Warm-up: 90s number ones everyone can hum
Start here. These twelve songs all reached number one in the United States during the 1990s, and most of them were unavoidable for months at a time. If you are hosting, read the question and then give the room five seconds before you take an answer, because with these the first person to shout usually has it.
A useful host trick for this round: after the reveal, ask the table to guess how long the song sat at number one. The 90s produced some absurd runs, and the numbers themselves get a bigger reaction than the answers do.
Q1.Whose version of "I Will Always Love You" anchored the 1992 film The Bodyguard?Tap to reveal
Answer: Whitney Houston
Dolly Parton wrote and first recorded the song in 1973 as a farewell to her mentor Porter Wagoner. Houston's version held number one for 14 weeks, a record at the time.
Q2.Which 1990 single became the first rap single to top the Billboard Hot 100?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Ice Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice
Blondie's "Rapture" had reached number one in 1981 with a rap verse inside a new-wave record; this was the first rap single to do it. Its bassline was lifted from Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure," and the matter was settled by handing them a writing credit.
Q3.Which Spanish duo recorded the 1990s dance craze "Macarena"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Los del Rio
The original 1993 Spanish recording went nowhere in the US. The 1995 Bayside Boys remix, with new English verses, spent 14 weeks at number one in 1996.
Q4.Which 1999 Cher single turned a pitch-correction plug-in into a hit sound?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Believe"
Its producers ran Cher's vocal through extreme pitch correction, and the effect has been copied ever since. At 52 she became the oldest woman to top the Hot 100 up to that point.
Q5.Which Toni Braxton ballad spent 11 weeks at number one starting in late 1996?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Un-Break My Heart"
Diane Warren wrote it, and Braxton reportedly disliked it at first. It won her the Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.
Q6.Which Irish singer had a 1990 number one with "Nothing Compares 2 U"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sinead O'Connor
Prince wrote the song, and it was first released in 1985 by his side project The Family. O'Connor's near-motionless close-up video did as much work as the vocal.
Q7.Which trio of pop-royalty daughters topped the chart in 1990 with "Hold On"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Wilson Phillips
Carnie and Wendy Wilson are daughters of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson; Chynna Phillips is the daughter of John and Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas. Confusingly, En Vogue released a completely different "Hold On" the same year.
Q8.Which Boyz II Men ballad spent 13 weeks at number one in 1992?Tap to reveal
Answer: "End of the Road"
It broke a Hot 100 longevity record that had stood since 1956, when Elvis Presley managed 11 weeks. Whitney Houston passed them three months later with 14 weeks, Boyz II Men matched that with "I'll Make Love to You" in 1994, and they finally took the record outright at 16 weeks alongside Mariah Carey on "One Sweet Day."
Q9.Which 1995 Seal single came from the Batman Forever soundtrack?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Kiss from a Rose"
The song had already been released on Seal's 1994 album and flopped. The film gave it a second life, and it won the Grammys for both Record and Song of the Year.
Q10.Which 1998 Will Smith single took its hook from Sister Sledge?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Gettin' Jiggy wit It"
The sample is "He's the Greatest Dancer" from 1979. Smith's run of sample-driven, radio-safe hits made him the rare rapper who was also a summer blockbuster lead.
Q11.Which TLC single from CrazySexyCool spent seven weeks at number one in 1995?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Waterfalls"
Its video was among the first to spend heavily on computer-generated effects, with the group performing as figures made of water. The song's subject matter was unusually serious for a summer number one.
Q12.Which Canadian artist topped the Hot 100 for seven weeks in 1993 with "Informer"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Snow
Snow, born Darrin O'Brien, grew up in a Toronto housing project, and the track was produced by MC Shan, who also raps the intro. Seven weeks at number one for a Canadian reggae toaster was not something anyone had forecast.
90s pop, R&B and hip-hop
This is the decade's commercial engine: boy bands engineered in Orlando, R&B albums that sold like rock albums, and hip-hop moving from a genre radio tolerated to the genre radio was built around. The questions here go a step past the chorus and into who wrote it, who sampled what, and who sued whom.
If your group skews younger, this is the round they will do best on, because streaming has kept most of these songs in circulation. If it skews older, expect the boy-band questions to be the ones that stump the table.
Q1.Which Spice Girl was known as Posh Spice?Tap to reveal
Answer: Victoria Beckham, then Victoria Adams
The five nicknames - Posh, Scary, Baby, Sporty and Ginger - were invented by a writer at Top of the Pops magazine in 1996, not by the group or their label.
Q2.Mattel went to court over a 1997 hit about one of its toys - which band recorded it?Tap to reveal
Answer: Aqua, over "Barbie Girl"
Mattel sued the record company, MCA, arguing the song tarnished the Barbie brand. The Ninth Circuit treated it as protected parody, and Judge Kozinski closed the opinion by telling both sides they are advised to chill.
Q3.Which trio of brothers from Tulsa released "MMMBop" in 1997?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hanson
Isaac, Taylor and Zac Hanson had been gigging for years before Middle of Nowhere. The brothers say the hook began life as a background part for a different song, and that "mmmbop" stands for a fleeting frame of time.
Q4.Which boy band released "As Long as You Love Me" in 1997?Tap to reveal
Answer: Backstreet Boys
They broke in Germany, Canada and Asia first and only then came home - a deliberate strategy that meant their US debut arrived with two years of momentum behind it.
Q5.What was the visual trademark of the early-90s rap duo Kris Kross?Tap to reveal
Answer: They wore their clothes backwards
Chris Kelly and Chris Smith were barely teenagers when Jermaine Dupri spotted them in an Atlanta shopping mall. Their single "Jump" spent eight weeks at number one in 1992.
Q6.Which duo of brothers had a 1991 hit with "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss"?Tap to reveal
Answer: P.M. Dawn
The track is built on Spandau Ballet's "True," and the lyric name-checks actress Christina Applegate, which is why the song still turns up in Married... with Children trivia.
Q7.Which 1993 Janet Jackson album, her first for Virgin, produced "That's the Way Love Goes" and "Again"?Tap to reveal
Answer: janet.
The lower-case title with a period was a statement that she no longer needed the surname. The lead single spent eight weeks at number one.
Q8.Which 1995 Michael Jackson single was the first song ever to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100?Tap to reveal
Answer: "You Are Not Alone"
Billboard had recently changed its methodology to weigh first-week single sales more heavily, which made debuting at the top possible for the first time.
Q9.Members of which Atlanta group co-wrote TLC's 1999 hit "No Scrubs"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Xscape
Kandi Burruss and Tameka Cottle wrote it with producer Kevin Briggs. Burruss later won a Grammy for songwriting, which is rare for a performer known first as a group member.
Q10.Which 1997 single by Puff Daddy and Faith Evans was built on The Police's "Every Breath You Take"?Tap to reveal
Answer: "I'll Be Missing You"
It was recorded as a tribute to the late Notorious B.I.G. Because the sample was not cleared in advance, Sting ended up receiving the songwriting royalties.
Q11.Which Welsh singer spent nine weeks stuck at number two in 1996 with "I Love You Always Forever"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Donna Lewis
"Macarena" was the song blocking her the entire time. Nine weeks at number two without ever reaching the top is one of the more brutal records in chart history.
90s rock, grunge and alternative radio
In 1991 a Seattle scene that major labels had ignored became the sound of mainstream American rock, and for the rest of the decade alternative radio was simply radio. By 1996 the format had widened again to include singer-songwriters with an acoustic guitar and a Grammy nomination, which is why this round mixes distorted guitars with coffee-house folk.
The singer-songwriters at the end of this section are the best questions on the whole page for a competitive group. Almost everyone recognises the songs instantly and almost nobody can produce the name, which is the sweet spot for trivia.
Q1.Which band released the 1993 song "Plush"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Stone Temple Pilots
It came from their debut album Core and won the 1994 Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance with Vocal. The category had existed since 1990, when Living Colour won the first one for "Cult of Personality."
Q2.Which Seattle band recorded "Spoonman" for their 1994 album Superunknown?Tap to reveal
Answer: Soundgarden
The percussion you hear is a real street performer, Artis the Spoonman, playing actual spoons in the studio.
Q3.Which British band's 1994 debut album Sixteen Stone produced "Comedown" and "Glycerine"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Bush
They were the most successful of the British bands to sell American grunge back to America, and they did it while barely charting at home.
Q4.Which band recorded "Iris" for the 1998 film City of Angels?Tap to reveal
Answer: Goo Goo Dolls
Johnny Rzeznik wrote it in an unusual tuning with five of the six strings tuned to D, which is why the song sounds enormous with very few chords. It spent 18 weeks, not all of them consecutive, at number one on Billboard's airplay chart, and only entered the Hot 100 itself in December 1998 because there was no retail single until then.
Q5.Which band's 1997 debut album My Own Prison produced the single "What's This Life For"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Creed
The album was originally recorded for about six thousand dollars as a demo, then remixed and reissued by a major label essentially unchanged.
Q6.Which 1997 single by The Verve led to a songwriting credit for Mick Jagger and Keith Richards?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Bitter Sweet Symphony"
It sampled an orchestral arrangement of the Rolling Stones' "The Last Time," and a licensing dispute handed Jagger and Richards the credit and the royalties. They signed the rights back to Richard Ashcroft in 2019.
Q7.Which artist released the 1993 single "Are You Gonna Go My Way"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Lenny Kravitz
The riff is deliberately built out of late-1960s hard-rock vocabulary, and the album was recorded largely on analogue equipment at a time when everyone else was going digital.
Q8.Which British band's "Virtual Insanity" won the 1997 MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year?Tap to reveal
Answer: Jamiroquai
The video appeared to show the floor sliding underneath the singer. In fact the walls moved and the floor stayed put, which is why the illusion still holds up.
Q9.Which singer's 1996 hit "Who Will Save Your Soul" came from a debut album released the year before?Tap to reveal
Answer: Jewel
Pieces of You came out in February 1995 and sold almost nothing for a year. Relentless touring, not radio, eventually turned it into one of the best-selling debut albums of the decade.
Q10.Which singer had a 1995-96 hit with "One of Us"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Joan Osborne
She did not write it: the song came from Eric Bazilian of The Hooters. It was nominated for Record and Song of the Year, with Relish up for Album of the Year and Osborne for Best New Artist - and it lost all four, three of them to Seal and Alanis Morissette.
Q11.Which singer's "Give Me One Reason" became her biggest American hit in 1996?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tracy Chapman
It reached number three, higher than "Fast Car" had eight years earlier, and won the 1997 Grammy for Best Rock Song.
90s country music
Country in the 1990s was not a side genre, it was the biggest commercial story in American music. Garth Brooks outsold almost everyone, country radio expanded into every major market, and the line between a country hit and a pop hit got very blurry. Most general-knowledge quizzes skip this entirely, which is exactly why it makes a good differentiating round.
Read these a little slower than the others. Country titles are wordier than pop titles, and half the fun is watching someone recognise a song from four words of the chorus.
Q1.Who released the album Ropin' the Wind in 1991?Tap to reveal
Answer: Garth Brooks
It was the first country album to debut at number one on the all-genre Billboard 200, which is the moment the industry stopped treating country as a niche. Ropin' the Wind went on to sell over 14 million copies in the US.
Q2.Who sang the 1992 hit "Achy Breaky Heart"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Billy Ray Cyrus
It came from Some Gave All, which spent 17 straight weeks at number one on the Billboard 200.
Q3.Who recorded "Strawberry Wine" in 1996?Tap to reveal
Answer: Deana Carter
It came from an album with the deliberately unglamorous title Did I Shave My Legs for This?, and the song won the Country Music Association's Single of the Year.
Q4.Who recorded "A Broken Wing" in 1997?Tap to reveal
Answer: Martina McBride
From the album Evolution. McBride built a career on narrative songs about women leaving bad situations, at a time when country radio preferred romance.
Q5.Which Texan topped the country chart right through the 90s with "I Cross My Heart," "Blue Clear Sky" and "Carried Away"?Tap to reveal
Answer: George Strait
George Strait debuted back in 1981 with "Unwound" and kept scoring number ones through the 1990s by refusing to follow the decade's production trends at all, which is how he ended up nicknamed the King of Country.
Q6.Which singer had 90s number ones with "Is There Life Out There" and "For My Broken Heart"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Reba McEntire
She turned her albums into staged productions and her videos into short films, and she moved into acting on Broadway and television while still charting.
Q7.Which group had a 1992 number one with "I'm in a Hurry (And Don't Know Why)"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Alabama
They had already been the dominant country band of the 1980s, and reaching number one again in 1992 made them one of very few acts to headline two decades of country radio.
Q8.Which singer's 1994 recording of "I Swear" topped the country chart?Tap to reveal
Answer: John Michael Montgomery
The R&B group All-4-One released a pop cover months later, and their version became Billboard's number one song of the entire year - a neat illustration of how porous the genres had become.
Q9.Which 1997 duet gave Tim McGraw and Faith Hill their first country number one together?Tap to reveal
Answer: "It's Your Love"
They met on the Spontaneous Combustion tour in 1996 and married that October. "It's Your Love" held number one on the country chart for six weeks and made them the decade's defining country couple.
Q10.Whose only 1990s country number one was "Shut Up and Kiss Me"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mary Chapin Carpenter
It won her a Grammy in 1995. Her better-known songs, such as "He Thinks He'll Keep Her," never actually topped the chart.
Soundtracks, Oscars and Grammys
The 90s was the last great decade of the soundtrack single. A film could make a song, a song could sell a film, and the Academy Award for Best Original Song was for most of the decade effectively a Disney trophy. This round rewards anyone who knows their films as well as their charts.
One thing worth explaining to the table before you start: an Oscar handed out in, say, 1998 is for a film released in 1997. These questions name the film rather than the ceremony year, so nobody loses a point over a calendar technicality.
Q1.Which Disney film won the Academy Award for Best Original Song with its title track, sung on the single by Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson?Tap to reveal
Answer: Beauty and the Beast
In the film itself the song is sung by Angela Lansbury as a teapot. The Menken and Ashman score also took Best Original Score, and the film became the first animated feature nominated for Best Picture.
Q2.Which 1994 film had three of the five Best Original Song nominees, winning with "Can You Feel the Love Tonight"?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Lion King
"Circle of Life" and "Hakuna Matata" were the other two nominees, so Elton John and Tim Rice were effectively competing against themselves.
Q3.Which 1997 film gave Celine Dion "My Heart Will Go On"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Titanic
James Horner wrote it without the director's knowledge, because James Cameron had said he did not want a pop song in the film at all. It won the Oscar and the Grammy for Record of the Year.
Q4.Which animated film produced the Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey duet "When You Believe"?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Prince of Egypt
It won the 1999 Oscar for Best Original Song. Pairing the two biggest voices in American pop on one ballad was a commercial idea that had been discussed for years.
Q5.Which Bruce Springsteen song, written for a 1993 film about the AIDS crisis, won both an Oscar and a Grammy?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Streets of Philadelphia"
The film was Philadelphia. Springsteen built it on a drum machine rather than the E Street Band, and it won the Grammy for Song of the Year.
Q6.Which 1995 Coolio hit came from the soundtrack of Dangerous Minds?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Gangsta's Paradise"
It is built on Stevie Wonder's "Pastime Paradise" from 1976, and it finished as Billboard's number one song of the entire year.
Q7.Which Batman film featured U2's "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Batman Forever
The 1995 soundtrack also carried Seal's "Kiss from a Rose," making it one of the few superhero films to launch two lasting hits.
Q8.Which Eric Clapton song from the film Phenomenon won the 1997 Grammy for Song of the Year?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Change the World"
It was produced by Babyface, who also sings backing vocals - a pop-R&B producer steering a blues guitarist, and it won Record of the Year too.
Q9.Which Natalie Cole recording won the 1992 Grammy for Record of the Year?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Unforgettable"
It was built as a duet with her father Nat King Cole, who had died in 1965, using his original vocal. The technique was new enough that it startled people.
Q10.Which Shawn Colvin song won both Record and Song of the Year at the 1998 Grammys?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Sunny Came Home"
A quiet folk single beating out "MMMBop" and "I Believe I Can Fly" is one of the great Grammy upsets of the decade.
Q11.Which song did the surviving Beatles release in 1995 alongside the Anthology project?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Free as a Bird"
McCartney, Harrison and Starr built it around a rough home demo John Lennon had recorded in 1977. It won a Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group.
Q12.Which 1996 film starring Madonna produced the Oscar-winning song "You Must Love Me"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Evita
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice wrote it specially for the film, and it took Best Original Song at the 1997 Academy Awards - Madonna's only Oscar-winning record.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are some good 90s music trivia questions for a party?
Start with the songs that were unavoidable - "I Will Always Love You," "Macarena," "Ice Ice Baby," "Waterfalls" - because everyone can answer at least one and nobody feels shut out. Then move into who wrote or sampled what, which is where the round gets competitive. Save the country and Oscar questions for the end; they separate the table fastest.
What was the best-selling song of the 1990s in the United States?
Elton John's "Candle in the Wind 1997," rewritten for the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, sold more copies than any other single of the decade. Setting it aside, Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" and Los del Rio's "Macarena" are the two that dominated the Hot 100 for the longest stretches.
How many 90s music trivia questions do I need for a quiz night?
Plan on about 30 for a single themed round, or the full 56 here if 90s music is the whole evening. A useful rhythm is four rounds of eight questions with a short break between each, which keeps a pub-quiz pace without anyone losing track of the score.
What made 1990s music different from the decade before it?
Two things. Nirvana's Nevermind pushed a scene the major labels had ignored into the mainstream in 1991, which ended the reign of polished stadium rock almost overnight. And in 1991 Billboard started using actual scanned sales and monitored radio airplay instead of asking shops and stations to report, which immediately revealed that country and hip-hop were far bigger than the old charts had admitted.
Are these questions suitable for a mixed-age group?
Yes. They cover pop, rock, country and film music rather than one niche, and nothing here needs a lyric sheet or an audio clip to answer. If you have teenagers playing, the pop and hip-hop section will be their strongest; if you have parents playing, the country and Grammy sections will be.
