What even was 1992? I’m tempted to look back on it as a year without much of an identity, at least in my personal experience. 1990 and 1991 were huge transitional years for me, and then 1992 was just sort of… the status quo. I went from freshman to sophomore in high school, and maybe I finally felt a little bit like I knew what I was doing and I was no longer the puniest kid on campus, but that’s about it. The only newsworthy event from that year that I can remember having any impact on me at all was the L.A. Riots – a pretty serious event in American history, of course, but I somehow coasted blithely through it without understanding the gravity of the situation, even while stores were being looted mere blocks away from where I lived. It’s weird how your sense of risk and danger can get distorted when you’re young and you think your little world is invincible and nothing significant could ever disrupt it. I had the vague sense that what had happened to that man who got beat up by the police was wrong, and that the system had failed when those officers were acquitted, and that it was understandable for people to be angry about it… but I didn’t have to live with the fallout from it firsthand. It certainly would have been a lot more terrifying to live through as an adult who more clearly understood the implications, the systemic grievances that had gotten us to that point, and the potential dangers of even getting up and going to school the next morning. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.

The music from 1992 that I’ve accumulated over the years seems like it’s more scattershot than most other years from that era. In terms of great albums, it might be the weakest year of the 90s for me. In terms of great songs, though, I had no shortage – whittling it down to 100 for this list required some tough eleventh-hour decisions! It all adds up to a playlist that will probably seem quite incongruous to anyone other than me, what with some of the most earnest and sentimental songs I enjoyed in that era wedged right up against some of the most hilariously flippant (and in some cases even petulantly irreverent) ones. Some of this music, I didn’t encounter until well into adulthood, while some of it, while I can’t deny the fact that it still hits the same sweet spot that it did over thirty years ago, I have to admit to myself that I might’ve reacted to it differently if I hadn’t first stumbled upon it as a teenager.