Flannel, frost, and the CD gold rush
The nineties opened with a guitar chord that sounded like a door being kicked in. Grunge dragged rock back to the garage, hip-hop grew from a culture into the culture, and pop — after a decade of gloss — split into a dozen directions at once: Britpop's swagger, R&B's slow-jam golden age, dance music's warehouse years, and the teen-pop explosion waiting at the decade's end. It was the CD era's victory lap: the last ten years when buying music meant holding it, and the industry sold more of it than ever before or since.
Deezer's 90s Hits playlist opens with the decade's founding document — Nirvana's “Smells Like Teen Spirit” — and then refuses to settle into any one story: Oasis and Radiohead from Britain's guitar wars, Coolio's “Gangsta's Paradise” and Dr. Dre from rap's imperial phase, the Goo Goo Dolls and R.E.M. carrying the melodic flag, and the Backstreet Boys closing the ten with “I Want It That Way,” the sound of the teen-pop future arriving right on schedule. A decade that contained all of that was never one genre. It was an argument about what came next, and everybody won.
Top 10
The opening ten of the playlist, at a glance. The full list, playable top to bottom, is just below — loaded fresh from Deezer's “90s Hits” playlist every time this page opens.
- Smells Like Teen Spirit — Nirvana
- Wonderwall — Oasis
- Creep — Radiohead
- Gangsta's Paradise — Coolio
- Thunderstruck — AC/DC
- Iris — The Goo Goo Dolls
- I Want It That Way — Backstreet Boys
- Still D.R.E. — Dr. Dre
- Otherside — Red Hot Chili Peppers
- Losing My Religion — R.E.M.
The full 1990s playlist
The CD decade
The nineties were the last decade with a skip button you could hold in your hand. Music came on discs, in jewel cases, with liner notes you actually read — and mixtapes became mix CDs, burned one track at a time for one person at a time. Scarcity shaped taste: you lived with an album because you'd paid for it, and songs grew on you at disc speed, not feed speed. Half the classics on this page were slow burns that today's three-second audition might never have allowed.
Which makes this playlist a small act of restoration. Press Play All and give these songs the patience they were built for — the quiet verse before the loud chorus, the album track that became a standard. The nineties were the final decade of music as a place you visited on purpose. This is the tour bus.
Looking for a song from another time?
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