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World Cafe 30th Anniversary Playlist: 1992

World Cafe celebrates 30 years with a 1992 playlist.
WXPN
World Cafe celebrates 30 years with a 1992 playlist.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of World Cafe, we'll be looking back and posting playlists from each year of the show. As music has evolved over the years, so have our playlists, which have grown to reflect many genres and styles of music.

In 1992, while grunge rock continued to hold high court on the sales charts and on radio station playlists, a number of important records found their way onto the World Cafe that year, including Harvest Moon by Neil Young, Tori Amos's remarkable Little Earthquakes, the excellent debut by Arrested Development, and the genre defying Joshua Judges Ruth by Lyle Lovett. R.E.M. broke through to the mainstream with Automatic For The People. Arizona's The Gin Blossoms, a relatively unknown band at the time when it released New Miserable Experience, had four massive songs from the record to sing along to, and noise-rockers Sonic Youth released Dirty, produced by Butch Vig. Plus, there were exciting releases from Los Lobos, Leonard Cohen, the Beastie Boys and Eric B. & Rakim.

Copyright 2021 XPN

Bruce Warren is assistant general manager for programming of WXPN in Philadelphia. Besides serving as executive producer of World Café, Warren also contributes to Paste magazine and writes for two blogs: Some Velvet Blog and WXPN's All About The Music Blog.