporary pop and R&B. The Love Symbol album was the decade’s most unabashedly slutty-sounding record. Jonathan Keefe


The 10 Best Albums of 1992

8. Beastie Boys, Check Your Head

Having already released one of hip-hop’s greatest party records with Licensed to Ill, revolutionized the art of sample-based hip-hop with Paul’s Boutique, and, in doing so, seamlessly introduced the white Jewish MC into the cultural lexicon of East Coast rap, it would have made sense for the Beastie Boys to take a breather. Instead, the clown-princes of New York City went lo-fi, infusing and sometimes overpowering their rap roots with barreling post-punk drums, metal riffs, and sweaty funk grooves. At that, it’s tempting to lay blame for the endless cultural embarrassment of rap-metal at their feet. I’d ask that we give props instead, because contained in that accusation is an acknowledgment that the Beastie Boys succeeded where pretty much every imitator has failed. Matthew Cole

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The 10 Best Albums of 1992

7. Annie Lennox, Diva

With her debut solo album, Annie Lennox placed all of her insecurities, pretentions, frustrations, and triumphs on display like finely polished diamonds, at once haughty and stubborn but equally delicate and transcendent. The Eurythmics singer is in total command of her craft here, using her strikingly contralto voice to lead the record through plush, penetrating pieces like “Why” with the same amount of sensual power that graces playful pop songs like “Walking on Broken Glass.” Diva is ultimately Lennox’s greatest work: a warm, soulful, rhythm-fueled pop masterpiece that established her as not only one of the best female vocalists of the ’90s, but of any age. Kevin Liedel


The 10 Best Albums of 1992

6. Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes

Blurring the line between artist and cult leader, Tori Amos’s epistles are intimate and seductive, allowing anyone who’s ever been a victim or who’s ever struggled to find his or her own voice to derive deeply personal meanings from her mishmash of religious iconography, pop-cultural non sequiturs, and harrowing first-person details. Her mythology has become more convoluted and frankly insufferable over the years, but Amos’s Little Earthquakes still plays like a revelation, with its cutting turns of phrase (“Boy, you’d best pray that I bleed real soon” remains perhaps the most loaded line in her catalogue) and simply masterful piano work causing seismic upheavals that are anything but little. Keefe


The 10 Best Albums of 1992

5. Tom Waits, Bone Machine

Tom Waits albums always carry a certain stink of vaudevillian excess, seemingly conceived more for a broad stage performance than intimate listening. Only Bone Machine remains so staunchly dedicated to its themes, uniform in both message and tone, creating a consistently entrancing experience. A pitch-black mediation on death, racking up the highest body count this side of a Nick Cave album, the album sees Waits tilting his gruesome instrument toward sinister ends, from wholesale slaughter for sport to invocations of end-times austerity. Many artists have plumbed this kind of dark territory, but who else has contemplated mortality on songs that sound like they were played on actual bones? Jesse Cataldo


The 10 Best Albums of 1992

4. Pavement, Slanted and Enchanted

The coarse and fuzzy sound of Slanted and Enchanted resonated with every teenager furiously strumming power-chord combinations in their parents’ garage, because it seemed as if Pavement was, like them, reveling in the stripped-down, lo-fi aesthetic like pigs in shit. Now, rather than emulating the über-polished rock of the 1980s, teenagers could shoot for a sound that wasn’t too dissimilar to what was blaring from their own hand-me-down amplifiers. Slanted and Enchanted brought music fans closer to their idols through its grainy production and illusion of amateurism, but was stuffed with enough expert lessons in treble-heavy rock to maintain the necessary distance. Huw Jones

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The 10 Best Albums of 1992

3. Dr. Dre, The Chronic

Less the seminal weed-fetish album or a direct call for Eazy-E’s head than a compulsive, fevered exploration of deez nuts, The Chronic cut to the core of hip-hop’s male-genital obsession, with Dr. Dre at least having the pluck to admit it was all about his junk. Favoring languid atmosphere over lyrical dexterity and a devotion to ribald silliness over actual content, the album, aided by a constantly hanging-around Snoop Dogg, is nasty, brutish, and warm. It’s a watershed moment and a clear dividing line in hip-hop history, separating the ruthless belligerence of NWA from a generation of MCs more fixated on their own dicks than the state of the world around them. Cataldo


The 10 Best Albums of 1992

2. Madonna, Erotica

No Madonna album was ever met with a louder backlash or was more rampantly misrepresented than this dark masterpiece, so you know it was doing something right. Released on the tail end of AIDS hysteria, Erotica is far from the opus to guiltless sexual fulfillment it—and its even more ridiculed accompanying tome Sex—was made out to be. Though there’s no doubt it espouses taking joy in physical pleasure (“Let me remind you in case you don’t already know/Dining out can happen down below”), no album seems more empathetically haunted by the act’s countless side effects (i.e. “Bad Girl,” “Thief of Hearts,” a purposefully monotonous house cover of Peggy Lee’s “Fever”). Underneath Madonna’s bondage getup and Shep Pettibone’s oversized drum tracks beats a truly pained heart. Henderson


The 10 Best Albums of 1992

1. R.E.M., Automatic for the People

By 1992, R.E.M. had transformed from one of the originators of the alternative rock tag into one of the biggest mainstream rock acts in the world, and Automatic for the People confronted the band’s uneasy relationship with that metamorphosis head-on. Michael Stipe’s imagist poetry is at its most reflective and intuitive, as songs like “Try Not to Breathe,” “Find the River,” and the extraordinary opening cut, “Drive,” all lay bare deeply personal insecurities about becoming one of rock music’s elder statesmen. However twitchy R.E.M. may have felt about their massive commercial presence, Automatic for the People emerges as the band’s most timeless recording for the way in which Stipe’s lyrics and especially Peter Buck’s guitar work translate their personal anxieties into meditations that resonated on a broad, populist level. Keefe

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