What is the best-selling album of the 1990s?

The 1990s have always represented a period of change in the music world. No matter what genre you listened to, things were in for a shakeup once the ball dropped on December 31st, 1989, and while it might have taken a while for people to figure out what was going on, it was hardly a bad thing when some of the best records of all time were popping up left and right in any genre. And now that they were also working with a different medium, that meant that sales were about to go through the roof for the industry.

While the 1980s captured a moment where people were still breaking away from the idea of vinyl, the ’90s were the first time when CDs became the central format for how people listened to pop music. Outside of not having to have a massive slab of vinyl, the runtime also expanded on records, which gave people a lot more wiggle room when it came to which songs they liked and which songs they had to cut from some of their records.

And when looking at some of the greatest records from that era, it’s not hard to see them working in that format. Blood Sugar Sex Magik by Red Hot Chili Peppers was a bit of the lengthy side compared to everything else they released, and when looking at the way that hip-hop albums were shaping up, Doggystyle by Snoop Dogg or Dr Dre’s The Chronic made sure to fill the CDs to the brim with one brilliant track after the other.

It was the last blockbuster decade before the new millennium, though, that also meant everything had to be larger than life on the silver screen. The grunge movement may have helped people get back to authentic ways of making music, but whenever the mainstream needed a soundtrack, every musician needed to go big, and Whitney Houston took The Bodyguard all the way to the top of the world.

So, how did The Bodyguard become the biggest-selling album of the 1990s?

Whereas most people were focusing on acts like Michael Jackson at the time, Houston hadn’t lost an ounce of polish on her trademark pipes. She was about to put some elements of New Jack Swing into her style with tunes like ‘I’m Your Baby Tonight’, but her tracks on this soundtrack had a lot more to do with the classic sound she was known for, like the booming presence behind ‘I’m Every Woman’.

But, really, everyone who was picking up this record was only coming for one specific song. As much as ‘I Will Always Love You’ has been given an ironic twist in recent years, there’s no denying the perfection in Houston’s performance, practically making everyone’s hands stand on end from the first note she sings and leaving everyone dumbfounded when that key change hits.

There had been many tie-in movie songs beforehand of varying quality, but whereas most people hope not to get a song as bland as ‘You Light Up My Life’ on its soundtrack, Houston was able to take The Bodyguard all the way to the bank, raking in over 45million copies of the record, even managing to outsell the other major 1990s craze, The Backstreet Boys, by over 5m copies.

Although most people can pay their respects to albums like this purely for Houston’s vocal performance, it goes a lot further than that when looking at what she put into both the songs and the movie. She was bound to sell a lot of records based on her singing alone, but judging by the songs that we got, it feels like Houston left a little bit of herself in between the cracks of this record.

Related Topics

This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content