Music Decades Quiz: Week 5, 1990s

48 Comments

1. I was doing so well .. and then it all went to shit. 24/50. Freefalling.

   • Full Moon Fever was released in 1989. We’ll see how this week goes – i think there’ll be a range of scores.

2. I did exactly as I expected for the ’90s with 41/50. If I was able to see the album covers I probably would have gotten them all but just based on album titles I’m happy with my results. I turned 30 in the middle of the ’90s so I was much less interested in popular music than I was in previous decades. I still listened to just as much new music back then but most of my favorites did not trouble the charts. Okay, now I’m ready for the ’80s.

   • You’re ready for overproduced music! 🙂

     • I am, but there’s just as much amazing & well-produced music from that decade, especially prior to around ’84 when “over the top” and “bathed in synths” became the music industry’s mantra. The ’80s also coincided with my high school & college years, which means that music has been embedded in my brain for a long time.

       • The formative years.

       • 1980s college rock is a very fertile source of great, overlooked music. Even the big mid-1980s mainstream hits sound better than they did back in the 1990s, now that synth-pop has enjoyed a renaissance.

   • Good effort. I thought there was a pretty good dose of critically acclaimed. but not high selling. acts in that quiz.

     • It was definitely a good cross-section of ’90s music. In that decade I was listening to a lot of power pop, prog-rock, celtic and other genres that neither troubled the charts nor got any kind of critical exposure. If I made a list of my 50 favorite albums from the ’90s, I’m guessing only about 10 of them were well-known. That’s why I was very pleased with my score this week.

       • Do you have any recommendations for 1990s Celtic music? You and Bruce both did well enough to suggest you were keeping up with music in the 1990s.

         • My favorite celtic and celtic rock bands from that era are Solas (who are the gold-standard and, in my opinion, one of the all-time greats), Lunasa, Wolfstone, Runrig, Old Blind Dogs, Ashley MacIsaac and Altan.

       • @KamerTunesBlog: I’m intrigued by your 90s picks and have added Solas to my list

         • Chris, I hope you enjoy Solas whenever you check them out. Their whole discography is excellent but I highly recommend starting out with their first two albums, “Solas” and “Sunny Spells and Scattered Showers.” Both are among my all-time favorite traditional celtic albums.

3. 26 of 50 and content with that score since for the ones I didn’t get while I recognized the band names had no clue on some of the album titles. And hey its better than the poll average (not that that means much).

   • Scores have been all over the place this week – will be interesting to see where everyone ends up this week.

     • Like you mentioned I did like the fact that the album selection was pretty broad everything from Lucinda Williams to Snoop Dog.

4. 41/50. I think I might’ve missed one or two of these… Don’t know where I’ve been…

   • I think you just missed last week – you can find it at https://albumreviews.blog/2019/06/13/music-decades-quiz-week-4-1970s/

5. 38.
   Better than anticipated, though still fairly ordinary.

   • Alright in a sort of a limited way for an off-night?

     • Very good, Paul. 😉

       • You can call me Al 🤔

         • Thanks Al.
           Love Betty.

   • Also I think you scored nearly twice the Sporcle average, so good job. I know you’re into stuff like Flaming Lips and Fountains of Wayne

     • Spot on. Interestingly, soon after I arrived at the “wild guesses” stage, the time ran out. Probably just as well.

6. 29 of 50. I thought I would do better…I thought wrong!

   • I think a lot of the music you enjoyed probably got marginalised from the popular/critical mainstream by Nevermind?

     • That it did! The sad thing is, I knew all the bands…I just couldn’t remember their album titles.

       • It’s a shame you were doing your new music of the week blog back then – if you had been, you’d ace it.

         • If only…

7. Finally! I did pretty well this week – 49/50. Hurrah!

   • Great effort! You’re first equal with Tony.

8. 25/50.The 90s is a long time ago!

   • Yes, almost 20 years ago!

9. 19/50 – The 90s are the decade I know least about.

   • You would have been born in the 1990s, right? I was a teenager through most of the 1990s, which was probably a whole lot more useful for the purposes of this quiz.

     • Yeah. I was born in 1994. Pretty much the only stuff from the 90s I like is Britpop.

       • One of the problems I have with 1990s music is that CD technology allowed for longer albums. Lots of potentially good records ended up as 60 bloated minutes when they could have been 40 tight minutes. I always feel a bit reactionary against the stuff like grunge and RHCP that my generation’s supposed to enjoy, but there’s lots of good stuff around too. Music was really fragmented by this point, so there’s always going to be some niches out there to enjoy. Looking at https://rateyourmusic.com/charts/top/album/1990s, I enjoy most of the stuff at the top of the list.

         • I totally agree about quality over quantity. I’d rather have 40 minutes of solid music than 60 minutes and half of it is filler.

10. “Speaking as a child of the nineties”… 49/50

    • There’s probably some sort of correlation between when you’re born and how well you do in this one.

      • I think owning 70% of these also helped

        • I tried to count but I think I’m less than half, even counting ones my sister or my wife own that I’ve listened to.

11. Dam it… SCORE
    30/50
    I knew most of the artist just not the album

    • There’s been a big range this week!

      • It was a good one. I had fun doing it.

12. 45! which as a percentage, is apt!

    • Great work! If you want to catch up to get on the final leaderboard, you can find the previous weeks’ quizzes here: https://albumreviews.blog/category/sporcle/