90s Music Videos

On January 11, 1992, Nirvana’s Nevermind knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top of the Billboard 200. That single fact has done more to shape how people remember the decade than almost anything else that happened in it, and it is close to useless as a description of the 1990s. Jackson went back to No.1 within weeks. The best-selling single of the decade was a Whitney Houston ballad written by a country singer twenty years earlier. What actually defined the nineties was not one sound replacing another but the total collapse of the idea that there should be one sound at all.

The video budgets went first. MTV had spent the eighties turning promo clips into an industry, and by 1991 directors were being handed the kind of money that had previously gone to short films. Guns N’ Roses’ November Rain ran nearly nine minutes, transported a church across state lines, and became the first video from before YouTube existed to pass a billion views on it. At the other end of the scale, Tracy Chapman could put out a blues shuffle with almost nothing around it and take it into the Top 5. Both approaches worked, in the same years, on the same channels.

Country stopped asking permission. Billy Ray Cyrus’ Achy Breaky Heart put line dancing into shopping malls in 1992 and made Nashville a mainstream commercial force for the rest of the decade. Reggae did the same from a different direction — UB40’s version of an Elvis ballad spent seven weeks at No.1 in America. Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men rewrote the record books for time spent at the top. Whitney Houston held No.1 for fourteen weeks with a song Dolly Parton had written to end a business partnership in 1973.

Europe ran a parallel decade that American radio mostly missed. Blur, Oasis and Pulp fought a chart war in Britain that never fully translated, while Eurodance and continental pop moved millions of records without troubling the Hot 100 at all. The Wannadies came out of Sweden, Blue System out of Germany. Meanwhile the CD reissue turned the entire back catalog of popular music into a going concern, and a teenager in 1995 could buy the Beatles, Nirvana and Snoop Dogg on the same afternoon without anyone finding it strange. That, more than grunge, is what the nineties actually did.

Below you’ll find Music Videos Club’s growing collection of 1990s videos — official releases, live performances, and television appearances — each paired with the full story behind the recording: the chart performance, the studio sessions, the human details that most sites don’t bother with. Browse by what you remember, discover what you missed, and find out what was actually happening when these songs were made.