2000s: Collapse, Comeback, and the Blog-Era Renaissance

The 2000s were hip-hop's imperial phase. The genre had money, reach and power, and an identity crisis to go with it. Could you be conscious and commercial? Street and pop? Lyrical and melodic? Turns out you could. The decade did not just expand hip-hop's audience; it expanded its language. This was the mixtape era, the ringtone rap era, the rise of Southern dominance, the birth of the GOAT conversation.

Phase one, 2000 to 2004, belonged to artists who balanced art and enterprise. Jay-Z ran New York and rapped like it: The Blueprint on 11 September 2001, The Black Album in 2003, then a fake retirement and the presidency of Def Jam. Eminem was pure chaos and technical genius; nobody pushed boundaries, or buttons, like Slim Shady. 50 Cent turned nine bullet wounds into a myth, and Dr. Dre's polish put Get Rich or Die Tryin' in every car in America. Missy Elliott and Timbaland made weird sound mainstream. The Neptunes ruled the charts with a four-count intro. Nelly made St. Louis matter with a sing-song flow. Ludacris brought Southern energy and a cartoon's delivery.

Phase two, 2004 to 2007, was Atlanta's takeover. The South had always been there; now it was everywhere. OutKast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below won Album of the Year. T.I. crowned himself King of the South on Trap Muzik. Young Jeezy's Thug Motivation 101 was trap music's emotional ice storm, all cold delivery and heavy ad-libs. Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz screamed crunk into the clubs, and turn up began there. Dem Franchize Boyz, D4L and Soulja Boy made snap music: minimal, viral, ringtone-ready. Houston got loud too, with Mike Jones, Paul Wall, Slim Thug and Chamillionaire taking DJ Screw's chopped and screwed sound to MTV, and UGK and Three 6 Mafia finally collecting what they were owed.

Phase three, 2007 to 2009, is when the internet changed the rules. Mixtapes became marketing, not throwaways, and DatPiff, NahRight, 2DopeBoyz and early YouTube broke artists without radio. Lil Wayne flooded the decade with Dedication, Da Drought 3 and a thousand features before Tha Carter III sold a million in a week. Kanye West went from soul samples to stadium rap to Auto-Tuned heartbreak in four albums. Lupe Fiasco was the nerd's rapper. Clipse wrote drug-rap poetry over minimalist Neptunes heat. Kid Cudi's Day 'n' Nite changed bedroom rap forever, and Drake's So Far Gone mixtape, in February 2009, was the door the next decade walked through.

Around the edges: Dipset's Cam'ron, Juelz Santana and Jim Jones set trends in Harlem; Fat Joe, Remy Ma and Terror Squad held the Bronx; Nas, Mobb Deep, Mos Def and Talib Kweli stayed active and respected; Twista, Do or Die and a Kanye-reborn Common warmed up Chicago; MF DOOM and Madlib made Madvillainy and J Dilla made Donuts. Grime broke out of London with Dizzee Rascal, reggaeton broke out of Puerto Rico with Daddy Yankee. Production moved from soul samples to synths to Southern 808s, and Auto-Tune went from gimmick to emotional tool, T-Pain to Kanye to Wayne. Fashion went from throwbacks and tall tees to grills and BAPE to skinny jeans, and artists became brands: Rocawear, G-Unit, Sean John, LRG. By 2009 rap was no longer fighting for pop placement. It was pop.

Rock was not dead. It just moved back into the garage. The early 2000s saw a gritty, stylish return to punky minimalism and jagged guitars, from bands who looked like CBGB ghosts in Hedi Slimane suits. The Strokes' Is This It rewired cool and brought lo-fi downtown back. The White Stripes were Jack White's bluesy, minimal, genre-bending chaos, two people and a red-and-white color scheme. The Hives were Swedish punks with explosive precision. Franz Ferdinand made danceable riffs with art-school swagger. Interpol were brooding, suited-up post-punk revivalists. Yeah Yeah Yeahs turned Karen O's stage presence into something visceral. The Vines, the Libertines, the Kings of Leon, and eventually Arctic Monkeys and the Black Keys followed.

There was a heavier, dustier rock too. Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf was a drive through the California desert with Dave Grohl on drums. At the Drive-In's Relationship of Command was post-hardcore at its most accomplished, and when the band split, the Mars Volta took the prog half with them. Radiohead's Kid A, released 2 October 2000, is the decade's opening statement: the biggest rock band in the world putting its guitars down and going to number one in America anyway. Coldplay, Snow Patrol, the Fray, OneRepublic, Lifehouse and early Maroon 5 were the crossover class: rock-leaning acts with radio hooks and pop polish that were not underground but were not bubblegum either.

This was the last decade where rock felt like youth culture. It was on TV, in movies, in your buddy's burnt CDs. It was not one movement; it was many at once. And it laid the groundwork for the genreless, playlist-driven world that followed, where your favorite band might be screaming one track and crooning the next.

Indie stopped meaning "independent label" and became a sound, an ethos and a whole aesthetic. Fueled by mp3 blogs, Pitchfork reviews and iPod commercials, it took over dorm rooms, festival stages and iTunes libraries. Arcade Fire's Funeral, on Merge in September 2004, was orchestral drama and communal catharsis from a Montreal collective that had just buried several family members. Modest Mouse's weirdness went pop with Float On. The Shins got Garden State immortality. Death Cab for Cutie turned gentle sadness stadium-sized. Vampire Weekend brought Ivy League Afro-pop and baroque bops. The Killers were a synth-drenched Springsteen revival from Las Vegas. Late in the decade MGMT and, in Australia, Tame Impala made it psychedelic and playful.

The blog era had its own lineage. Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was dropped by its label, streamed free from the band's website in September 2001, and became the decade's best-known story about a record company being wrong. James Murphy's DFA label and LCD Soundsystem put punk kids on the dancefloor. TV on the Radio, the National, Spoon, the Hold Steady, the New Pornographers, Neko Case, Broken Social Scene, Feist and the Postal Service filled out a scene that was as much Brooklyn and Toronto as Seattle. Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion in January 2009 and Phoenix's Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix later that year showed where it was going: toward electronics, toward pop, toward Coachella.

Britain sent its own wave. Coldplay's A Rush of Blood to the Head made stadium melancholy, Arctic Monkeys made the fastest-selling debut in UK history in January 2006, and Radiohead's In Rainbows, sold from their own website for whatever you wanted to pay in October 2007, was the decade's most-discussed business decision. Elliott Smith died in October 2003, and Beck's Sea Change, Sufjan Stevens' Illinois and Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago carried the quieter end of the genre into folk.

Emo went mainstream in the 2000s, and it did not lose its teeth. Whether you were crying in your bedroom or shouting in a VFW hall, this music caught the full spectrum of emotional chaos. Jimmy Eat World's Bleed American put The Middle on every radio in July 2001. Dashboard Confessional was the acoustic confessor who made crying cool. Taking Back Sunday brought dual-vocal drama and Long Island angst. Brand New started pop-punk and ended devastating and literary. Thursday, Thrice and Underoath were screamo's melodic, explosive vanguard. My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade, in October 2006, was theatrical and bombastic, emo's Bohemian Rhapsody. Paramore's Riot! gave the scene Hayley Williams: power, melody and fiery vulnerability.

Pop-punk 2.0 took the torch from the nineties and ran with it, polished it and dominated the charts and the Hot Topic shelves. Blink-182 went from jokes to heartbreak on Take Off Your Pants and Jacket and the untitled 2003 record. Sum 41 was skate punk with metal flair. Good Charlotte wrote anthems for the eyeliner generation, Simple Plan pure teen melodrama. New Found Glory, the Used and All Time Low were Warped Tour royalty. Fall Out Boy's From Under the Cork Tree in 2005 and Panic! at the Disco a year later made Fueled by Ramen the label of the moment. Green Day, elder statesmen at this point, made American Idiot in September 2004, a punk rock opera about a country at war that went to Broadway.

The heavier scene screamed, riffed and threw down in basements and parking lots. Post-hardcore and metalcore, with their heavy breakdowns and screamed-clean vocal trades, were music for catharsis and moshing: Underoath, Atreyu, Killswitch Engage, Alexisonfire, Poison the Well, Glassjaw, and late in the decade Bring Me the Horizon going from deathcore to melody. At the Drive-In's Relationship of Command, in September 2000, is where a lot of it starts.

The decade opened with nu-metal at its commercial summit. Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory, released 24 October 2000, became the biggest-selling debut of the decade in America by fusing rap verses, screamed choruses and turntables into something a suburban fourteen-year-old could sing every word of. Deftones' White Pony proved the style could be beautiful. Slipknot's Iowa and System of a Down's Toxicity, both from late summer 2001, were uglier and stranger: nine masked men from Des Moines, and four Armenian-Americans from Glendale singing about prisons and pilgrims. Tool's Lateralus made prog-metal a number one album. Evanescence's Fallen and Disturbed took the sound to the Grammys and Ozzfest.

Underneath, metalcore was being built out of hardcore breakdowns and Gothenburg melody. Killswitch Engage, As I Lay Dying, Lamb of God, Avenged Sevenfold, Trivium and Bullet for My Valentine filled Ozzfest second stages and then headlined them. Converge's Jane Doe, on 4 September 2001, was the extreme end of that world and is still its high-water mark. Mastodon's Leviathan turned Moby-Dick into a sludge-metal concept album and Crack the Skye finished the thought. Opeth's Blackwater Park, Meshuggah's polyrhythms, Gojira from France, Isis and Sunn O))) in the post-metal and drone corners, and Nightwish's symphonic metal in Finland all found audiences that the internet, not radio, delivered.

The old guard had a hard decade. Metallica's St. Anger and the documentary Some Kind of Monster showed a band in group therapy; Death Magnetic in 2008 was their comeback, and also the record that made the loudness war a public argument, because the Guitar Hero version sounded better than the CD. Iron Maiden, with Bruce Dickinson back, filled arenas again. And on 8 December 2004 Dimebag Darrell of Pantera was shot dead on stage in Columbus, Ohio, the decade's cruelest loss.

The decade started with the last great sales week the old business would ever see: *NSYNC's No Strings Attached sold about 2.4 million copies in seven days in March 2000. Britney Spears followed with Oops!... I Did It Again and then, on Toxic in 2004, made my pick for the best pop single of the decade. Christina Aguilera stripped the teen image off on Stripped. Avril Lavigne, Pink and Kelly Clarkson gave girls a guitar and an attitude. Gwen Stefani went solo. Kylie Minogue's Can't Get You Out of My Head and Girls Aloud's Xenomania singles kept Britain the home of the perfect three-minute record.

Then the producers took over. Justin Timberlake left the boy band for the Neptunes and Timbaland on Justified, and FutureSex/LoveSounds in 2006 turned Timbaland's stutter-beats into stadium pop. Nelly Furtado's Loose and Timbaland's own Shock Value were the same story. Max Martin, who had written the Backstreet Boys' hits, teamed with Dr. Luke on Since U Been Gone and rebuilt his empire. Beyoncé's Crazy in Love and Single Ladies, Rihanna's Umbrella and Lady Gaga's Poker Face were all producer records first: Rich Harrison, Tricky Stewart and the-Dream, RedOne. Shakira's Hips Don't Lie and the Black Eyed Peas' I Gotta Feeling were global in a way pop had never quite been.

Television built its own stars. American Idol gave the world Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood. Disney gave it Hannah Montana, the Jonas Brothers and High School Musical, and then Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift, whose second album Fearless won Album of the Year in January 2010. Britain answered with Amy Winehouse's Back to Black, a sixties soul record about a very modern mess that won five Grammys in 2008, then Adele's 19 and Duffy in its wake. And on 25 June 2009 Michael Jackson died in Los Angeles, and for a week every radio station on earth played the same songs.

The year 2000 was neo-soul's moment. D'Angelo's Voodoo, in January, was recorded at Electric Lady with the Soulquarians: Questlove, J Dilla, James Poyser, Pino Palladino. Its grooves sat behind the beat like they were late on purpose, and the video for Untitled (How Does It Feel) made D'Angelo a sex symbol he did not want to be. Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun, Jill Scott's Who Is Jill Scott?, Musiq Soulchild's Aijuswanaseing and India.Arie's Acoustic Soul all landed inside eighteen months. Alicia Keys' Songs in A Minor, in June 2001, took the sound to the top of the charts and to five Grammys, a classically trained pianist from Hell's Kitchen playing Fallin' on a Yamaha grand.

Aaliyah's self-titled third album came out on 7 July 2001; she died in a plane crash in the Bahamas on 25 August, at twenty-two, with Timbaland's futurist beats and her cool, quiet phrasing already pointing at everything R&B would become. Mary J. Blige answered the decade's anxiety with No More Drama. Ashanti sang the hooks on Ja Rule records and then her own. Usher's Confessions, in March 2004, sold like a pop record and sounded like a club: Yeah! with Lil Jon and Ludacris was crunk&B, and Ciara's Goodies made the term stick. Mariah Carey came back from the wilderness with The Emancipation of Mimi and We Belong Together in 2005. Chris Brown and Ne-Yo were the new teen idols; Keyshia Cole and Anthony Hamilton kept it raw.

The second half belonged to the writers. Ne-Yo, the-Dream and Tricky Stewart wrote Irreplaceable, Umbrella and Single Ladies. T-Pain put Auto-Tune on everything and made a pop-R&B language out of it. John Legend's Get Lifted, Raphael Saadiq's The Way I See It and Maxwell's BLACKsummers'night in 2009 kept live soul alive. R. Kelly's Ignition (Remix) was everywhere in 2003 while he awaited trial on child pornography charges; he was acquitted in 2008 and convicted of far worse a decade later. And Beyoncé, who started the decade in Destiny's Child singing Survivor, ended it as the biggest star in the world.

The decade opened with a soundtrack. O Brother, Where Art Thou?, produced by T Bone Burnett for the Coen brothers' film in December 2000, was old-time string band music, Ralph Stanley singing O Death unaccompanied and Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch harmonizing on hymns, and it won Album of the Year at the Grammys in February 2002 without a single country radio station playing it. It started a bluegrass revival that ran through Dolly Parton's bluegrass trilogy, Old Crow Medicine Show's Wagon Wheel, Nickel Creek and, at the end of the decade, the Avett Brothers and Mumford and Sons.

Then the war came. Alan Jackson's Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning) was the plainspoken 9/11 song; Toby Keith's Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue was the angry one, and it went to number one in July 2002. On 10 March 2003, nine days before the invasion of Iraq, Natalie Maines told a London crowd the Dixie Chicks were ashamed the president was from Texas, and country radio dropped the biggest-selling female group in American history overnight. Their answer, Taking the Long Way, swept the Grammys in February 2007. Johnny Cash covered Nine Inch Nails' Hurt in late 2002, and the video Mark Romanek shot in his cluttered Hendersonville house became his last testament; he died on 12 September 2003, four months after June Carter Cash. Loretta Lynn, at seventy-two, made Van Lear Rose with Jack White.

Mainstream Nashville got bigger and louder: Kenny Chesney's stadium tours, Tim McGraw's Live Like You Were Dying, Brad Paisley's guitar, Keith Urban, Rascal Flatts and Lady Antebellum. Gretchen Wilson's Redneck Woman and Big and Rich's Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy) made 2004 the year of the MuzikMafia. Carrie Underwood came off American Idol and sold seven and a half million copies of Some Hearts. Miranda Lambert was the first of the new outlaw women. And Taylor Swift, sixteen years old at her debut in 2006, wrote her own songs about her own high school and made Fearless, the record that won Album of the Year and took her, and country, into pop. On the other side of town, Drive-By Truckers' Southern Rock Opera, Ryan Adams' Heartbreaker and Gold, and Jason Isbell were building the Americana that the 2010s would run on.

Daft Punk's Discovery, in March 2001, turned French house into a candy-colored pop record and gave the decade One More Time. Their pyramid show at Coachella on 29 April 2006, two robots in a glowing triangle running the hits together, is the moment American festival culture decided it wanted dance music on the main stage; Alive 2007 is the recording. Ed Banger Records, run by their manager Pedro Winter, made Justice's Cross the sound of blog house in 2007. Basement Jaxx's Rooty, the Chemical Brothers, Röyksopp, Gorillaz's cartoon pop and Kylie's Can't Get You Out of My Head kept British dance-pop on the radio. The Avalanches' Since I Left You, in November 2000, was made of thousands of samples and sounded like a party heard through a wall. Boards of Canada's Geogaddi, Aphex Twin's Drukqs, Four Tet, Squarepusher, Venetian Snares and Amon Tobin held down the headphone end.

The decade's most important new sound came from South London. UK garage had crossed over with Craig David and So Solid Crew at the turn of the decade; its darker children were grime, with Wiley's Eskimo, Dizzee Rascal's Boy in da Corner and Lethal Bizzle's Pow!, and dubstep, built in Croydon by Skream, Benga, Digital Mystikz and the DMZ nights, with Burial's Untrue in November 2007 as its masterpiece and Rusko and Caspa as the bridge to the American version Skrillex would sell in 2010. Electroclash, with Fischerspooner, Peaches and Ladytron, was the decade's first revival. Berlin's minimal techno, with Ricardo Villalobos, Richie Hawtin and the club Berghain, which opened in 2004, was its longest-running one.

By 2009 the next thing was visible. Trance had peaked with Tiësto playing the opening ceremony of the 2004 Olympics and Paul van Dyk and Armin van Buuren topping the DJ polls. Deadmau5's Ghosts 'n' Stuff, Swedish House Mafia forming in Stockholm, and David Guetta's When Love Takes Over with Kelly Rowland, in 2009, pointed at the EDM boom. Girl Talk and Danger Mouse's Grey Album made the mashup a form. Ableton Live made a laptop a band. And in Los Angeles, Flying Lotus's Los Angeles, his Brainfeeder label and the Low End Theory club night built a beat scene out of J Dilla's ghost.

Jazz had its biggest commercial moment in decades from a singer most jazz players did not claim. Norah Jones' Come Away with Me, on Blue Note in February 2002, sold more than twenty million copies and won eight Grammys in one night, including Album of the Year, on the strength of Don't Know Why, a Jesse Harris song sung like a secret. Diana Krall and Jamie Cullum followed the same lane. Ken Burns' ten-part Jazz aired on PBS in January 2001 and argued, controversially, that the story more or less ended in the sixties. Wynton Marsalis answered by opening Jazz at Lincoln Center's Frederick P. Rose Hall in October 2004, the first concert hall built for jazz.

The living music went two ways. Brad Mehldau, the Bad Plus and the Esbjörn Svensson Trio rebuilt the piano trio out of Radiohead covers and rock dynamics. Wayne Shorter's quartet with Danilo Pérez, John Patitucci and Brian Blade was the best working band in the world. Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer and a young Christian Scott sharpened the avant-garde. Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters won Album of the Year in February 2008, the first jazz record to do it since 1965. Ornette Coleman won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2007 for Sound Grammar, forty-eight years after The Shape of Jazz to Come.

The bridge to hip-hop, which the 2010s would cross, was built here. Madlib recorded as Yesterdays New Quintet and cut Shades of Blue from the Blue Note vaults. The Roots, Medeski Martin and Wood and Soulive played jazz on the jam-band circuit. Robert Glasper's Double Booked, in 2009, put a trio on one disc and a Rhodes-and-808 band on the other, and Kamasi Washington was a sideman in Los Angeles waiting for his turn. The decade also buried a generation: Elvin Jones in 2004, Michael Brecker, Alice Coltrane, Max Roach and Oscar Peterson all in 2007, Freddie Hubbard in 2008.

Dancehall had never been closer to the American charts. Shaggy's Hot Shot, in August 2000, was the second best-selling album in the United States in 2001 on the back of It Wasn't Me and Angel. Then Steven "Lenky" Marsden's Diwali riddim, in 2002, a handclap pattern that half of Kingston voiced at once, gave Sean Paul Get Busy, Wayne Wonder No Letting Go and Lumidee Never Leave You. Sean Paul's Dutty Rock, in November 2002, went to the top of the American album chart, he sang on Beyoncé's Baby Boy, and for two years Jamaican patois was the language of the club. Elephant Man, Beenie Man, Sizzla, Capleton and Tanya Stephens all rode the wave.

The music also got darker at home. Vybz Kartel and Mavado's Gully versus Gaza feud split Kingston's garrisons in the second half of the decade and turned dancehall into a soundtrack for real violence. Buju Banton's decade ended in a Florida courtroom. The roots side was carried by the Marley sons: Damian Marley's Welcome to Jamrock, in September 2005, put a Sizzla-style chant over an Ini Kamoze sample and won two Grammys, and Stephen Marley's Mind Control did the same in 2008. Tarrus Riley and Etana, with the Gentleman and Alborosie records from Europe, were the roots of the reggae revival the 2010s would name.

Reggae's pop afterlife was everywhere. Rihanna's first single, Pon de Replay in 2005, was dancehall. Matisyahu, a Hasidic Jew from White Plains, took reggae to Bonnaroo, and Rebelution, SOJA and Slightly Stoopid built an American reggae-rock circuit from California to Virginia. Toots and the Maytals won a Grammy for True Love in 2005, and Bob Marley's Legend, released in 1984, passed ten million copies in the United States and kept selling every week of the decade.

Reggaeton came out of Panama's Spanish reggae and San Juan's marquesinas, the carport parties where DJ Playero's mixtapes played in the nineties, and in 2004 it went global. Daddy Yankee's Gasolina, the lead single from Barrio Fino, took the dembow rhythm, a boom-ch-boom-chick borrowed from Shabba Ranks' Dem Bow, and put it on radio stations that switched formats to keep up. Tego Calderón's El Abayarde in 2002 had made the genre credible; Luny Tunes' productions made it hit; Don Omar, Wisin y Yandel and Ivy Queen, the queen in a genre of kings, made it a scene. Calle 13's debut in 2005 made it smart. The Library of Congress named Gasolina to the National Recording Registry in 2023, the first reggaeton record there.

Pop crossed over too. Shakira learned English well enough to write Laundry Service in 2001, and Hips Don't Lie with Wyclef Jean in 2006 was a number one in a dozen countries. Juanes' Un Día Normal and A Dios le Pido made Colombian rock an export. Enrique Iglesias' Escape, Ricky Martin's Sound Loaded, Paulina Rubio and Jennifer Lopez kept the late-nineties Latin boom going; the Latin Grammys, first held in September 2000, gave it an awards show. Aventura's Obsesión, in 2002, took bachata, the Dominican guitar music that used to be too poor for the radio, from the Bronx to Europe, and Romeo Santos became the biggest Latin star of the next decade because of it.

Regional Mexican music was the genre's quiet giant: Los Tigres del Norte's corridos, Vicente Fernández, and Jenni Rivera, whose banda records made her the most important woman in the music. Rock en español had Café Tacvba's Cuatro Caminos, Zoé, Babasónicos, Molotov, Kinky, Julieta Venegas and Aterciopelados. Brazil sent Bebel Gilberto's Tanto Tempo and Seu Jorge, whose voice carried City of God in 2002. Gotan Project and Bajofondo made tango electronic. Marc Anthony kept salsa on the charts. And on 16 July 2003 Celia Cruz, the Queen of Salsa, died in New Jersey, and her funeral procession stopped traffic in Miami and Manhattan.

Mary Mary's Shackles (Praise You), released in February 2000, was a gospel record on pop radio in Britain and Australia and on MTV in America, two sisters from Inglewood singing praise over a Warryn Campbell beat that could have been a Destiny's Child track. It opened a door that Kirk Franklin walked through for the rest of the decade: Hero, in October 2005, went platinum and won two Grammys, and The Fight of My Life followed in 2007. Yolanda Adams, Donnie McClurkin's We Fall Down, Smokie Norful, Fred Hammond, Israel Houghton and New Breed, Tye Tribbett and Kierra Sheard made urban contemporary gospel a genre with its own charts, tours and awards. Marvin Sapp's Never Would Have Made It, in 2007, was a sermon that became a radio hit. The Clark Sisters came back, CeCe Winans stayed, and Take 6 kept the a cappella tradition alive.

The older tradition had its own revival. The Blind Boys of Alabama, founded in 1939, won four straight Grammys from 2002 with records that mixed Tom Waits and Ben Harper into Southern quartet gospel. Mavis Staples' We'll Never Turn Back, produced by Ry Cooder in 2007, sang the freedom songs of the civil rights movement to the Bush years. Aretha Franklin's So Damn Happy won her another Grammy in 2004. And the church was inside hip-hop and R&B more openly than ever: Kanye West's Jesus Walks, in 2004, built on the ARC Choir, and every Beyoncé record ended on a run she learned at St. John's in Houston.

Contemporary Christian music had its own mainstream moment. MercyMe's I Can Only Imagine, from 2001, crossed to pop radio; Switchfoot, Relient K and Underoath sold to kids who did not know they were Christian bands; and Hillsong's worship songs from Sydney, Shout to the Lord and the ones that followed, became the music most American churches sang on Sunday, which is the largest audience any genre in this chapter has.

Folk came back through the side door. A Volkswagen ad in 2000 put Nick Drake's Pink Moon under a car full of kids driving at night, and a record that had sold almost nothing in 1972 sold more that year than in Drake's lifetime. Vashti Bunyan, whose 1970 album had been a similar ghost, came back in 2005. Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, whose Ys in 2006 was five long songs with Van Dyke Parks orchestrations, and CocoRosie were called freak folk and hated the name. Sufjan Stevens' Illinois, in July 2005, was a fifty-state project that stopped at two, with Chicago as its anthem. Iron and Wine, Bright Eyes' I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, the Decemberists, Andrew Bird, the Mountain Goats' The Sunset Tree, Okkervil River and Neutral Milk Hotel's ever-growing afterlife were the indie-folk canon the blogs built.

The end of the decade produced its own myths. Justin Vernon went to his father's hunting cabin in Wisconsin with mono and a broken heart and came back with For Emma, Forever Ago, which Bon Iver self-released in 2007 and Jagjaguwar issued in February 2008. Fleet Foxes' harmonies came out of Seattle the same year. Feist's 1234 sold the iPod nano in 2007 and The Reminder with it. Antony and the Johnsons' I Am a Bird Now won the Mercury Prize in 2005. Jack Johnson, John Mayer's Continuum, Norah Jones, Ray LaMontagne, Amos Lee, Josh Ritter, Damien Rice's O, Regina Spektor, Cat Power's The Greatest and José González's cover of Heartbeats filled coffee shops and film soundtracks.

Britain built a nu-folk scene in a Bosun's Locker basement in London, where Laura Marling, Noah and the Whale, Johnny Flynn and, from 2007, Mumford and Sons played. And the tradition itself was honored: Gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator) in 2001, Bert Jansch's late records, and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss' Raising Sand, produced by T Bone Burnett in 2007, which won Album of the Year in February 2009 for a Led Zeppelin singer and a bluegrass fiddler harmonizing on Everly Brothers and Townes Van Zandt songs.