BBC Radio 2's National Album Day collection goes live on Monday 9th October and will be rolled out through the week. Search ‘Radio 2 90s’ to listen.

The Bomb Squad and Cube’s crew, Da Lench Mob, worked 20 hours a day for 26 days straight, trying to make sure Cube not only came with it, but came with it before N.W.A released their next single. The internal and external pressure produced a roiling, thunderous work that hits all the glandular response buttons—repulsing with violent misogyny (“You Can’t Fade Me”) and seducing with superliterary tales from the ‘hood (“Once Upon a Time in the Projects”). “I know we’re all addicted to sex and violence,” Cube said in 1993, “but you’ve got to put some knowledge on top of that, so you can get the medicine you need to fight this beast we’ve got to fight.” AmeriKKKa’s“knowledge” is ugly at times—and on Cube’s later albums, it turned dull and rote—but combined with the Bomb Squad’s unparalleled production, it was frighteningly undeniable. TONY GREEN Colin Greenwood (bass) says: "I’m just really grateful and happy that people love the record and those atmospheres captured in that magical place stand up today and you can hear them on the record." Then, in a big old barn, she wrote some songs on the keyboards and sent them to her band—old Automatic Dlamini bandmate John Parish, avant-garde guitarist Joe Gore, Captain Beefheart sideman Eric Drew Feldman, and producer Flood (U2/Nine Inch Nails)—thinking it was probably crap. But “from the moment I popped the cassette in,” Gore says, “I knew this was going be a phenomenally great record. When a lot of artists try to evoke the emotional power of blues and gospel, it comes out as lame-ass imitation. Polly doesn’t waste any time replicating the gestures, she just taps into the music’s deepest core.”By the end of 1996, Radiohead was a one-hit wonder (thanks to 1993’s self-loathing “Creep”) whose second album, The Bends, sold half as well in the U.S. as their first. But as they toured the world for a bleary-eyed year and a half to try to cultivate an audience for their increasingly experimental music, they came up with their great theme: In the future that’s two minutes away, everywhere looks the same and no place is home.

Flying in at Number 1 and Number 2 are none other than legendary Britpop band Oasis, with (Whats The Story) Morning Glory? taking the lead, and Definitely Maybe securing second place. Nowell was reportedly so dope-addled during the sessions for Sublime that he was shipped home before the album was finished. The completed record is a tragic contradiction: a confident, clearheaded work by an artist coming into his own and at the same time losing control. “When you’re strung out, you get a deeper sense of reality,” says Sublime drummer Bud Gaugh. “The things you’re talking about might seem sweet, but the way you’re feeling is bittersweet. You’re standing outside.” Not a path to honor, perhaps, but a document too vital to ignore. ERIC WEISBARD When it was released in 1997 in a post- Odelay haze of collagadelica, Cornershop’s third album made the sitar-soaked history of East-meets-West musical crossbreeding seem entirely beside the point. After years of borrowing and exoticizing, an Anglo-Indian and a white Brit were script-flipping between English and Punjabi on a groovy, politically pointed joyride into chronic-laced hip-hop and lo-fi incense funk. “We wanted to keep it varied and upbeat,” frontman Tjinder Singh says. “Everything was quite relaxed and summery.”But L.L. responded with classic Muhammad Ali-style rope-a-dope. Teaming with Juice Crew founder Marley Marl, he stripped his sound down and rediscovered the battle rhymer within. The James Brown sample behind En Vogue’s dance hit “Hold On” was tweaked until it became the rugged street anthem “The Boomin’ System.” The smash “Jingling Baby (Remix)” and the R&B-flavored “Around the Way Girl” asserted that from the dance floor to the boudoir, Ladies still Loved Cool James. Amid the frenzied mourning that erupted in New York City following DMX’s tragic passing last year, it was easy to forget that Earl Simmons had once seemed like a lost cause, passed over by Bad Boy for the more bankable LOX after early single “The Born Loser” flopped at Columbia. But this trial by failure proved to be his salvation. By the time Def Jam gave him a shot, DMX was a 27-year-old vet who wasn’t about to take his second chance for granted. Does anyone really believe that the self-incriminating, girl-germs-infested, quote-worthy lyrics of Live Through This came from a notebook other than Courtney Love’s? As for the music, it certainly shares the soft-raw dynamics of the time with Nirvana, but with a rose/thorn quality that suggests Love knew exactly what she wanted, drawing on her own obsessive and idiosyncratic musical canon. A cover of the Young Marble Giants tune “Credit in the Straight World,” for instance, gave some recognition to a postpunk pioneer, while the lyric precisely suited her purposes. And besides that scorched-earth yowl, her vocals throughout the record had the dexterity of great acting, finding the poise to make lines like “I fake it so real I am beyond fake” credible and moving. The chart is filled with classics and fan favourites which have stood the test of time, spanning a spectrum of the biggest genres of the decade. Expect Dr Dre, Shania Twain, Westlife, Nirvana, Spice Girls, Metallica, Destiny's Child and more.