The 10 best-selling songs of the 1990s
Despite the countless artists innovating the music scene throughout the 1990s, the decade gets a bit of a bad rep.
Typically, when looking at the entire decade through the most hideously generalised lens possible, it’s seen as the era when music became inherently more commercialised, with most major pop artists becoming more focused on style over substance.
Efforts to blend genres and styles are often reflected on as a loss of direction and a tool to capitalise on different sensibilities, rather than experiment with them for innovative purposes, something you could probably say for most decades in one way or another, but with the ‘90s, risk-taking became more of a commodity in many areas than an authentic technique in artistic expression. This ultimately blurred the lines between those who were genuinely invested in pushing boundaries and those who were just simply following trends.
A lot of this hinged on making the more alternative scenes more visible in the mainstream, which ultimately turned the playing field into grounds for the purer, more focused artists to become lost in the noise. Of course, this wasn’t always the case, but it’s part of the reason why the ‘90s are seen in such an aggressive light, which is that many spaces became louder, more abrasive, and inherently harder to define, but when you look at things a little more closely, it doesn’t take long to figure out that it was also one of the best decades for fresh ideas.
While we were being bombarded by multiple styles, genres and cultures, many were involved in genuinely changing the landscape for the better, turning a mass kaleidoscope of conflicting voices into a period of challenging the status quo of styles and attitudes.
The best-selling songs of the 1990s
Many from that pool became best-sellers, proving that charting success and cultural impact aren’t always mutually exclusive, and tenth on the list was Coolio’s enduring hit ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’, a rumination on misinterpreting something as ‘paradise’ when really it’s all just misguidance and entrapment. One of the greatest opening lines in any song ever, it set an entirely new standard for social critique in modern hip hop.
Highlighing the diversity of the entire era the best was Whitney Houston’s reimagination of Dolly Parton’s classic ‘I Will Always Love You’, becoming the ninth best-selling track, while David Baddiel, Frank Skinner & The Lightning Seeds’ ‘Three Lions’ from 1996, and subsequent re-release in 1998, compounded one of the most significant cultural moments ahead of the World Cup.
Following them in seventh place was Diddy’s ‘I’ll Be Missing You’, while Cher spearheaded the entire realm of pop with her everlasting single ‘Believe’ at sixth, and Aqua delivered one of the most misinterpreted tunes of all time with their satirical diss of the Mattel doll with ‘Barbie Girl’ charting at fifth. Switching up the game was Bryan Adams with his cheesy rock ballad ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’ at the fourth position, and Wet Wet Wet and Robson & Jerome proved that old classics can become reignited flames with ‘Love Is All Around’ and ‘Unchained Melody’ garnering them third and second place, respectively.
However, the forerunner came from the one and only Elton John, whose 1997 version of his 1973 classic ‘Candle in the Wind’ in tribute to the late Princess Diana became the best-selling song of the entire decade, a culturally poignant moment that captured the spirit and mood of the entire generation.
