Primus, faith no more, Dee lite all in heavy rotation on mtv.
Umass spring concerts included phish, beastie boys, bostones one year, Dylan and the Wailers (without Bob Marley) the previous.
I worked security for Perl Jam playing the student union ballroom.
Lots of that music holds up really well. Eve6 if my underrated band of choice.
Phish had some fun weekend camp out with fish concerts/fests in Maine and Upstate NY.
It ended kind of badly with riots at the Woodstock 99 concert.
In a similar vein: I had a new coworker named "Jason" join a team once, and for the life of me I couldn't help but type "JSON" first when writing emails/messages with his name. It took weeks before I could reliably get it right first try. Some habits (muscle memory? sub-vocalizations?) die hard.
Everyone here is talking about rock music, but electronic music was also just on fire during the 90s. No decade since has come close to the perfection of the 90s across so many genres of electronic music. House, gabber, jungle, so many electronic genres are still just trying to reach the peaks they hit in the 90s.
I say this as someone who was 5 years old at the turn of the millennium, so this isn’t some sort of nostalgia filter.
I agree, the lack of social media, secrecy in production techniques, dawn of digital technology, big names in synthesis pouring millions into r&d was an amazing combo, and most importantly production heavily sampling and dubplate culture....hard to replicate that!
I tend to listen to a lot of electronic music, and am always looking for new recommendations myself. My taste for 90s stuff has typically run more toward Eurodance/Eurobeat and House and J-pop for more recent things.
Here are some random recommendations:
Daft Punk
Anything on the "Blade" soundtrack
Pretty much any Eurobeat featured in the anime Initial D. e.g. Dave Rodgers, Manuel, Fastway, Go2, m.o.v.e.
2 Unlimited - Get Ready, Twilight Zone, Tribal Dance, No Limit
Technotronic - Pump Up The Jam
Le Click - Tonight is the Night
La Bouche - Be My Lover
Mr Vain - Culture Beat
Black Box - Ride on Time, Strike it Up, I Don't Know Anybody Else (technically 80s, early house music)
The Shamen - Move Any Mountain
Livin' Joy - Don't Stop Movin'
Bonus, more recent: Destination Calabria (Alex Gaudino, Crystal Waters)
Future Sound of London - Dead Cities, was my first exposure to electronic, as an American. They are hard to describe, but are labeled as more psychedelic ambient with bits of techno, trip hop, and progressive house music thrown in. Each album is fairly different from the others, and there is a lot of experimentation that feels unique even in 2025 (at least to myself). I'm a big progressive music fan, or any genre, so they scratch an itch for me when it comes to electronic music.
I am biased as a Londoner but it UK Garage is/was a wonderful subgenre of house from the 90s, a uniquely London blend of genres including Chicago house. Infectious stuff. It was a precursor to later genres like Dubstep and Grime which are so popular today.
Spotify has some good playlists. Rosie Gaines 'Closer than Close' and Artful Dodger 'Movin too Fast' or 'Woman Trouble' are good starting points.
We have been enjoying Massive Attack. The same culture that hatched Banksy is my kind of folks and the music has a good edge, IMO.
For modern stuff, I've enjoyed SomaFM's Groove Salad out of San Francisco. They have net streams directly accessible in VLC, so the processor burning Web app is utterly unnecessary.
That same culture also hatched Portishead (just down the road from Bristol), which was pretty much the apotheosis of trip-hop. It's also the second home of reggae in the UK (after London), which has quite a bit to do with its musical vibe.
Be sure to go back and forth between Groove Salad and Groove Salad Classic, which is the more 90s-2000s version. There's not a lot of people putting out stuff with the "classic" feel anymore, which is partly why Rusty renamed it, and started a newer, modern channel.
SomaFM was incredible, I probably used more bandwidth on their streams than almost anything else for a good year at home. And iirc, this was during dial-up days!
Compared to say the 70s, the 90s was pretty bleak. A bit of good grunge, a bit of good hiphop, and then it all sort of fizzled out. At least in europe/uk you had the explosion of electronic music and mdma and everyone having an amazing time. American kids growing up in the late 90s were robbed.
As an American, that was a lot more going on that you didn't really hear about, but I also agree with you about electronic music. I randomly grabbed a Future Sound of London CD in the mid to late 90s, and couldn't believe what I had been missing. I have been exposed to bands like Kraftwerk, but nothing like what was going on in the UK and Europe. From there I discovered Trance music, then progressive House, and started to experiment with sequencing software like FruityLoops (now FL Studio) in the later 90s. Trip-hop then started to become popular, and it became easier to get my friends into electronic, who prior only were into 90s hip-hop (arguably some of the best ever produced).
As a 90s American teen this is completely absurd. It is literally the peak of the music industry as a whole.
The American 90s rave scene was also absolutely amazing. Big enough to have parties every Friday and Saturday but not too big to attract much undesirable people and law enforcement.
Trance originated in the 90s though it only matured after. But it was a great time for me. I'm in Europe, yes, but I heard about trance events in the US too
Primus, faith no more, Dee lite all in heavy rotation on mtv.
Umass spring concerts included phish, beastie boys, bostones one year, Dylan and the Wailers (without Bob Marley) the previous.
I worked security for Perl Jam playing the student union ballroom.
Lots of that music holds up really well. Eve6 if my underrated band of choice. Phish had some fun weekend camp out with fish concerts/fests in Maine and Upstate NY.
It ended kind of badly with riots at the Woodstock 99 concert.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodstock_%2799