I’m wrapping up the latest installment of my Decades series with a track from Britpop band Blur’s Parklife, a well-regarded 1994 album that became the band’s best-selling release in their native UK.
My only real exposure to Blur is through 1997’s ‘Song 2‘ (the “woohoo” song; you’ll know it when you hear it), so I was anticipating this album as an opportunity to discover something great.
When I saw that Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell came out in 1994, I couldn’t resist making it one of my featured albums.
Like most high school boys of my generation, I was a huge Pink Floyd fan. I knew most of their albums by heart, especially the run between 1971’s Meddle and 1983’s The Final Cut. By muscle memory alone, I can still sing or air guitar along to every note of Wish You Were Here, Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall.
When I do these Decades series, I’m always surprised by how many copies albums sold two or three decades ago. Most of the albums I’m featuring as part of this look at 1994 went at least three or four times platinum. A few made it to diamond status (10 million units).
Among those is Green Day’s Dookie, the band’s third album and first for a major label. The album went diamond in the U.S. and sold 20 million copies worldwide, making it their top-selling album by far (eclipsing 2001’s American Idiot by several million).
1994 was a big year for well-received debut albums. At least a half dozen of the albums I’ve already featured from that year have been debuts, and a handful of other first efforts just missed the cut.
English electronic band Portishead have released only three albums during their on-again, off-again career, and 1994’s Dummy — their triple-platinum first effort — is the standout.
In May of 1994, Los Angeles rock band Weezer released its first — and still most successful — album, a self-titled record popularly referred to as the Blue Album due to the background color of its cover image.
The power pop collection went triple platinum in the U.S. and reached #16 on the Billboard 200. Its first two singles — ‘Undone – The Sweater Song‘ and ‘Buddy Holly‘ — became minor hits largely due to the prominence of their Spike Jonze-directed videos on MTV.
Meet Me In Montauk 