1990s: Identity and Influence

I call the 1990s the golden era, full stop, and the case is easy to make. Between 1990 and 1994 every MC had to earn it with wordplay, flow and originality, and sampling reached a creative peak just before the courts made it expensive. A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul, the Native Tongues, put jazz records under conversational rhymes. Gang Starr paired Guru's level monotone with DJ Premier's chopped, scratched hooks. Pete Rock and CL Smooth, Black Moon and Mobb Deep built the New York sound: dusty drums, a filtered bass loop, a horn stab that hits like a punch. Nas took all of it and wrote "Illmatic". The Wu-Tang Clan took a kung-fu video store and a Staten Island basement and made "Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)", nine rappers on one record and a business plan that let each of them sign anywhere.

The West Coast answered with a different sound and a different weather. Ice Cube left N.W.A and made "AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted" and "Death Certificate", political and personal fire. Dr. Dre left too and built G-funk on "The Chronic": Parliament-Funkadelic bass, a whining Moog lead, a slow tempo you could drive to, and a skinny kid from Long Beach named Snoop Doggy Dogg who rapped like he was talking to you from the passenger seat. Cypress Hill brought Latino pride, stoner anthems and spooky beats out of South Gate. Warren G, Nate Dogg and DJ Quik were the smooth end of the same street. E-40, Too $hort and the Hieroglyphics crew gave the Bay its own slang and flow.

Then it turned. Bad Boy in New York had the Notorious B.I.G., Brooklyn's king, whose "Ready to Die" and "Life After Death" told stories with a novelist's eye and a comedian's timing. Death Row in Los Angeles had Dre, Snoop, Tha Dogg Pound and, from October 1995, Tupac Shakur, a poet, a provocateur and a prophet who contradicted himself on purpose. The 1995 Source Awards put the two camps in one room and it went wrong on stage. Magazines sold the feud, the labels fed it, and the artists paid: Tupac was shot in Las Vegas and died on 13 September 1996; Biggie was shot in Los Angeles and died on 9 March 1997. Jay-Z's "Reasonable Doubt" had arrived in between, the hustler's manifesto that would outlast both empires.

The South had been there the whole time. The Geto Boys and Scarface in Houston, UGK in Port Arthur, Eightball and MJG in Memphis, Three 6 Mafia's horrorcore and DJ Screw's chopped-and-screwed tapes gave the region a slow drawl and a dark heart. Then OutKast stood up at the 1995 Source Awards, got booed by New York, and André 3000 said the South had something to say. "ATLiens" and "Aquemini" proved it, Goodie Mob and the Dungeon Family kept the conscience, and by 1998 Master P's No Limit in New Orleans was selling millions with no radio and Cash Money's Juvenile was turning bounce into "Back That Azz Up". The 2000s would belong to the South. This is where that started.

And the mainstream got bigger without the underground going quiet. Puff Daddy's shiny-suit era put Biggie samples and pop hooks on MTV every hour. Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliott and Timbaland reinvented what a rap record could sound like. Eminem, DMX and Busta Rhymes arrived at the end. Meanwhile Rawkus, The Roots, Common, Mos Def and Talib Kweli, Company Flow, MF DOOM, Slum Village and J Dilla kept it weird, lyrical and philosophical, and The Neptunes and Swizz Beatz were writing the beats that would run the next decade.

Grunge was not just a genre. It was a cultural detonation. Sub Pop in Seattle had been putting out murky, slow punk with metal riffs since the late 1980s: Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Nirvana's "Bleach". Then Nirvana signed to Geffen, hired Butch Vig, and made "Nevermind". Released on 24 September 1991, it hit number one in January 1992 and knocked Michael Jackson off the top. Pearl Jam's "Ten" was more classic rock and deeply principled. Soundgarden were heavy, sludgy and operatic. Alice in Chains were the darkest corner, metal-drenched and harrowing. Stone Temple Pilots had the hooks and the swagger. The sound was dirty guitar, quiet-loud dynamics and a voice that cracked on purpose. The subject was depression, isolation and whether any of it was real.

Kurt Cobain hated what fame did with the music, made the abrasive "In Utero" with Steve Albini, sat down for "MTV Unplugged" in a cardigan, and died on 5 April 1994. Hole's "Live Through This" came out a week later. The scene did not end there, but it changed: Foo Fighters were Dave Grohl's reinvention, Bush and Live and Collective Soul and Candlebox took the sound to arena radio, and Creed made it a punchline that sold ten million copies. I call that post-grunge: grunge aesthetics with polished production. It ruled the dial until nu-metal took the slot.

Alternative in the 1990s meant rock that did not fit the boxes, and suddenly it was on every radio and movie soundtrack. Radiohead went from "Creep" to "The Bends" to "OK Computer", art-rock outsiders who became the decade's visionaries. The Smashing Pumpkins layered glam, goth and metal into "Siamese Dream" and a two-disc epic. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were funk-rock punks who found depth. Beck was the slacker king of genre-hopping. Jane's Addiction were psychedelic, sexual and chaotic, and Perry Farrell's Lollapalooza put the whole scene on one stage in the summer of 1991. Weezer were geeky and secretly heavy. R.E.M., Sonic Youth and the Pixies, the college-rock elders, made their best-selling records and, in the Pixies' case, broke up by fax.

The indie underground kept its own counsel. Pavement, Guided by Voices and Built to Spill made the lo-fi, hooky, wrong-on-purpose rock that indie would run on for twenty years. Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" and Elliott Smith's whispered albums became the records people passed hand to hand. Jeff Buckley made "Grace" and drowned. And a generation of women did the decade's most honest writing: Liz Phair answering the Stones from a Chicago bedroom, PJ Harvey, Björk, Tori Amos, Sinéad O'Connor tearing up a photo of the Pope on live television, Alanis Morissette selling thirty million copies of a breakup, and the riot grrrl bands, Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, who made a punk scene where girls were the point.

Britain built its own thing. My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless" made shoegaze, a wall of guitar with the melody buried like a secret, and Slowdive and Ride followed it in. The Stone Roses played to thirty thousand people at Spike Island in 1990 and then vanished for four years. Suede brought glam back. Then Britpop: Oasis were the Gallagher brothers' Beatles obsession turned stadium-sized, Blur were the brainy art-school rival, Pulp were kitchen-sink drama and sexual politics, the Verve were orchestral grandeur, the Manic Street Preachers were the conscience. In August 1995 Blur and Oasis released singles the same day and the whole country picked a side. In Bristol, Massive Attack and Portishead slowed hip-hop down into trip-hop, the sound of a city after midnight.

Rock outside the alternative bubble spent the decade absorbing what the underground had done. The Red Hot Chili Peppers recorded "Blood Sugar Sex Magik" in a Hollywood mansion with Rick Rubin and released it the same day as "Nevermind". Rage Against the Machine set revolution to riffs and rhymes: Tom Morello's guitar doing DJ tricks, Zack de la Rocha shouting slogans you could not un-hear. Tool made heavy music that was patient and strange. Faith No More and Jane's Addiction had shown the way in 1990. By the end of the decade Rage and Tool were headlining Woodstock 99 and Limp Bizkit was on the same bill.

Some bands traded guitars for glitchy samples. Nine Inch Nails was Trent Reznor's tortured brilliance in digital form; "The Downward Spiral" went to number two in 1994 and his mud-caked set at Woodstock 94 made industrial rock a mainstream event. Ministry had already fused thrash and machines with political venom. Marilyn Manson, Reznor's protégé, was shock rock that rattled the culture and got blamed for Columbine. The line for all of it: heavy riffs, sampling, screaming vocals, themes of alienation and control.

The mainstream arena did not disappear. Metallica became the biggest rock band in the world with a black-covered album that sold sixteen million copies in America alone. Guns N' Roses released two albums on one day in 1991 and then fell apart. Aerosmith, Bon Jovi and Tom Petty kept selling. U2 reinvented themselves twice. Foo Fighters became the most consistent rock band of the next twenty-five years. And Queen, three months after Freddie Mercury died, went back to number two on the American chart because two guys headbanged to "Bohemian Rhapsody" in a car in "Wayne's World".

Pop in the 1990s belonged first to the voices. Mariah Carey arrived in 1990 with a five-octave range and by 1995 was putting Ol' Dirty Bastard on a remix. Whitney Houston sang Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You" in "The Bodyguard" and held number one for fourteen weeks. Celine Dion sang the "Titanic" song. Janet Jackson signed the biggest record deal in history in 1991 and used it to make "janet." and "The Velvet Rope", records about sex and depression that sounded like the future. Michael Jackson made "Dangerous" with Teddy Riley and premiered "Black or White" in front of half a billion people. The ballad, the key change and the video budget were the tools.

Then the kids took over. Lou Pearlman built the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC in Orlando and sold them to Europe before America noticed. The Spice Girls sold girl power to the whole planet in 1996. And in a studio in Stockholm called Cheiron, a former metal singer named Max Martin worked out a formula: a huge chorus, a vocal melody that sat on the beat like a drum part, and lyrics in slightly wrong English that everyone could sing. "Quit Playing Games (with My Heart)", "...Baby One More Time", "I Want It That Way". Britney Spears was sixteen. Christina Aguilera followed. "TRL" counted the votes. The 2000s pop chart was built here.

Pop also learned new tricks. Los del Río's "Macarena" spent fourteen weeks at number one in 1996 and taught America a dance. Cher's "Believe" in 1998 pushed an Antares pitch-correction box called Auto-Tune past the point where it fixed a note and into the place where it became a sound; twenty years later every rapper would use it. Ricky Martin's "The Cup of Life" at the February 1999 Grammys started a Latin pop explosion. Shania Twain's "Come On Over" made a country record the best-selling album by a woman in American history. Pop was learning to eat every other genre. It has not stopped.

R&B in 1990 was new jack swing, Teddy Riley's stuttering drum machines under gospel-trained voices. Then a twenty-one-year-old from Yonkers named Mary J. Blige made "What's the 411?" with Puff Daddy in 1992 and the Rock Hall's phrase for it is exact: it defined hip-hop soul. Rap beats, a singer who sounded like she meant it, no smoothing. Everything R&B did for the next thirty years starts there.

The harmony groups ruled the chart. Boyz II Men held number one for thirteen weeks with "End of the Road" and fourteen with "I'll Make Love to You", and sixteen with Mariah on "One Sweet Day". En Vogue were the funky divas. TLC made "CrazySexyCool", a diamond-selling album whose creators filed for bankruptcy the next year, which tells you how the contracts worked. Toni Braxton, Brandy, Monica and Aaliyah, who at fifteen was the voice on Timbaland and Missy Elliott's strangest beats, made the sound of the second half of the decade. Usher's "My Way" and Destiny's Child's "The Writing's on the Wall" set up the next one. R. Kelly wrote and produced hits across the decade; he was convicted of sex crimes in 2021 and 2022, and this chapter leaves it at that.

And a counter-movement started. D'Angelo's "Brown Sugar" in 1995 sounded like Marvin Gaye had been listening to Wu-Tang. Kedar Massenburg, who managed him, coined "neo-soul" for it and for Erykah Badu's "Baduizm", which arrived in 1997 in a headwrap with a voice out of Billie Holiday. Maxwell's "Urban Hang Suite" was the quiet storm reborn. Lauryn Hill's "Miseducation" was the movement's crown. The point was live instruments, Fender Rhodes, and singing about something. It fed straight into the Soulquarians, J Dilla and the 2000s.

Britain spent 1990 to 1992 in a field. Acid house had become rave, and rave meant twenty thousand people at an illegal free party like Castlemorton Common in May 1992, which is the one that made the government act. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 gave police power to shut down gatherings playing music "characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats". The scene went indoors and split into a dozen sounds. The Prodigy, who had been a rave act, made "The Fat of the Land" and went to number one in America. The Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim and the big beat clubs in Brighton and London put rock drums and hip-hop breaks under acid lines. Underworld's "Born Slippy .NUXX" became the anthem after "Trainspotting" used it. Orbital played Glastonbury in 1994 and made dance music a festival headliner.

Jungle came out of London's Black and mixed-race clubs: breakbeats sped to 160 beats per minute, dub bass, ragga vocals. Goldie's "Timeless" in 1995 made it an album form, and Roni Size and Reprazent's "New Forms" won the 1997 Mercury Prize over "OK Computer". UK garage followed at the end of the decade, the sound that would give the 2000s Craig David, So Solid Crew and, eventually, dubstep and grime. Meanwhile Warp Records in Sheffield released "Artificial Intelligence" in 1992 and a label sampler accidentally named a genre: Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada. Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works 85–92" was the sound of a teenager in Cornwall building his own synthesizers, and it is still the record people mean when they say "IDM".

On the continent, techno had gone home to Berlin. Tresor opened in a bank vault in 1991. Basic Channel stripped techno to a pulse and an echo. The Love Parade grew from a few hundred people in 1989 to over a million in the late 1990s. Detroit's second wave, Carl Craig, Jeff Mills and Underground Resistance, Richie Hawtin across the river in Windsor, played Berlin as often as home. Trance, from Frankfurt, was the melodic, hands-in-the-air version that would fill superclubs by 1999. And in Paris two kids in robot helmets released "Homework" in 1997; Daft Punk, Air, Cassius and Étienne de Crécy were "French touch", disco filtered through a sampler, and it made the world want to dance to France.

America came last and came through Moby. "Play", released in May 1999, put Alan Lomax's 1959 field recordings of Southern gospel and blues singers over house beats and licensed every track to an advert or a film. It sold ten million copies to people who had never been to a club. Björk's "Homogenic", with Mark Bell of LFO on beats and an Icelandic string octet, showed what electronic pop could be when a singer treated the machines as an orchestra. Between them they pointed at the 2000s, when the laptop would be the instrument.

Country had never sold like this. Garth Brooks, an Oklahoma kid who loved Kiss and James Taylor equally, took arena rock staging, a headset microphone and a fly rig into the country show. "No Fences" in 1990 sold more than sixteen million. "Ropin' the Wind" in September 1991 became the first country album ever to enter the Billboard 200 at number one, a fact SoundScan made visible and the industry could not ignore. He sold more records than anyone in the 1990s, in any genre. Billy Ray Cyrus's "Achy Breaky Heart" in 1992 taught America a line dance and sat at number one on the pop album chart for seventeen weeks. Brooks and Dunn's "Boot Scootin' Boogie" did the same job for the dance halls.

Under the boom, the neo-traditionalists held the line. Alan Jackson's "keep it country" was a philosophy and a business plan; George Strait kept doing what he had done since 1981, and it kept working; Vince Gill sang harmony so clean it became a standard. Trisha Yearwood and Mary Chapin Carpenter wrote and sang grown women's songs. Tim McGraw and Faith Hill married in 1996 and became the format's royal couple. LeAnn Rimes sang "Blue" at thirteen. Shania Twain and her husband Mutt Lange, who had produced Def Leppard, made "Come On Over" a pop record with a fiddle on it and sold forty million copies. Then the Dixie Chicks, three women with a banjo and a fiddle and real harmony, sold twelve million copies of "Wide Open Spaces" and proved the boom could be traditional and enormous at once.

And a road ran the other way. Uncle Tupelo, from Belleville, Illinois, named their 1990 debut after a Carter Family song, played punk-fast hillbilly and Hank Williams slow, and when they split in 1994 they became Wilco and Son Volt. A magazine named "No Depression" after that record became the name for the whole scene. Whiskeytown gave the world Ryan Adams. Lucinda Williams took six years and three producers to make "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" and it is the record every Americana songwriter still measures against. Steve Earle came out of jail and rehab and made three great albums in a row. And Johnny Cash, dropped by his label and playing dinner theatres, sat down in Rick Rubin's living room with a guitar in 1994 and made "American Recordings". The last act of his life, and one of the best.

Metal split in two in the 1990s and both halves won. The first half was Metallica. "Metallica", the black-covered album produced by Bob Rock and released in August 1991, slowed the band down, turned the drums up and sold sixteen million copies in the United States. Every rock radio station played "Enter Sandman". Pantera went the other way: "Vulgar Display of Power" in 1992 was groove metal, Dimebag Darrell's guitar sounding like a chainsaw hitting a bell, and "Far Beyond Driven" entered the Billboard 200 at number one in 1994 without a single note of compromise. Sepultura, from Brazil, put tribal drums under the riffs on "Roots". Type O Negative made goth metal funny and sad at once. Kyuss in the California desert and Sleep in San Jose slowed Black Sabbath to a crawl and invented stoner rock.

The second half was extreme. Death metal peaked with Death's "Human" and "Symbolic", Morbid Angel signing to a major label, Cannibal Corpse getting banned in Germany and Entombed's Stockholm buzzsaw. In Norway a smaller, colder scene went further. Mayhem, Burzum, Emperor and Darkthrone made black metal: treble guitars, blast beats, shrieked vocals, corpse paint, recorded badly on purpose. Between 1992 and 1993 members of that scene burned at least a dozen churches, including the medieval stave church at Fantoft. On 10 August 1993 Varg Vikernes of Burzum stabbed Mayhem's guitarist Euronymous to death in Oslo. The music was real and so was the evil. The book "Lords of Chaos" tells it; treat the scene's own accounts with care.

By 1994 a band from Bakersfield had a different idea. Korn tuned down to A, put a hip-hop groove under seven-string guitars and let Jonathan Davis scream about abuse. Deftones blended beauty and brutality like no one else. Limp Bizkit added a rapper and a DJ and sold the whole thing at Woodstock 99. Slipknot arrived in masks in 1999. System of a Down brought Armenian folk and politics. Rob Zombie made the horror movie a party. Nu-metal, was metal for the modern age, and the modern age was the "TRL" countdown. It would be the biggest rock sound of the early 2000s and the one the next generation swore it hated.

Punk went to the suburbs. Green Day, three kids from the East Bay who had grown up at the all-ages Gilman Street club, signed to Reprise and released "Dookie" on 1 February 1994. It sold ten million copies in America; I call it the gateway drug. The Offspring's "Smash", on the independent Epitaph, sold eleven million and became the best-selling indie-label record there had ever been. Rancid, Bad Religion, NOFX, Lagwagon and MxPx filled the two independent labels, Epitaph and Fat Wreck Chords, that made punk a business without a major. The Vans Warped Tour started in 1995 and put a skate ramp next to the stage. blink-182's "Enema of the State" in June 1999 was crude jokes and big hooks, and it set up the 2000s pop-punk boom, including Sum 41, who formed in 1996 and would arrive with the new decade.

Ska-punk rode the same wave. Sublime from Long Beach mixed reggae, dub, hip-hop and hardcore and their singer Bradley Nowell died two months before the album that made them famous. No Doubt's "Tragic Kingdom" and "Don't Speak" put Gwen Stefani on every magazine cover. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Reel Big Fish wore suits and played horns. For a year or two in 1997 every high school had a ska band.

Underneath, punk evolved emotionally. Fugazi in Washington kept the five-dollar shows and the DIY ethics and made records of political fire and dynamic invention. Jawbreaker were the raw emo blueprint soaked in cigarette smoke. Sunny Day Real Estate's "Diary", on Sub Pop in 1994, was beautiful, anguished and genre-defining. Texas Is the Reason, Mineral and Braid were the Midwest cornerstones; The Promise Ring, The Get Up Kids and Jimmy Eat World turned it into songs. In Sweden, Refused made "The Shape of Punk to Come" in 1998, broke up weeks later, and were right about the title. At the Drive-In, from El Paso, were about to prove it. Bikini Kill, Bratmobile and riot grrrl, from Olympia, had already remade the scene's rules about who got the microphone.

Miles Davis died on 28 September 1991 with a hip-hop record, "Doo-Bop", unfinished on the shelf. The argument about what jazz should be after him ran the decade. Wynton Marsalis and the Young Lions, the suit-wearing neo-traditionalists who ran the new Jazz at Lincoln Center, said it should sound like the tradition and honor it. In April 1997 Marsalis's oratorio "Blood on the Fields" became the first jazz work to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Joshua Redman, Roy Hargrove, Brad Mehldau and Christian McBride were the generation under him, virtuosos who could play anything and mostly chose the standards. Cassandra Wilson and Diana Krall showed a jazz singer could sell records again, Wilson by covering Robert Johnson and Joni Mitchell, Krall by channeling Nat King Cole.

The other answer came from the sample vault. Blue Note opened its catalog to a British producer and Us3's "Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)", built on Herbie Hancock's "Cantaloupe Island", became the label's first platinum record in 1993. Guru of Gang Starr put Donald Byrd, Roy Ayers and Branford Marsalis on "Jazzmatazz", live jazz over rap beats. A Tribe Called Quest had already made the case on "The Low End Theory" with Ron Carter on bass. Medeski Martin and Wood took the organ trio to the jam-band circuit. Acid jazz, in London and New York, was the club version. Jazz was alive in hip-hop whether the Young Lions liked it or not.

And the decade's biggest jazz record was neither. Ry Cooder and Nick Gold went to Havana in March 1996 and recorded a room full of Cuban musicians in their seventies and eighties. "Buena Vista Social Club" sold millions, won a Grammy, became a Wim Wenders film and put Ibrahim Ferrer and Compay Segundo at Carnegie Hall. Ken Burns's ten-part "Jazz" would air in January 2001 and argue the whole history from Armstrong to Marsalis. The 1990s had already shown the music was bigger than any one story about it.

Dancehall took over from roots reggae in the 1980s and in the 1990s it took over the world's bass. Shabba Ranks, gravel-voiced and unstoppable, won the Best Reggae Album Grammy in 1992 and again in 1993, the first dancehall artist to do it, and "Mr. Loverman" was on American radio. Super Cat signed to Columbia. Shaggy took an old ska song, "Oh Carolina", to number one in Britain and then made "Boombastic" a global hit and a Grammy winner. Beenie Man's "Who Am I (Sim Simma)" and his feud with Bounty Killer ran the Jamaican charts. Big Mountain's reggae cover of Peter Frampton sat in the American top ten. Ini Kamoze's "Here Comes the Hotstepper" went to number one there in 1994.

Then the conscious turn. Buju Banton, the biggest and roughest voice in dancehall, converted to Rastafari and made "Til Shiloh" in 1995, a record of drums, scripture and "Untold Stories", the song that sounds like Bob Marley's "Redemption Song" for a new generation. Capleton, Sizzla and Luciano followed, and Xterminator's productions made the Bobo Ashanti sound the late-1990s roots revival. Bob Marley's "Legend" kept selling to every college dorm in the world; his estate was finally settled in 1991, and his son Damian released his first album in 1996.

The riddim, the instrumental track dozens of singers voice over, was the decade's quiet export. Shabba Ranks's "Dem Bow" (1990) gave its drum pattern to a Puerto Rican underground that would call itself reggaeton. Dancehall toasting sat inside New York hip-hop from Biggie to Lauryn Hill, who sampled Sister Nancy's "Bam Bam" and recorded her album at Tuff Gong. Sean Paul cut his first singles in 1996 and 1997. The 2000s, when dancehall and reggaeton both went to number one, were already audible.

Selena Quintanilla was the Queen of Tejano, the accordion-and-synth border music of South Texas, and she was about to be much more. "Amor Prohibido" in 1994 sold like a pop record and won her a Grammy. On 31 March 1995 the president of her fan club shot her dead in a Corpus Christi motel. She was twenty-three. "Dreaming of You", the English-language crossover she was recording, came out that July and entered the Billboard 200 at number one, the first mostly Spanish-language album to do it. Jennifer Lopez played her in the 1997 film and then made her own record.

The crossover Selena did not live to lead arrived four years later. Ricky Martin, a former member of Menudo, sang "The Cup of Life" at the Grammys on 24 February 1999 and got a standing ovation; "Livin' la Vida Loca" was number one within three months. Enrique Iglesias, Marc Anthony, who had already made salsa romántica records that sold in the millions, and Shakira, whose "Pies Descalzos" and "Dónde Están los Ladrones?" were rock records from Barranquilla, all followed. Carlos Santana's "Supernatural", his comeback with Clive Davis, won eight Grammys in one night. Luis Miguel had spent the decade selling boleros to the whole Spanish-speaking world. The industry called it the Latin explosion. It was a market noticing itself.

Under and around all of it, other Latin musics were doing their own work. Café Tacvba's "Re" (1994), Maná, Los Fabulosos Cadillacs and Soda Stereo made rock en español a continent-wide scene with its own MTV. Los Tigres del Norte's "Jefe de Jefes" was the corrido, the border ballad, grown up and dangerous. Banda and technobanda, brass bands from Sinaloa, filled Los Angeles dance halls and made a Spanish-language station the city's number one. In Puerto Rico, DJ Playero's underground cassettes put Spanish rap over dancehall riddims; a teenager named Daddy Yankee first appeared on "Playero 37" in 1992. Celia Cruz kept touring at seventy. Buena Vista Social Club brought Cuba's old men to Carnegie Hall. Latin music in the 1990s was not one thing. It was a dozen, and each was about to get louder.

Gospel had been feeding pop for a century and in the 1990s it took some of it back. Kirk Franklin, a choir director from Fort Worth, made "Kirk Franklin and the Family" in 1993 and it became the first gospel debut to go platinum. Then, in 1997, "Stomp" with God's Property put a Funkadelic sample and a Salt-N-Pepa rap under a church choir, went into rotation on MTV and to number one on the R&B airplay chart, and then won Best Gospel Choir or Chorus Album at the 1998 Grammys. Purists hated it. The kids in the choir loved it. Franklin's "Nu Nation Project" the next year put Bono, Mary J. Blige and R. Kelly on the same gospel track. The fusion of hip-hop and church was now a market.

Around him the tradition stayed strong and got louder. Yolanda Adams's "Mountain High... Valley Low" in 1999 was a gospel record produced like R&B and it crossed over. Fred Hammond and Radical for Christ, Donnie McClurkin, whose "Stand" became a standard, Richard Smallwood's "Total Praise" and the Clark Sisters kept the choir sound alive. Take 6 sang six-part a cappella that won Grammys in both gospel and jazz. BeBe and CeCe Winans, with Mavis Staples on "I'll Take You There", topped the R&B chart. Mary Mary's "Shackles" was months away. Gospel taught the 1990s R&B singers how to sing; in the 1990s it took the beats back in return.

The folk revival of the 1990s was mostly women and mostly done without permission. Ani DiFranco started Righteous Babe Records in Buffalo in 1990, sold her tapes from the trunk of her car and turned down every major label; by 1996 she was selling hundreds of thousands. Tracy Chapman, whose first album had made her famous in 1988, came back in 1995 with "Give Me One Reason", a twelve-bar blues that became her biggest hit. The Indigo Girls sang "Galileo" in harmony. Jewel's "Pieces of You", recorded partly in a coffee shop, took two years to sell twelve million copies. Sarah McLachlan, told that radio would not play two women in a row, put a tour together to prove it wrong: Lilith Fair, in the summer of 1997, was the highest-grossing festival tour in America that year. Dar Williams, Fiona Apple, Iris DeMent and Gillian Welch, whose "Revival" sounded like a 1930s field recording made in 1996, wrote the songs under the noise.

The men whispered. Elliott Smith, from Portland, made "Either/Or" on a four-track and found himself in a white suit at the Oscars in March 1998 singing "Miss Misery" between Celine Dion and Trisha Yearwood. Nick Drake, dead since 1974, was rediscovered when "Pink Moon" scored a Volkswagen advert at the decade's end, and a generation of bedroom songwriters heard him for the first time. Beck put the electronics away for "Mutations" and reached back to the folk and tropicália records his grandfather might have owned. Uncle Tupelo and Wilco kept the Woody Guthrie line alive; Billy Bragg and Wilco set Guthrie's unpublished lyrics to music on "Mermaid Avenue" in 1998. Folk in the 1990s was not a movement. It was a voice and a guitar, and it was everywhere.

Blues in the 1990s was a reissue business and then it was not. Columbia's "Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings" box set in 1990 sold a million copies of a man who had died in 1938. Stevie Ray Vaughan died in a helicopter crash on 27 August 1990, and the blues-rock guitar hero seat stayed empty. Buddy Guy, who had been without a label for a decade, made "Damn Right, I've Got the Blues" in 1991 with Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and won a Grammy. Clapton himself made "From the Cradle" in 1994, a straight blues album that went to number one. John Lee Hooker, at seventy-two, was in the Top 40 with "The Healer" and its follow-ups.

The interesting blues came from Mississippi and from kids. Fat Possum Records, out of Oxford, recorded R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough playing the one-chord hill country trance they had played in juke joints for fifty years, and put Burnside on tour with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Keb' Mo' and Corey Harris went back to the acoustic Delta. Susan Tedeschi and Jonny Lang, who was fifteen, were the new guitar players. The White Stripes were in a Detroit garage working it out. The blues was not the decade's sound. It was under the decade's sound, the way it had been under every decade before it.