Best & Worst Music

Faith No More merged rap and metal, DNA turned Suzanne Vega into techno-folk, and the 2 Live Crew incorporated Bruce Springsteen into one of their raps — just a few examples of the musical barrier-breaking that went on all year.

Fifty-two years after his death, seminal Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson cracked the Billboard Top 100 with a boxed set of his work, which sold more than 175,000 copies in the U.S.

Mariah Carey. Sure, she can sing — with the earnest intensity of a newly hatched angel. But what she sings is another story. Can anyone remember even one of her songs?

U.S. Representative Jean Dixon, a Missouri Republican and the country's leading proponent of government-sanctioned record labeling, lost a reelection bid to a real-estate salesman.

Various Artists, It Ain't Over 'Til She Sings ''She'' being the fat lady of operatic fame. There's nothing wrong with the contents of this record, which offers a collection of arias sung by eight leading divas. But the title (surely the crassest musical marketing concept of the year) is positively insulting. Did anyone at CBS care that one of the singers, Ileana Cotrubas, is notably slight, that another, Kiri Te Kanawa, is a willowy beauty — and that a third, Renata Scotto, fought a famously successful battle to reduce her weight?

Gunnar and Matthew Nelson, those long-maned, blond twins who front the band Nelson. They're Ricky's sons, and they're the prettiest boys on MTV. At least they didn't do a power-ballad remake of ''Travelin' Man.''

George Michael, ''Freedom 90.'' The boy makes his second album and wants to shed his sex-god image. The last thing he's going to do is show his pretty face in a video — he's serious now, see? So he takes the song in which he says all this and makes a video that is lip-synched by five sleek models, caught in what look like outtakes from some erotic film. And we're supposed to believe he's rejecting their lifestyle?