Look at a list of the top hits of the '90s. While tastes did shift from the beginning of the decade to the end, the top American songs of the '90s usually fall into the categories of dance, ballads and alternative rock. Examples from these genres include C&C Music Factory's "Gonna Make You Sweat," Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" and The Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Under The Bridge," respectively. Familiarizing yourself with these genres will help identify music types from the '90s.
Listen to albums by the top artists of the era. The '90s were defined by artists like Janet Jackson, Nirvana, Mariah Carey, TLC, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., Sheryl Crow, Will Smith, Beck, Dr. Dre and Puff Daddy. All of these artists influenced their contemporaries and helped to define the '90s sound. If you become familiar with the top artists of the '90s, you will be able to hear their influence on other bands and identify those others as pop acts from the '90s.
Download software to help you identify songs. If you hear a song on the radio and want to identify it you can play it through a microphone on your computer or smart phone and run it through a special software application. Programs and applications such as Tunatic, Midomi Ultra and Shazam recognize sound data and run that data through a database to reveal the name of the song and the artist. If you want to identify the song as a piece of American pop music from the '90s, enter the resulting name of the song and the artist into a search engine to research its date and origin.
Write down some of the lyrics to the song. There are many lyric identification sites, such as eLyrics.net. Type a few of the song's lyrics into the search box and the site will help you to identify the song and the artist that made it popular. From there you can perform an Internet search to determine if the song is American and if it dates back to the '90s.