What was the biggest-selling album of 1991?
Some years just leap out of the rock and pop tapestry with an immediate signal of music’s storied lay of the land.
1967? The US West Coast’s countercultural explosion, dubbed the ‘Summer of Love’, and marked the zenith of the peace and love generation. 1977? Punk’s insurrectionary bulldoze of rock’s bloated indulgences, scoring the street-level seethe toward a political malaise that fugged much of the Western world. 1988? The golden age of acid house, when the previous years’ penchant for cocaine’s aggressive individualism melted into the sweaty, MDMA hug of happy dancers rejecting the corporate drab of the decade’s ruthless rat race.
What chapter in music’s turbulent history does 1991 tell? The rollcall of that year’s pop landscape will likely tigger flashes of Seattle’s grunge explosion snuffing out hair metal overnight, Madonna swept up in her erotically charged Truth or Dare era, the likes of Public Enemy and Ice Cube terrifying white America in the latter peak of hip-hop’s golden age, and Queen frontman Freddie Mercury’s death thrusting the epidemic of the HIV/AIDS crisis deeper into the mainstream consciousness.
As ever, critical consensus and the Rolling Stone narrative of any given year can often be worlds apart from commercial stature. Nirvana indeed boasted one of 1991’s big sellers, the unwitting force of the alternative revolution that placed Seattle on the global musical map saw sophomore LP Nevermind showered with as much as 30 million claimed sales since its drop in September. Yet, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was eclipsed by ‘Enter Sandman’, Metallica’s self-titled fifth album, dubbed ‘The Black Album’ by fans, garnering an extra claimed million as well as peaking at the Billboard 200 hot spot longer.
Domestically, Stateside, middle America’s record collections told a completely different story. You were more likely to find Garth Brooks’ country pop smash Ropin’ the Wind at a hefty four million sales than anything lauded by the professional journos, and across the Atlantic, ginger-dreadlocked soul singer Mick Hucknall had snuck his way into the majority of the UK’s CD racks with Simply Red’s Stars selling over 3.6 million.
So, what was 1991’s biggest-selling album?
While Nirvana famously knocked him off the US albums top spot by accident for two weeks in 1992, Michael Jackson’s fourth adult LP would still outsell Nevermind by two million claimed sales.
For the new decade, Jackson decided to call it quits with his longtime mentor and producer Quincy Jones, opting to soak up the contemporary new jack swing R&B sounds of the day, imbued with an expanded scope of gospel, rock heft, and his typical penchant for saccharine balladry on Dangerous.
The King of Pop’s biggest fans were happy, enamoured with canonical cuts like ‘Black and White’ and ‘Remember the Time’, while critical reception would point to its stodgy length and cluttered eclecticism as sapping the record’s coherency. But the numbers don’t lie, selling a colossal 32 million claimed sales, and setting the stage for his HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I statue-floating double album jamboree four years later.
