I bought them well into the nineties. They came in cardboard sleeves and cost $3-$4. There were CD singles, too, for twice as much.
Nirvana and its cohorts broke in 90-91, so there’s that. I recall Tori Amos making a big impression on me at the time. After several years of resisting the Compact Disc format, I finally abandoned my old turntable. Tori Amos’ Crucify and the Singles soundtrack were the first two CDs I bought. The Rolling Stone top-selling album for this period was Ice Ice Baby, then Mariah Carey’s debut album.
Yeah, I was a teenager right in the OP’s time frame, and nobody I knew had vinyl (as in, literally, I did not know a single person who owned contemporary music recorded on a vinyl record. Not a single one. The last vinyl record I remember having at the time was Disco Mickey Mouse, which came out in 1979.) That was what your parents listened to. It was all cassettes and then CDs in my neck of the woods.
But singles were also really cool in the early 90s, because their B-sides often had unreleased material. Back when grunge was the thing, we’d go out and get all the Pearl Jam import singles (usually CD singles), since they had tracks like “Dirty Frank” and “Yellow Ledbetter” that weren’t otherwise available.
It’s weird, I ought to know all about that era, since I finished high school in 1990, but I was 100% classic rock hippie back then. The most contemporary artists I was listening to then were Talking Heads and They Might Be Giants, with the rest of my music purchases being Queen, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Steely Dan, Yes, Traffic, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
My college roommate was into grunge and ‘college rock’. He turned me on to Meat Puppets, Think Tree and Phish, although I never really fell in love with them.
I was born 4 years after you but I had dozens of vinyl singles, starting around 1982. I think I stopped buying them in 1986, 1987 at the latest.
1987-1993 was just after college and during my transition from Boulder, CO to NYC.
Personally, I stopped listening to Genesis after And Then There Were Three (1978). I enjoyed everything up until then.
Peter Gabriel put out Passion, the soundtrack for **The Last Temptation of Christ ** in 1989 which included Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, violinist L. Shankar and Senegalese vocalists Youssou N’Dour and Baaba Maal. Youssou N’Dour had already gotten exposure singing the end of In Your Eyes on Gabriel’s So. He used his Real World label to expose international stars to wider audiences. I started listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan when he put out Mustt Mustt on Real World. His singing was also featured in Dead Man Walking and he became sort of famous being promoted by Eddie Vedder, etc.
I was thinking of Blues Traveler but they didn’t really have a hit until '94. There was a club called Wetlands in NYC that often had Blues Traveller, Spin Doctors, sort of a post-hippie jam band kind of thing going on.
XTC followed up the incredible Skylarking (1986) with Oranges and Lemons (1989) and, later, Nonsuch in '92.
Sarah McLachlan came out with** Solace** in 1991, which put her on the map.
That time period was the Gold Age of Hip-Hop, which this kid was listening to.
20 in 1987, 26 in 1993.
The above is really the answer. Between 1987 and 1993 US was the most powerful musical force in the world. Joshua Tree, the Rattle and Hum movie, and Achtung Baby is a trifecta of popular not often matched.
I recall - during the first period, 1987-1990, my college years - a lot of metal and such along with U2 as well as the rise of what we called ‘college rock’ at the time. But it all changed when the first chords of Smells Like Teen Spirit hit the airwaves. It’s like a switch got turned and modern rock was here. For a few years.
'79 was a bit early for the death of vinyl. I bought my first CD player (a Sony Walkman) for some outrageous amount ($200+?) and the selection of CDs at the local record store was still pretty thin. It probably took another 3-4 years before the albums got completely edged out by the CDs, and even then, there were miles of used album bins that you could flip through (ah, nostalgia).
Someone mentioned Sarah Mclachlan; Tori Amos and a bunch of other confessional female singer/songwriters (Melissa Etheridge) came out towards the end of the period in question. Kate Bush produced a couple of albums that got some airplay. And there was a bit of Celtic music going on with the Waterboys and Enya. This was all mostly college radio.
Oh, I’m not claiming that was the year for the death of vinyl at all. That’s just the last vinyl record I remember owning, and I probably begged my parents to buy it somewhere around 1984. I was only 9 at the time. Once I got to the point where I started buying albums for myself, like circa 1988 or so, it was all cassettes and then CDs.
(receives the ultimate Dope approval)
(feels warm and squishy inside)
Being college (and post graduate) during the period, I listened to ‘Alternative rock’ (such as the Church “Under the Milky Way Tonight”), what was then becoming mainstreamed alternative (as people mentioned before, U2’s “Achtung Baby” and REM and B-52’s “Cosmic Thing”), alternative pop like ‘Material Issue’ (“Diane”, “Valerie Loves Me”), mainstream rock (e.g. some guy named Petty, had a minor album called “Full Moon Fever”), grunge as it was rolled out to the masses (you know the bands, but I preferred a higher percentage of the songs from Alice In Chains and Soundgarden than the ratio for Nirvana or Smashing Pumpkins), the electronica & funk they played in the early hours at Malibu Dance club (including the aforementioned L.A. Style “James Brown Is Dead”) and whatever hard rock was around. Heck, even dance and club (Corona - “Rhythm of the night”).
So I thought I had a wide range…until I realized the 500 or so songs I knew were a miniscule slice of the likely 10s of thousands of songs released in that period. :smack:
Well over in the UK the late 80s saw the rise of Acid House which then spilled over into the Madchester scene (which someone alluded to by mentioning The Stone Roses).
But as this article points out, these were huge things but the majority still continued to listen to the same basic crap.