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    Before 1900 
  • Claudio Monteverdi was the bridge between the Renaissance and Baroque eras in music. His nine Books of Madrigals had the text dictate the harmonies, which allowed the music to capture human emotions. In particular, his opera L'Orfeo established the genre as a serious art form.
  • Ludwig van Beethoven was the bridge between the more traditionally-structured Classical period and the bombastic, heavily emotional Romantic era of classical music. His 3rd, 5th, and 9th Symphonies exemplify the transition, and all of them are among the most famous orchestral music ever composed.
  • The invention of the gramophone record in 1892 massively opened up what the new technology of the phonograph was capable of, allowing it to fundamentally change how people listened to music. Records could be mass produced far more efficiently than the cylinders that early phonographs relied on, making them a popular consumer item among the emerging middle classes of The Gay '90s and beyond rather than just luxury toys for the rich, such that, by the 1940s, phonographs were known almost exclusively as "record players". The reach of musicians massively expanded as live performances were no longer the only way that they could make money or find an audience, while those audiences could now listen to music in the comfort of their homes rather than head out to theaters, pubs, taverns, or other venues. The limited length of early gramophone records also favored shorter songs over lengthy, multi-part compositions, leading to the rise of the single as the dominant form of popular music in the first half of the 20th century. The entire modern music industry as we know it was built on Emile Berliner's innovation.
  • Almost a century after Beethoven, Claude Debussy did the same for Modern Classical by breaking away from the structures and harmony of his contemporaries.

     1900 to 1950 
  • Arnold Schoenberg represents another shift for Modern Classical, being the first composer to do away with keys entirely and write multiple atonal compositions. This proved highly controversial at the time, and still polarizes today due to being seen as True Art Is Incomprehensible.
  • Igor Stravinsky's 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring was a true modern epic, featuring extremely dissonant harmonies and radical shifts in tempo and time signature. It became the Trope Codifier for Avant-Garde Music.
  • The rise of radio broadcasting, generally held to have started on November 6, 1919 with the first broadcast of Nederlandsche Radio-Industrie from PCGG in The Hague, had a similar effect to the phonographic record in the 1890s. It gave musicians a whole new venue in which to perform (including live performances) and listeners a new way to listen to music, while further entrenching the single as the dominant form that popular music took.
  • Louis Armstrong was this for jazz music in the 1920s. He made the trumpet into one of the central instruments of jazz and changed the paradigm of jazz performers from bands to solo artists, and while he wasn't the first to use scatting as a vocal style, he undoubtedly helped popularize it. He was also one of the first African-American musicians to cross over with white listeners, and among the first musicians to make heavy use of recordings of his own music to improve his performances.
  • In the summer of 1927, Ralph Peer, a Record Producer for the Victor Talking Machine Company, took a two-month trip through several cities in the southern US in order to record regional styles of music. At his stop in Bristol, Tennessee in the heart of Appalachia, nineteen local artists and groups, including Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, recorded seventy-six songs in a series of sessions that have been described since as the "Big Bang" of Country Music. While they weren't the first recordings of the regional "hillbilly music" of Appalachia, the Bristol sessions marked the moment at which it came to the attention of record labels and mainstream culture.
  • Another turning point for country, as noted in this article by Nate Yungman for Cracked, came in the 1930s with the radio station XERA. A Mexican "border blaster" owned by the American quack doctor John R. Brinkley whose signal reached across North America, XERA needed something to play when it wasn't playing Brinkley's ramblings, and it found that something in country music, which quickly became the real reason people listened to the station. While the Mexican government seized XERA in 1941 due to Brinkley's malpractice lawsuits, tax fraud, and outspoken Nazi sympathies, the music it played influenced a generation of both country singers like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings and early Rock & Roll stars like Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. In the '60s, XERA's Spiritual Successor XERF, home of the famous DJ Wolfman Jack, was also among the only stations where listeners in the Deep South could hear rock & roll, as many Southern radio stations wouldn't touch "race music".

    1950s 
  • Rock & Roll in general set off a revolution in American (and by extension global) popular music and youth culture, and not just in terms of the genres and subgenres it influenced. Virtually the entire modern image of '50s youth culture, from the fashion to the slang to the cars, was derived from the rock scene, largely because of how it codified the very idea of the "teenager" as a separate age group. After the rise of rock, popular music as a whole skewed much younger than it did before, as record labels focused on the purchasing power of teenagers. On radio, the "hit parade" format, in which hit songs were played live on the radio by the station's house band and singers, died out as these musicians found themselves unable to convincingly cover rock songs. And in the cultural/political arena, its Hotter and Sexier image compared to the jazz, big bands, and crooners of the '40s and early '50s raised the bar for what Teen Idols could get away with, while the great many black artists within the genre did the same with African-American culture in the early years of the Civil Rights Movement.

    As far as individual rock & roll musicians go...
    • Chuck Berry is often cited as the musician who gave the genre — and, by extension, generations' worth of rock music — its sound and image of teen rebellion, good times, and showmanship. He brought the Epic Riff into rock by showcasing a guitar style that, even after Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, would barely sound out of place today, while his songwriting popularized the use of three-minute pop songs as a medium for storytelling. In his book But What If We're Wrong?, Chuck Klosterman stated that, if he had to pick out a single artist who would accurately symbolize everything that rock music stood for, long after everyone associated with its late 20th century golden age was dead and rock was spoken of the same way we now speak about jazz, he'd pick Berry.
    • Elvis Presley's dance moves, broadcast nationally on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1957 (albeit censored; they could only show him above the waist), brought the nascent sexual revolution into American homes for the first time. As the first white rock & roll artist to become successful, Elvis also helped break the genre out of the Minority Show Ghetto and establish that it had universal appeal among both white and black listeners. Sadly, even though Elvis himself routinely paid homage and respect to the black artists who inspired him, his success would produce an obsession by record labels with finding "the next Elvis" (i.e. the next white rock & roll star) that wound up whitewashing the genre in the ensuing years.
    • Elvis' sideman Scotty Moore, meanwhile, codified the idea of the lead guitarist as The Lancer in a rock band. Before him, the soloist and the frontman were usually the same person (i.e. Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins), and was just as likely to be a piano player (i.e. Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles). While there would still be some piano men in rock as late as The '70s (most famously Elton John and Billy Joel), and the electric keyboard and synthesizer would help revive the piano in rock in The '80s, Scotty Moore made the guitar into the genre's defining musical instrument.
  • Johnny Cash redefined what Country Music could be, opening it up to more diverse influences from American Folk Music and Rock & Roll and helping to bring the genres closer together. He also cultivated an "outlaw" image through both his run-ins with the law and his Darker and Edgier subject matter and clothing styles (literally in the case of the latter, as evidenced by his "Man in Black" moniker), setting the stage for the outlaw country revolution of The '70s.
  • In 1959, a songwriter from Detroit named Berry Gordy founded Motown Records and forever changed the landscape of African-American music. Motown, Gordy, the Holland–Dozier–Holland songwriting team, and the vast stable of musicians under the label's umbrella spent the whole of The '60s perfecting a poppy style of soul music known as the "Motown Sound" that brought black music to mainstream America without it being co-opted as rock had been. Virtually every genre of American music with roots in the black community that developed after The '60s, from funk to Contemporary R&B to Hip-Hop, takes at least some influence from Motown. Furthermore, Gordy, as a black man whose success came amidst the tumult of the Civil Rights Movement, insisted on carefully crafting and polishing the image of his singers in order for them to serve as not only celebrities, but ambassadors of the African-American community to white America... and in doing so, codified the template for the modern Idol Singer, an idea that would later flow far beyond American shores.

    1960s 
  • Ornette Coleman's wild, improvisational style of jazz was a shock to the culture of the time, to the point where the 1960 album that coined the name of the genre "Free Jazz" received simultaneous 5-star and 1-star reviews in the same publication. Of course, Free Jazz is now a respected institution among academics, though its popularity outside of avant-garde circles is quite low.
  • Upon their breakthrough in 1963, the impact of The Beatles upon pop culture was like a nuclear bomb.
    • They were hardly the only, or even the first, worthy or notable British rock musicians. However, their success as the first ones to cross The Pond in a lasting way, turning rock into a truly international phenomenon as opposed to one specifically rooted in the United States, kicked off The British Invasion as a whole host of other British rock bands, most famously The Rolling Stones and The Who, poured into the US and broke the dominance (dating back to The Roaring '20s but reaching its zenith postwar) that the Americans then held over global pop culture. The impact of "Beatlemania" stretches beyond music or even pop culture in general, with many historians seeing it, together with the assassination of John F. Kennedy that same year (or the prior year, in the case of their American fandom after their famed performances on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964), as one of the turning points upon which the famed sociocultural shifts of The '60s truly began to take off — phenomena that the band's individual members were often very much a part of themselves.
    • Musically, they and other British Invasion bands marked the point at which rock began to see itself as its own genre, truly separate from pop, rather than the mix of country, R&B, and electric blues it was before. Before, rock & roll, especially in the early '60s when the genre was taken over by label-backed Teen Idols, had been dominated by professional songwriters and studio musicians much as pop had been (and still is), but the Beatles broke from that, writing and performing themselves all of the music that they recorded. After the Beatles, rock bands were expected to write their own songs and play their own instruments if they were to be taken seriously as "real" bands. The seismic shift that the Beatles and other British Invasion bands brought to pop and rock was such that, for decades, the year 1963 was considered by radio programmers to be the dividing line between "oldies" and modern music.
    • Which album in particular is most influential is debatable, but the consensus opinion seems to settle on a run of three albums — 1965's Rubber Soul, 1966's Revolver, and 1967's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band — for the numerous innovations they introduced to rock music and the many subgenres they laid the foundation for. Specifically, they are often credited with popularizing the album itself as the central unit of music, fully exploiting the possibilities of the LP record invented in 1948 to make it more than just a collection of singles on one record but a singular, coherent piece of music in its own right, launching the "album era" of popular music that would last until the mid-2000s. Before, pop music was focused on singles, while albums were the domain of Classical Music, Jazz, film soundtracks, and original cast recordings of musicals.
    • Finally, the Beatles' impact on the business of music should not be understated. Obviously, as a runaway success, they made a lot of money for EMI... but it was more than that. Before 1963, as noted above, recording rock & roll music was a very collaborative effort: the songwriter would write the song, the singer would perform it, the backup singers would add to it, the instrumentalists would play underneath it, the recording engineer would mix & master it, the label would release it, and finally, the profits would be split between them six ways. The Beatles did away with half of this Production Posse by writing, singing, playing, and self-backing all of it themselves, leaving Record Producer George Martin (the Fifth Beatle) as the only other person to contribute to the track in a creative capacity. The label would then release it, and split the profit six ways: one to the Fab Four, one to Martin... and the remaining four to themselves. For some reason, EMI liked how much larger their profit margins were, and the "plays their own instruments / writes their own songs / only gets paid for 25% of what they actually do" model of music has persisted to this day. The fact that the music industry became a financial juggernaut in the late 20th century can, for good or ill, be laid quite directly at the feet of the Beatles.
  • The Rolling Stones, the second-biggest band of the British Invasion, pioneered a Darker and Edgier sound and image that influenced every Hard Rock band that came since, while also restoring interest in the blues and other "roots" genres among American audiences, despite them ironically being English. They also codified the Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll lifestyle that countless rock stars (especially many of their British compatriots) would embrace.
  • Phil Spector was the first modern Record Producer and the first true auteur in pop music, controlling every aspect of the production of his songs from the writing to the choice of session musicians to the instruments to the recording process. Inspired by Richard Wagner, he popularized the "Wall of Sound" production technique, using distortion, echo, and reverb to combine sounds and lend pop songs a big, orchestral feel, essentially turning the studio itself into a musical instrument. Notably, Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys considered Spector, and not other rock musicians (not even the Beatles), to be his main influence — and rival — as a studio artist. Sadly, his innovations in recording would also be matched by his pioneering the stereotype of the Producer From Hell due to his notoriously erratic behavior, which eventually drove him into seclusion in The '80s.
  • Bob Dylan's 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited, especially "Like a Rolling Stone". Bob's early output in general has often been cited as a major influence in bringing true art and poetry into pop music writing. It can't be a coincidence that his rising popularity in the first half of The '60s coincided with something of a move away from the once-ubiquitous "hot cars and fast women" thematics of '50s rock & roll, as people started listening to songs like "Blowing in the Wind" and "Mr. Tambourine Man" instead.
    • Dylan was also on the receiving end of this. He was invited by The Byrds to see them perform their version of "Mr. Tambourine Man", and, as David Crosby put it, the very next day he went out and hired an electric band.
  • The Beach Boys' 1966 album Pet Sounds has been credited with setting the stage for virtually every trend in rock music after 1965, most notably (and immediately) the rise of Psychedelic Rock in the late '60s but also Progressive Rock in the '70s all the way up to Indie Pop and Emo Music in the 21st century. Furthermore, while not the first Concept Album (and not exactly narrative), it was an inspiration for Paul McCartney to make Sgt. Pepper, a similarly influential album, into one. Pet Sounds marked the start of a Friendly Rivalry between the Beach Boys and the Beatles, or at least Brian Wilson and McCartney, as they began to engage in a constant process of trying to one-up the other, in the process producing some great music — ask almost any rock critic what the greatest album of all time is, and they'll answer either Sgt. Pepper or Pet Sounds.
  • Eric Clapton's short but legendary stint with John Mayall and The Bluesbreakers produced only one album in 1966, formally titled Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton but often called simply "Beano". The album is credited to be the first album to feature the modern rock guitar sound. Eric Clapton was the first guy to dare to crank up his amp and take his space. Many people say Jimi Hendrix was the first modern rock guitar player, but he got his inspiration from hearing this album.
  • That's not to minimize Hendrix's own influence, though. He was a major pioneer in using amplifier feedback, distortion, and stereophonic phasing effects to enhance the sound of his riffs beyond just making them louder, an idea that many Noise Rock and Electronic Music artists would later run with, while also leaving a deep mark on R&B and funk in his synthesis of African-American music with contemporary rock sounds.
  • Janis Joplin and Grace Slick were among the first modern female musicians to break out of the Girl-Show Ghetto, demonstrating that they could be profound creative voices in their own right as opposed to just pretty faces singing Silly Love Songs written by (usually male) songwriters. Name any female rock, folk, or soul musicians of the last fifty years, be they Stevie Nicks, Florence Welch, Patti Smith, or P!nk, and chances are you will find shout-outs to Joplin and/or Slick in their liner notes and interviews.
  • The Velvet Underground's 1967 début, The Velvet Underground & Nico, didn't have an immediate impact on rock music, but its impact in hindsight was undeniable. Brian Eno's famous quip that only about a thousand people bought the album, but every one of them started a band, doesn't seem very far off when one considers the huge number of genres that it inspired.
  • The Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967 is known to history as the moment when the "Summer of Love" began and "The '60s", or at least the Hollywood History version thereof, fully came into its own. It launched the American careers of '60s rock legends like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and The Who, many of whom were trailblazers in their own right, while also marking the first public demonstration of the Moog synthesizer. Its greatest influence, however, stretches far beyond that late '60s moment of pop culture. While Woodstock is often remembered as the birthplace of the modern music festival, in truth its organizers took inspiration from Monterey, with its mix of big-name headliners and bands from regional scenes all playing on the same stages over the course of three days. Even the PA system that Abe Jacob built for the festival became the standard for later ones, such that it was referred to as the "Monterey sound system". The festival culture of today is largely a refinement of what Monterey first set out and accomplished.
  • Modern reggae was codified and catapulted to mainstream attention by two bands, Toots and the Maytals and Bob Marley and the Wailers. Toots and the Maytals, on their 1968 single "Do the Reggay", are generally held to have coined the genre's name, while Marley turned reggae into a phenomenon outside Jamaica, helping to transform a small island nation into a global epicenter of world music and black culture as reggae influence crept into everything from Punk Rock to Hip-Hop.
  • The Doors proved that you could write and perform pop songs about much more existential subjects than teenage romance or pop music itself, and kids would buy them. After that, it became impossible to write off all popular music as a disposable, meaningless fad. Beyond that, Jim Morrison more or less became the defining archetype of a batshit crazy Rock & Roll frontman, predating artists like Ozzy Osbourne and Alice Cooper - while Elvis was considered provocative for his time, Morrison took it many steps further with his moodier and darker antics, crossing the line into outright vulgarity rather than simply being suggestive and even getting in trouble for it on The Ed Sullivan Show.
  • Miles Davis, in a long series of innovations, began incorporating electric guitars and organs into his music beginning with 1968's Miles in the Sky. It was the beginning of Jazz Fusion, which became the dominant form of jazz in the 1970s and is still a core of the genre.
  • In 1969, the label ECM was founded, focusing on jazz recordings by European musicians. It was crucial in bringing European jazz to the world's attention, and would influence artists in a variety of genres, most obviously the later albums of Talk Talk.
  • David Bowie. Let's put it this way: it would perhaps be easier to list the genres, especially in rock music, that he didn't leave an impact on. Alan Light, writing for The Hollywood Reporter, stated that "[s]ince his arrival at the dawn of the 1970s, every new movement that followed — punk, new wave, hip-hop, electronic, Goth, grunge, industrial — bore his stamp in some way." This article by Joe Lynch for Billboard, which calls him "the most influential rock star", goes into more detail.
    • To start, not only did his flamboyant, androgynous style and flashy presentation popularize Glam Rock in the early '70s, his work and experimentation in those years also touched on everything from Folk Music to Hard Rock to industrial to R&B, leaving his mark wherever he went. His "Berlin Trilogy" (1977's Low and "Heroes", 1979's Lodger) in particular was a seminal influence on Post-Rock, New Wave Music, and Electronic Music. In general, his '70s output was a turning point in the widespread recognition of rock music as having genuine artistic credibility on top of its popularity with the masses, laying the groundwork for everything from the Progressive Rock of that decade to Radiohead's Kid A.
    • As one of the first major musicians to come out as bisexual, he carved out a space for openly queer musicians in mainstream culture, many of whom would be influenced by him. For decades, Bowie's larger-than-life persona became the standard that many "gay icons", both male and female, would imitate and be compared to, especially for those who didn't come up through Broadway or specifically cultivate lesbian fanbases.
    • His style would also herald the Music Video era of The '80s, with artists like Madonna and Depeche Mode citing him as an influence on their own styles. By eagerly collaborating with former disco producers like Nile Rodgers whose careers had flatlined after the collapse of that genre (more on that below), he is often credited with saving a place for dance music in mainstream culture. Late in the decade, his band Tin Machine left its mark on grunge and Alternative Rock, its stripped-down style known to have influenced Pearl Jam when they were recording Ten.
    • He was also extremely prescient on the future of music in the internet age. In 1997, he became the first major musician to seek out royalties from streaming, which would become the dominant means of listening to music in the 2010s. A quote of his from 2002, predicting that in the future music would be like running water or electricity in its ubiquity and that live performances would replace album sales as the dominant revenue stream for musicians, would later be widely circulated as services like Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Music took over the music world.
  • Brian Eno was behind many of Bowie's innovations, but his influence on Alternative and Indie rock cannot be overstated. A self-proclaimed "non-musician", Eno experimented with noise and fuzz on his first album Here Come the Warm Jets, essentially creating Shoegaze in the process. His subsequent albums merged rock with Ambient music in a way that would later influence Cocteau Twins and Radiohead, among others. Eno's first four rock albums can be seen as the point at which Art Rock came of age and moved away from the lo-fi sound of The Velvet Underground.

    1970s 
  • Black Sabbath's self-titled debut album in 1970 laid the foundation for Heavy Metal. Influenced by the grime of their industrial hometown of Birmingham, England, they gave '60s Blues Rock a much darker edge, with a focus on wailing guitars, chugging bass, and macabre lyrics that fused together to create a sound of death and despair that an entire genre would emerge around. To paraphrase Chris Adler of Lamb of God, if a metal band says they're not influenced by Sabbath, either they're lying or they're not really metal.
  • On August 11, 1973, Clive Campbell, aka DJ Kool Herc, was supplying the entertainment at his sister's back-to-school party at the rec center at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, The Bronx, an apartment complex now recognized as the birthplace of Hip-Hop. There, Herc used record scratching to extend the "break" of the songs he was playing so that the partygoers could dance longer, and during the extended dancing, he and his friend Coke La Rock would punctuate the music with slang phrases and Shout-Outs to some of their friends. At that party, Herc and La Rock assembled what would later be called the four foundational elements of hip-hop — DJing, rapping (or MCing), breakdancing, and graffitinote  — into one musical package.
  • In the UK in late 1973, two bands released songs that dueled for a position atop the charts on Christmas Day, Slade's "Merry Xmas Everybody" and Wizzard's "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday". The outcome of that battlenote  was less important than the impact that the attention surrounding it had on not only the charts but on British Christmas music. The "Christmas Number One" became a contest with tons of media hype, and furthermore, while the US would see Christmas music settle into pop standards from the '50s and '60s and throwbacks to such (with more contemporary songs seen as either edgy departures from tradition or parodies of the genre), British Christmas music would remain contemporary even as times and trends changed.
  • On their 1974 New Sound Album Autobahn, Kraftwerk abandoned not only the Krautrock scene but rock instrumentation altogether, embracing a sound made entirely with electronic instruments and computers. In doing so, they invented Electronic Music, which would come to dominate pop music to this very day. For bringing synthesizers into the mainstream, they have been compared to the Beatles in terms of the sheer impact they had on pop music, their influence stretching from Synth-Pop to Hip-Hop to Techno to New Wave Music to Post-Punk — and that's just the genres that came of age in The '80s.
  • In the mid-1970s, Australian Music saw three major events which influenced the genre for years to come:
    • The establishment of the "pub rock" scene, where bands such as AC/DC, Cold Chisel and Midnight Oil, among others, cut their teeth. It could be argued that the very venues many of the bands played in (pubs) had a major influence on the evolution of their music and sound. The venues were more often than not small, the acoustics were poor, and the alcohol-fueled crowds were there for the experience rather than to see a "name band". Thus, an emphasis on simple, rhythm-based songs grew, with very loud snare and kick drums, driving bass guitar, and repetitive riffs rather than more complex solos or counter-melodies. This might explain why, even in studios and larger arenas and stadiums, many of the bands who originated in pubs relied on an exaggerated drum sound and fairly simple musical arrangements.
    • Harry Vanda and George Young from the 60s Easybeats, having failed to make it big in the UK, returned home with a huge library of unreleased songs and established the Albert's Recording Studios, the closest thing Australia ever had to a hit factory.
    • The introduction of color television to Australia in 1975, and with it, iconic music show Countdown, which helped publicise many acts nationwide.
  • The '70s saw at least three major turning points for Punk Rock in rapid succession, starting with its birth and following through with its growth across the US and overseas before culminating in its reinvention.
    • Starting around 1974, a New York City nightclub called CBGB attracted a number of rock acts like Television, Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith, and The Ramones. It was there that the DIY Garage Rock and (what we now call) protopunk of the '60s and early '70s coalesced into a new genre: punk rock. One can trace the roots of virtually every Alternative Rock band and subgenre back to that one nightclub in the East Village.
    • However, it was only when punk reached the UK that it became what we now know as "punk". The Sex Pistols pioneered virtually all of the genre's trappings, from the aggressive, countercultural attitude of the music to the archetypal fashion and image of the culture (courtesy of their manager Malcolm McLaren and his girlfriend Vivienne Westwood, owners of London's SEX boutique) to how they acted on and off the stage. While the bands playing at CBGB and those inspired by them created punk as a musical style, the Sex Pistols made it into a movement; virtually the entire stereotype of The Quincy Punk is based on things that they did as musicians and public figures. Furthermore, around that time, a number of British Heavy Metal musicians discovered punk and liked what they heard, leading to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, described in more detail below.
    • If punk was born in New York and raised in London, then it had its coming of age in Los Angeles, where Black Flag led a new wave of punk bands playing a louder, faster, and angrier sound known as Hardcore Punk. Their influence reinvigorated a stagnant genre and established all of the traits of punk that the Sex Pistols didn't, in particular the DIY aesthetic, independence from major record labels in favor of starting their own, and left-wing anti-authoritarian (and often anarchist) lyrics and politics. In doing so, they pulled American punk out of an art-school niche and turned it into an explicitly working-class genre of music that spurned commercialization. Most punk bands since can claim their lineage from Black Flag in one way or another, be it directly or through the many subgenres that grew out of hardcore. Their 1984 album My War, while polarizing at the time due to its gloomier and more plodding sound, has also been recognized as an important influence on grunge with the influence it injected from Black Sabbath-style metal into the punk genre. To quote Mike O'Flaherty, writing for The Baffler:
      "The suburban L.A. hardcore kids surpassed their Hollywood godfathers and -mothers by making punk accessible for the first time to people outside of a "hip", style-conscious milieu. ... This enabled the music to rapidly break out of the bohemian ghetto, where most American punk had previously been confined, and travel to D.C., Boston and the Midwest. The first full-fledged L.A. hardcore records appeared in 1980; a mere two years later dozens of bands, such as D.C.’s Void, Michigan’s Negative Approach, and Boston’s SS Decontrol, were releasing records that surpassed most of the L.A. originators in stylistic daring and sonic extremism."
  • Wanted! The Outlaws, a 1976 compilation album by Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter, and Tompall Glaser, was far from the first Outlaw Country Music album. Many songs on the album were already a few years old, and Jennings' own 1973 album Honky Tonk Heroes was the Trope Codifier for the sound. What Wanted! did accomplish, however, was to make outlaw country, with its Darker and Edgier lyrics and rock & roll attitude influenced by the drug culture of the era, mainstream by becoming the first country album to go platinum, heralding a backlash against the smoother, poppier "Nashville sound" and "countrypolitan" music that dominated the genre from the late '50s through the early '70s.
  • The Village People did this for gay culture in the late '70s. Dennis Altman, in his 1982 book The Homosexualization of America, attributed to them the rise of a more Manly Gay aesthetic as a pushback against the flamboyance that dominated gay culture in the past, as the band's members famously dressed as a construction worker, a cop, a biker, a cowboy, an Indian chief, and a sailor, all stereotypically manly professions or cultures.
  • On the night of July 13, 1977, a lightning strike at an electrical substation set off a chain of Disaster Dominoes that ended with New York City being plunged into darkness, resulting in riots and looting across the city that night and into the next day. Among the items stolen included large amounts of DJ equipment from electronics stores, and as a result, the 1977 blackout is often held (such as by DJ Grandmaster Caz) to be a seminal moment in the history of Hip-Hop. A generation of aspiring DJs got their hands on turntables, mixing boards, speakers, and other equipment as a result of the riots, leading to a creative explosion in the late '70s.
  • Not a band or an album, but a film: the release of Saturday Night Fever in 1977 was this for the disco genre. While disco had started breaking into the mainstream around 1974, with "The Hustle" by Van McCoy in '75 often cited as the first unambiguous disco hit, Fever turned it into a phenomenon that ruled the pop music landscape in the late '70s. Unfortunately, this sudden explosion was quickly met with backlash, which is described in more detail a few entries down.
  • The New Wave of British Heavy Metal in the late '70s and early '80s marked the point at which it became clear that metal (which seemed to be on its way out before then due to oversaturation) wasn't just a passing fad. NWOBHM bands like Motörhead, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden, with their fusion of Black Sabbath-style metal with the energy of punk, codified a loud and fast sound that remains, to this day, one of the traits most commonly associated with metal in popular culture, especially as metal scenes outside the UK took those influences and turned them up to eleven. If one album could be said to have left the most impact, then Judas Priest's 1978 album Stained Class is probably the most popular candidate, with Joe Divita of Loudwire referring to it as "when [metal] got its drivers license." Musically, it marked the moment when metal fully broke from the Blues Rock and Progressive Rock influences that characterized the genre for much of the '70s and became something else entirely, while in terms of style, it was also around this time that the band embraced the Hell-Bent for Leather trope that would become a calling card of '80s metal.
  • On the same day (February 10, 1978) that Judas Priest released Stained Class, Van Halen released their self-titled debut album. Right out of the gate, Eddie Van Halen's eighty-second, album-opening guitar solo was the "Eruption" heard 'round the world. Shredding was born, and rock guitarists became virtuosos in their own right. While the style fell out of favor in mainstream rock in the early 1990s, it's still a major element of various metal and progressive rock scenes worldwide. Furthermore, their specific blend of Southern Rock and Heavy Metal was also massively influential, to the point that Todd in the Shadows has said that most '80s Hard Rock was predicated on the blueprint they laid down on their debut album. Between them, Van Halen and Judas Priest wrote the book for Hair Metal.
  • "Disco Demolition Night", a promotion held on July 12, 1979 at Chicago's Comiskey Park during a double-header between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers, is remembered to history as "the night that disco died". The gimmick was that people would be admitted to the stadium for just 98 cents if they brought a disco record with them, and during the break between the two games, local rock DJ and Shock Jock Steve Dahl would blow up all those records in the middle of the field. Needless to say, most of the people in Comiskey Park that night weren't there for baseball, and when Dahl detonated the crate full of records, the event turned into a riot. The whole affair signaling a turning point in a growing pop culture backlash against disco, one whose long-term effects reached beyond just that one genre; dance music in general all but vanished from the American charts by the end of the year and went back underground, and the boundary between the "white" and "black" pop music worlds (which had grown blurry since the rise of Motown) hardened, with only a few artists successfully crossing it and attaining mainstream success among both white and black listeners.
  • The 1979 single "Rapper's Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang was one of the first Hip-Hop songs to achieve mainstream success, selling over two million copies in the United States alone, and helping to pave the way for the entire popularity of the genre of hip-hop. Without "Rapper's Delight", the entire world of rap music as it is known now may not have ever existed.

    1980s 
  • Peter Gabriel's Melt and Talking Heads' Remain in Light, both released in 1980, are widely credited with popularizing worldbeat and opening popular music up to more "ethnic" influences. Incorporation of western & nonwestern sounds in pop stretches back to at least the late '50s, if not further, but these two records proved that this blend could surpass novelty status and produce artistically viable material.
  • What Saturday Night Fever did for disco, the 1980 film Urban Cowboy (incidentally, another dance film starring John Travolta) did for country. Not only did it popularize country outside of its roots in the rural South at a time when the American public was getting burned out on disco and was looking for a more down-home alternative, it brought with it a wave of Lighter and Softer country music that was often as much about fashion and lifestyle as anything else (the Pasadena, Texas honky-tonk Gilley's became a merchandising empire after it was featured in the film).
  • "Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll." With those six words, the cable TV network MTV made its debut on August 1, 1981 and forever changed the landscape of popular music and culture, their influence being such that an entire generation of young people has been referred to, in all seriousness, as the "MTV Generation", a term that the network quickly embraced. The rise of MTV swept aside the cornball pop music of The '70s and, for better or worse, created an environment in pop where style was as important as substance, with entire genres ranging from New Wave Music and Hair Metal in The '80s to Teen Pop in The '90s thriving due to the exposure they received through MTV. Since, in the early '80s, shows like Top of the Pops had given the British music industry a head start over the Americans in making music videos, MTV oversaw what has been called a second British Invasion in pop music in the '80s by giving a platform to British Synth-Pop and new wave musicians in order to fill airtime, bringing those genres into the American heartland. Even as they started to undergo their much-ballyhooed Network Decay in The '90s, MTV still left a mark on pop culture through both groundbreaking animated series like Beavis and Butt-Head, Daria, and Liquid Television and pioneering Reality TV shows like The Real World and Road Rules, along with the Top 10 music video countdown show Total Request Live (or TRL), which became a major venue for the boy bands, girl groups, and pop princesses of the late '90s and early '00s.
  • Michael Jackson and Madonna revolutionized pop music in The '80s, such that, when people call them the King and Queen of Pop, it's fair to say that it's not an exaggeration.
    • Michael Jackson brought R&B into the mainstream by making it fun, poppy, and danceable. His music videos and dance moves were pop culture touchstones that played a pivotal role in the rise of the aforementioned MTV and in changing the expectations for pop stars, who were now expected to be well-groomed, conventionally attractive, and good dancers in addition to good singers. Furthermore, as the first black superstar musician in decades, and one who used his celebrity status to draw attention to issues of diversity and civil rights, Michael served as a major influence on countless black pop musicians, not least of all being his sister Janet. The video for "Thriller" in particular has often been cited as among the greatest and most influential music videos of all time, elevating the medium beyond just filmed concert performances designed to promote the songs into an attraction in its own right, often taking the form of short films. One could use "Thriller" as a dividing line in the history of pop music, with everything that came afterwards bearing its influence, and as the point where the "MTV era" truly kicked off in earnest.
    • Madonna, meanwhile, was the first female musician that one could credibly call a rock star on the level of Elvis Presley or Mick Jagger in terms of her A-list celebrity status. She would be a dominant influence on other women in pop music, especially dance-pop, for decades to come, even after the rise of adult alternative singer-songwriters in The '90s as a backlash against her style. Her highly sexualized style and image, and more importantly her control over it, also played a pivotal role in breaking down taboos around female sexuality, which not only codified the template for the Ms. Fanservice pop diva but reverberated well beyond music and into the broader culture and politics, especially with the rise of third-wave feminism. Even in live performance technology, she left an impact; cordless microphone headsets, now a staple of pop stars that allows them to sing and dance simultaneously without worrying about having to stand close enough to the microphone, became known as "Madonna mics" after she popularized them. In the words of Tony Sclafani, who compared her influence to that of The Beatles:
      "It's worth noting that before Madonna, most music mega-stars were guy rockers; after her, almost all would be female singers ... When the Beatles hit America, they changed the paradigm of performer from solo act to band. Madonna changed it back — with an emphasis on the female."
    • And between them, their influence effectively ended the dominance of rock over American pop music, which had endured from The '50s through The '70s, and helped to revive dance music as a mainstream force after the collapse of disco. While rock would still thrive for a long time to come, it would be just one of many genres competing in the pop sphere, as Contemporary R&B, Hip-Hop, Electronic Music, and other genres all rose to carve out their own places in the music landscape.
  • Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's 1982 song "The Message" was one of the first prominent hip-hop songs to incorporate social commentary in rap music, with its lyrics about the struggles of inner-city life in the United States, which in the long run paved the way for the subgenres of Conscious Hip Hop, Political Rap, and Gangsta Rap.
  • The release of R.E.M.'s Murmur and New Order's Power, Corruption & Lies in 1983 marked a turn from Post-Punk and New Wave Music to Alternative Rock in the underground scene. Four years later, both acts would have their first major hits with "The One I Love" and "True Faith", marking a major shift towards mainstream interest in alternative, with major labels, radio and MTV taking interest in the burgeoning and diverse genre, with more acts getting major exposure and heralding of things to come in The '90s.
  • Metallica was this for Thrash Metal, and for metal as a whole. They took the added speed and intensity that the NWOBHM bands brought to metal and fused it with a grittier, more down-to-Earth presentation (eschewing the flamboyant fashion and stage shows of Hair Metal in favor of a more punkish, working-class look) and more melodic and tightly structured compositions that both showed off the band members' prowess on their instruments and lent them a critical favor that other metal bands lacked. The result diverged so sharply from both the mainstream rock and hair metal of the '80s that the rise of Metallica and thrash in general is cited by some metal fans as the moment when metal became a truly separate genre from rock. Their first three albums (1983's Kill 'Em All, 1984's Ride the Lightning, and 1986's Master of Puppets) were the Trope Codifiers for the sound of thrash, such that they are cited as one of the genre's "Big Four" bands — and one of the other three, Megadeth, was born from Dave Mustaine getting fired from Metallica and starting his own band. For metal musicians since, acknowledging the influence of Metallica on their music is almost as obligatory as acknowledging that of the aforementioned Black Sabbath.
  • The Golden Age of Hip Hop, a time lasting from roughly the mid-'80s to the early '90s (the exact years depending on who's telling the story), was the first and greatest turning point for Hip-Hop music as a whole. This time period not only saw rap's popularity expand far beyond its roots in the New York City area, it also introduced a large array of sub-genres that showed that rap could be more than just party music, and that it could carry strong messages and themes. Rolling Stone referred to the time period as one "when it seemed that every new single reinvented the genre", such that it would probably be easier to list which singles and records didn't leave a profound impact.
    • However, if there were ever an Elvis for the Golden Age of hip-hop, then it would probably be Run–D.M.C. as the band that put the genre on the mainstream map. Their self-titled debut in 1984 was the first hip-hop album to go gold, King of Rock in 1985 was the first to go platinum, and Raising Hell in 1986 was the first to go multi-platinum. They were the first hip-hop act nominated for a Grammy Award, the first to have their videos played on MTV, and the first to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone. Furthermore, they also left a deep mark creatively, codifying a more aggressive sound, the "street" fashion of hip-hop (eschewing the over-the-top fashion of early rappers in favor of tracksuits, baggy jeans, and sneakers), and the relationship between the rapper and the DJ.
    • LL Cool J was probably the most influential solo rapper of the Golden Age, often credited with advancing the lyricism of hip-hop in particular. His tough, boastful style of delivery was a major influence on the rappers of the Golden Age and beyond, overturning the rapping styles of the "old school" of the late '70s and early '80s. His 1985 debut album Radio was also one of a trilogy of albums, together with Run-D.M.C.'s Raising Hell and Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill the following year, by Record Producer Rick Rubin that helped pull the genre away from the funk and disco influences of The '70s and in a more minimalist, rock-influenced direction, one that influenced everything from Hardcore Hip-Hop to producers like Timbaland and the Neptunes.
    • Rap Rock had two points of origin in 1986: Aerosmith's collaboration with Run–D.M.C. on "Walk This Way", and Beastie Boys' debut album Licensed to Ill, particularly the single "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)". Before this, fans of Hip-Hop and Rock generally held each other's music in contempt, and there was a fair amount of antagonism between the fanbases. These two releases showed the two groups that they weren't that different and did much to bridge the gap between them, kick-starting a genre that would explode in popularity in the following decade.
    • The 1986 Dutch documentary Big Fun in the Big Town, featuring interviews with countless rising stars of Golden Age hip-hop, helped bring hip-hop to Europe in general and the Netherlands especially, influencing a generation of Dutch rappers.
    • The debut album of Boogie Down Productions (composed of KRS-One, D-Nice, and Scott La Rock), 1987's Criminal Minded, offered up vivid depictions of life growing up in the ghettoes of the South Bronx, serving as an important progenitor to Gangsta Rap. It also helped set off one of hip-hop's first great feuds, the Bridge Wars between BDP and the Juice Crew over the birthplace of hip-hop (BDP's native South Bronx versus the Juice Crew's Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City). The murder of Scott La Rock in a shooting five months after the release of Criminal Minded, meanwhile, also led the remaining members to become pioneers in Conscious Hip Hop on their 1988 follow-up By Any Means Necessary, with KRS-One starting the Stop the Violence Movement.
    • Public Enemy took the militancy of the Political Rap of the time and brought it into the mainstream. Their 1988 breakthrough It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back helped set off a wave of Afrocentric hip-hop about urban oppression and institutional racism, and had a strong hand in shaping the confrontational politics of the genre as a whole.
    • And in that regard, what Public Enemy didn't do on Nation of Millions, N.W.A did when they released Straight Outta Compton a few months later, codifying the tropes of Gangsta Rap. Furthermore, the Los Angeles rap group were the first big-name hip-hop stars to come from outside New York, not only laying the seeds for the East Coast/West Coast rivalry of The '90s but marking a turning point in the growth of rap scenes across America and the world.
    • Across The Pond from the Golden Age rappers of the Bronx, London Posse were the group that gave British hip-hop its own unique voice. While hip-hop had reached the UK early in the '80s, most of its homegrown rappers were performing with put-on American accents and imitating the genre's superstars from New York. When London Posse recorded "Money Mad" in 1988, however, they did so in their native British accents while incorporating greater reggae influences in their sound (as befitting the roots of much of the UK's black community in the Caribbean), creating a distinctly British style of rap music separate from anything coming out of the US.
    • While the rest of the hip-hop world was turning in an increasingly Darker and Edgier direction, De La Soul's 1989 album 3 Feet High and Rising helped pioneer Alternative Hip Hop. Called a "hippie" group at the time due to their Lighter and Softer sound, their more goofy and upbeat style (including popularizing the "skit" on rap albums) helped carve out a space for less aggressive material.
    • The Beastie Boys' 1989 sophomore album Paul's Boutique proved to be as influential as Licensed to Ill. Initially selling poorly and receiving a lukewarm reception from fans due to how different it was from its predecessor, the album grew in critical acclaim as the years went on and is now seen as a key contributor in the development and explosion of sampling in Hip-Hop, its use of samples creating a lush, borderline psychedelic sound to back up the Beasties' rapping. Today, the album is considered to be a hip-hop masterpiece and one of the best albums the Beasties ever made, and a stunning example of what was possible with sampling in Hip-Hop before its use was restricted following a 1991 court ruling mentioned below.
    • While Run-D.M.C. was the first hip-hop act to cross over into the mainstream, MC Hammer was the genre's first real rock star, becoming a pop sensation with his 1990 breakthrough album Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em. He was the face of marketing campaigns, he saw his catch phrases and outfits influence mainstream fashion and slang, and he even had a Saturday-Morning Cartoon with Hammerman. Any rapper who makes a point of flaunting a flashy lifestyle and angling for mainstream success is following in Hammer's footsteps.
    • An exact moment for when the Golden Age ended, meanwhile, is the subject of debate, but one of the earliest cited is the 1991 court case Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc. in 1991, which killed sampling as a hip-hop production technique for a decade as the music samples that many hip-hop producers made heavy use of before then suddenly became prohibitively expensive. While it's usually agreed that the Golden Age was over by 1993 when Gangsta Rap had fully taken over the genre, this legal decision marked the beginning of the end, leading to a heavy change in the sound of hip-hop as more beats were interpolated from older songs (with many producers often putting their own twists on them, as seen with the rise of G-funk) rather than directly sampled from them.
    • And if it's not that, then it was when former N.W.A. member Dr. Dre became a Breakup Breakout with his 1992 album The Chronic, revolutionizing hip-hop again by defining a specifically West Coast brand of such characterized by a smooth, laid-back "G-funk" sound interpolated from '70s Parliament-Funkadelic tracks. Dre's production on The Chronic would make him one of the most influential and in-demand hip-hop Record Producers of The '90s, a legacy that would be cemented by his work on Snoop Dogg's debut album Doggystyle the following year. After The Chronic, gangsta rap took over, and there was no looking back.
  • Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson, starting with the former's 1985 self-titled debut album and the latter's 1986 debut Control, were this for Contemporary R&B. While Janet's brother Michael was pivotal in bringing R&B sounds into the mainstream, she and Whitney did so with far less hybridization with pop music, securing crossover success with albums that applied modern production to R&B and made it feel fresh while keeping it recognizable as R&B. Whitney specifically is often credited, together with the below-mentioned Mariah Carey, with reviving the "soul diva" in pop with her emphasis on big Melismatic Vocals, while Janet built on Madonna's impact with sex appeal and a message of empowerment that brought women's liberation to R&B and black American pop culture more broadly.
  • In the summer of 1985, the Washington, D.C. Hardcore Punk scene experienced what was called the "Revolution Summer", a short-lived musical movement that came to be known in hindsight as the birthplace of Post-Hardcore and Emo Music. Rebelling against the violence and Testosterone Poisoning that they associated with the punk scene, a collection of bands centered around Dischord Records and the activist group Positive Force DC and led by Rites of Spring, Embrace, and Beefeater instead embraced positivity, moralism, social activism, and the Straight Edge movement while rejecting violence, moshing, and drug use at concerts. The bands that emerged from this scene, most notably Fugazi (founded by former members of Embrace and Rites of Spring), also took a more melodic approach that spurned the noise, speed, and aggression of hardcore punk, demonstrating that punk didn't have to be loud and in-your-face to be rebellious.
  • Picture a Boy Band. If you're American, you're probably picturing a group of five handsome young men, one of them a heartthrob (and possibly The Leader), one an edgy tough guy, one a cutie, one a cool "older brother" figure, and one a shy guy, singing light rock and/or R&B-inflected tunes about romance as a Vocal Tag Team while showing off their synchronized dance moves in their concerts and videos. Congratulations, you're probably picturing New Kids on the Block, the boy band that wrote the book for every one that followed. While New Edition did this formula firstnote , New Kids managed to avoid getting pigeonholed as a "black" band and become a mainstream breakout success.
  • The "Class of '89" in Country Music, a group of musicians led by Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, and Clint Black who had their mainstream breakthroughs in 1989, pulled the genre mainstream away from the pop influences that had been dominant in The '80s and towards a sound that combined older country styles with modern production while spurning pop crossovers. Their success brought country, once dismissed as limited to the rural South and West, to national attention as listeners across the US and beyond started buying country records and driving sales into the stratosphere, transforming Nashville from a regional center of the music industry to a global one. Their fashion, dominated by cowboy hats and pressed suits, was also highly influential, to the point that "hat act" came to be a derogatory term to describe many Follow the Leader male country artists in The '90s.
  • While Melt and Remain in Light are credited with popularizing worldbeat, Peter Gabriel's later soundtrack album Passion and Talking Heads frontman David Byrne's solo debut Rei Momo, both released in 1989, are credited with popularizing proper World Music in the western world, showing that these sounds were just as artistically capable unfiltered as they were when combined with rock.

    1990s 
  • Mariah Carey, upon her debut in 1990, revolutionized pop as a whole and R&B in particular.
    • Even more than the aforementioned Michael and Janet Jackson and Whitney Houston in the '80s, Mariah helped break down American pop music's "color line" not just through her status as one of the first openly mixed-race pop stars, but also by fusing Contemporary R&B with Hip-Hop. Her duets and collaborations with rappers, starting with her 1995 collaboration with Ol' Dirty Bastard on the remix of "Fantasy", were considered daring in their time but proved enormously successful, affording rappers and hip-hop as a whole a way to soften their image (especially after the below-mentioned murder of Biggie and Tupac) while also popularizing remixes in pop music. By the 2000s, even white pop singers like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys were incorporating greater R&B influences in their music. To quote Jody Rosen, writing for Slate:
      "It was a change that risked alienating those millions of Carey’s fans who knew her as the reigning sovereign of adult contemporary radio, liked her that way, and couldn’t fathom why she was palling around with a shark-toothed rapper who rhymed "Mariah" with "pacifier." But it was a smart, prescient career move. The hybridized mix of pop, R&B, and hip-hop that dominates today’s top 40 was an inevitability that Carey saw earlier than others, and she hurried that future along."
    • Her enormous vocal range and bombastic Melismatic Vocals also heralded a revival in pop of the big-voiced diva who could hit and hold the high notes, paving the way for singers like Jessica Simpson, Leona Lewis, and Adele. To quote Rolling Stone when they listed her as one of the 100 greatest singers of all time:
      "Her mastery of melisma, the fluttering strings of notes that decorate songs like "Vision of Love", inspired the entire American Idol vocal school, for better or worse, and virtually every other female R&B singer since the Nineties."
  • In the early '90s, two distinct moments worked in tandem to fuel the rise of adult alternative as a more rootsy, organic response to the pop styles of The '80s.
  • Nirvana's 1991 breakthrough album Nevermind, especially its lead single "Smells Like Teen Spirit'', sent a shockwave through American popular music.
    • Within rock music, not only did it finish off the remnants of Hair Metal (and numerous other genres and musicians who performed in them), it was the album that kicked off the Alternative Rock revolution of The '90s, as Grunge, Alternative Metal, Pop Punk, and a slew of other subgenres were all able to achieve mainstream breakthroughs in Nirvana's wake. In fact, Nevermind's impact, staking out the year 1991 as a dividing line between "classic" and "modern" rock music not unlike how The Beatles' debut did the same for 1963, has caused a problem for Classic Rock DJs and radio programmers: while the rock music of The '60s through The '80s exists in such a continuum that it all fits fairly well onto the same classic rock stations, the alternative rock of the early '90s, despite now being old enough to call "classic rock", marks such a radical departure that it sticks out like a sore thumb next to bands from just five years prior. Todd in the Shadows, who often covers '80s rock bands for his shows One-Hit Wonderland and Trainwreckords, has made "Nirvana killed my career" into a Running Gag to describe how many of those acts fell off the charts almost immediately after 1991.
    • It also had a surprising impact on Country Music, as this article by Steve Leftridge for PopMatters explains. Not all rock fans and listeners embraced the rise of alternative, with fans of the heartland rock, Arena Rock, and Hair Metal of The '80s feeling especially left out, and furthermore, a lot of the producers and session musicians who made their names in more traditional rock sounds suddenly found that their talents didn't translate well to alternative. On the other hand, Nashville, seat of a country music industry that was built on tradition and catering to nostalgia, was more than happy to bring these old-fashioned rockers on board. Together with the aforementioned Class of '89, the surge of mainstream rock talent into Nashville played a pivotal role in country's explosion of popularity in the coming decades.
    • And just as Kurt Cobain put grunge in the spotlight, he killed it three years later — namely, by killing himself, his suicide fueling the backlash to grunge and, with it, the rise of Post-Grunge in its place. The downward spiral and eventual death of one of the genre's superstars, out of a mix of drug and alcohol addiction destroying his health and Artist Disillusionment from his struggle to reconcile his anti-commercial ethos with mainstream success, not only took out the genre's biggest band at the height of its glory, it caused many fans to see grunge as music for nihilistic, terminally depressed killjoys, especially with other artists in the genre also battling addiction. While people still liked the sound of grunge and Alternative Rock, they wanted something Lighter and Softer, and bands like the Foo Fighters (founded by a former member of Nirvana, tellingly enough), Candlebox, Bush, Live, Collective Soul, and countless others flourished in the place of grunge's former titans.
  • Seo Taiji & Boys, over the course of four albums from 1992 to '96, made Korean Pop Music into what we now know as "K-pop", hybridizing traditional Korean ballads and folk music with hip-hop, rock, synthesizers, and English-language lyrics. Furthermore, as one of the first A-list bands to emerge in the wake of South Korea's democratization and liberalization in 1988, they played a pivotal role in breaking down barriers of censorship and ending the stranglehold that the television networks had on what music became popular, as Taiji, who owned his own record label, used his power to promote the band's music himself, push back against state Media Watchdogs, and bring underground artists and genres (most notably Korean metal, Taiji having previously been the bassist of the band Sinawe) into the mainstream. In doing so, Taiji pioneered the business model of modern K-pop, in which the record labels wield most of the power — an influence that became especially apparent after one of the band's members, Yang Hyun-suk, went on to found YG Entertainment, which became one of K-pop's Big Three record labels.
  • In 1992, Electronic Music label Warp Records released the compilation album Artificial Intelligence. Consisting of several songs by different Electronic Music artists, the album helped invent a new style of Electronic Music known as intelligent dance music (or IDM), a more complex and experimental style of the genre intended for listening and not for dancing. While the genre had existed before thanks to artists such as The Orb and The KLF, Artificial Intelligence gave the genre a defining name and sound (albeit a name that is often despised by its artists for its perceived elitism), which would later come into its own partially thanks to the work of some of the artists featured on the album such as Autechre and especially Aphex Twin.
  • Aphex Twin's 1992 debut album Selected Ambient Works 85-92 was itself a major contribution to the development of IDM, as explained in this article. Its distinctive mix of calming Ambient music with a foreboding creepiness created a sound that, as described by the aforementioned article, made it more electronic than previous ambient albums such as The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld or Chill Out by The KLF. This unique sound would later influence other acts in the IDM genre, and the album is today seen as one of the best Electronic Music albums of the entire 1990s, one which launched the long, successful, and innovative career of Aphex Twin.
  • A pair of 1993 albums, Modern Life is Rubbish by Blur and the self-titled debut of Suede, hold a similar status in the UK as Nevermind in the US as the albums that codified Britpop, the genre that would quickly emerge as the sound of '90s "Cool Britannia". Rooted in '80s indie rock and fusing numerous styles of British rock and pop from decades past into one flag-waving "good times" package, they marked a Lighter and Softer pushback against American-style grunge.
  • While Pop Punk's roots date back to The Ramones, it was two hit albums from 1994, Green Day's major label debut Dookie and The Offspring's Smash, that made it a mainstream force in popular music. By combining the breakneck speed and mischievousness of Punk Rock with a greater focus on catchy hooks, pop sensibilities, and a more melodic sound, Green Day and the Offspring made pop punk a fixture of youth rebellion and mainstream skate culture in the latter half of the '90s and well into the '00s.
  • When Jonathan Davis screamed out "are you RRREADDDYYYYYY???" on "Blind", the leadoff track from Korn's 1994 self-titled debut album, it marked the beginning of the Nu Metal era. Korn's blend of downtuned guitars, Hip-Hop fashion sense, and angsty, introspective lyrics about subjects like bullying, sexual assault, parental abuse, and suicide would help put Heavy Metal back in the spotlight in the latter half of The '90s, rejecting the theatrics that had characterized '80s metal in favor of emotion and raw aggression of a sort not too dissimilar to contemporary grunge (albeit substantially louder and angrier). While nu-metal endured a heavy backlash from metal enthusiasts in the early-mid '00s, its influences continue to live on within metal as a whole, even if mainly through bands that were responding to it.
  • Goldie's 1995 album Timeless, with its monster success and blending of the frenetic beats of Drum and Bass and an atmospheric, ambient sound to back them up, helped kick off the Drum and Bass boom in the United Kingdom in The '90s. While overexposure and the failure of Goldie's second album Saturnz Return finished off this period of success, Drum and Bass eventually came back and today remains a relevant sub-genre of Electronic Music worldwide and influence on other genres such as grime.
  • If any one act could be said to have kicked off the "Y2K era" of pop music, it would probably be the Spice Girls.
    • In 1996, the American music mainstream was dominated by all things "alternative", be it grunge and Alternative Metal bands like Soundgarden, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Live or singer-songwriters like Sheryl Crow, Alanis Morissette, and Fiona Apple, and had little room for light, fluffy dance-pop. Neither did the British music mainstream, at the time in the midst of the peak of Britpop. The Spice Girls stood in stark opposition to all of this, carving out a new place for unapologetic, larger-than-life bubblegum pop music and spearheading a revival of such in the late '90s and early '00s and a wave of girl groups, boy bands, and teen idol singers on both sides of the Pond eager to mimic their success.
    • In the long term, their use of "girl power" as their motto also marked the moment at which feminist messaging (albeit in a very scrubbed-down, Lighter and Softer form) first began to seriously enter Teen Pop. The aforementioned female singer-songwriters had teenage fans, to be sure, but the cores of their fanbases were made up of college students and twentysomethings. The Spice Girls, on the other hand, played to crowds composed primarily of adolescents and teenagers.
  • At the time of its release, Weezer's 1996 album Pinkerton was a critical and commercial flop that sent Rivers Cuomo into a Creator Breakdown over its poor reception, but in just a few short years, it would be Vindicated by History in a major way. While Emo Music has roots going back to the Washington, D.C. punk scene in The '80s before spreading nationally through the underground in the early '90s, Pinkerton was where the tropes of what emo became in the 2000s fully crystallized. Numerous later emo bands have cited Pinkerton (and, to a lesser extent, Weezer's self-titled debut in 1994, known retroactively as The Blue Album) as a direct inspiration for their sound, such that some critics have called Weezer the most influential rock band of the late '90s.
  • The Gangsta Rap era ended in disaster in the span of six months in late 1996 and early '97, when The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur were both gunned down, triggering a backlash against the dark lyrical subject matter of gangsta rap that had just been made Harsher in Hindsight. Soon after, Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs released his hit album No Way Out, and suddenly Glam Rap became the dominant form of "urban" music on the radio for the rest of the decade and the start of the next.
  • OutKast completely changed hip-hop, even if it took some time before their influence truly became apparent. Their rich, soulful, and distinctly Southern style of rap was controversial at the time for its incorporation of soul and R&B elements, but later proved to be prophetic in how it predicted an increasing trend of melodic rap in the subsequent decades.
    • 1996's ATLiens was a spacy, almost ambient psychedelic rap album which would inspire a large number of artists in the 2010s.
    • 2000's Stankonia is virtually a map of where hip-hop would go over the next twenty years, featuring songs which inspired crunk and trap music as well as more experimental cuts with electronic soul influences. OutKast notably injected influence from rave culture into the album, heralding a shift from the slower and more laid-back beats of late '90s hip-hop to faster and more up-tempo music.
    • 2003's The Love Below, one half of a double album with the more traditional Speakerboxxx, was one of the first examples of a rapper doing an entire album in an R&B/soul style with little rapping. This would be followed up by Kanye West and Tyler, the Creator, whose projects draw from The Love Below's neo-psychedelic sound.
    • André 3000's fashion sense was quite unique in its day, featuring flamboyant costumes in an era of either gangsta attire or shiny suits, to the point where many people thought he was gay. Nowadays, many rappers have experimented with pushing gender boundaries and received significantly more praise for it.
  • Shania Twain's 1997 smash hit album Come On Over did this for Country Music, especially for female artists.
    • In the aforementioned Steve Leftridge article on how the rise of grunge caused country to absorb the remnants of Classic Rock in the US, Leftridge points to Come On Over as the point where the convergence was completed, having been produced by the legendary '80s rock/metal producer (and Shania's husband) Robert John "Mutt" Lange and mixing unmistakable country sounds with unapologetic classic rock influences.
    • Furthermore, Shania's personal style also marked a sea change for female country musicians. While there had been attractive women in country who had flaunted their sex appeal before (most famously Dolly Parton), Shania was unquestionably the genre's Ms. Fanservice in a way that none of them had ever been, wearing revealing outfits (especially her frequently bared midriff) that up to that point had been more associated with pop divas than country singers. Since then, overtly sexy female country artists like Carrie Underwood, Kellie Pickler, and Maren Morris have not been nearly so unusual.
  • The immense success of Radiohead's OK Computer in 1997 moved Alternative Rock into a more melancholic and electronic direction following the decline of Britpop in the UK and grunge in the US (with the album doubling as a Genre-Killer for the former). 1998 alone saw three of alt-rock's biggest acts shift to electronic rock, and much of the post-Britpop movement in the 2000's would take heavy influence from Radiohead thanks to OK Computer.
  • Eminem wasn't the first white rapper, but he was the first to be taken seriously as a rapper, breaking the stereotype that they were all either posers and novelty acts like Vanilla Ice or rock bands with rappers in them like the Beastie Boys and Red Hot Chili Peppers. His 1999 breakthrough The Slim Shady LP and his 2000 follow-up The Marshall Mathers LP were raw, intense, fire-breathing records that quickly silenced those who initially dismissed him as an outsider, taking the ghetto iconography of '90s hip-hop and combining it with the "trailer trash" imagery of his own upbringing to great effect. Rappers like Kid Rock (in his early years), Atmosphere, Macklemore, G-Eazy, and Post Malone likely would not have enjoyed the success they did if not for Eminem opening the door.
  • On June 1, 1999, Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker launched Napster, a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that dragged the music industry kicking and screaming into the information age. While it was shut down by an RIAA anti-piracy lawsuit in 2002, its popularity facilitated the rise of legal counterpart iTunes, and both platforms' ability to let users download individual songs ended the album era of popular music. To this day, album sales haven't returned to their peak in 1999, with revenue being focused more on digital downloads, streaming services, and live performances.
  • In the Eighties, there was a string of bands who played Heavy Metal or Thrash Metal harsher than it used to be, played with the technical merits of Death Metal, or incorporated Satanic or mythological themes into their music. One of them, Venom, provided a handy name for this with their album Black Metal. In the Nineties, these bands were succeeded by a bunch of Norwegian weirdos who played with the utmost seriousness every single thing that they had done as a mildly ironic gimmick. Thus, the Norwegian black metal scene was born, and it transformed the nascent genre into the equal parts mix of Creepy Awesome and Narm Charm it is ever since.

    2000s 
  • The Strokes' 2001 debut album Is This It helped kick off the Post-Punk revival movement in the early-mid '00s, characterized by a gritty, lo-fi sound hearkening back to The Velvet Underground and The Ramones as a backlash against the overproduced Post-Grunge and Nu Metal of the late '90s. The post-punk revival would, in turn, later have an enormous impact on the indie rock of the late '00s and the 2010s, especially after the scene caught traction in the UK in ways that it never did in The Strokes' native US.
  • Kanye West:
    • Before he broke out as a rapper in his own right, West was a Record Producer. His work on Jay-Z's 2001 album The Blueprint helped popularize a sound influenced by soul music in hip-hop beats, while also helping to revive sampling in rap music. Before, hip-hop had been dominated by the "Timbaland sound", an electronic-influenced sound defined by looped beats and digital keyboards.
    • His 2004 debut album The College Dropout changed rap music in the '00s by decisively breaking the influence of Gangsta Rap. Even after the deaths of Biggie and Tupac discredited the more hard-edged material and pushed hip-hop in a Lighter and Softer direction, Glam Rap still drew heavily from that well, with the rowdy parties, gorgeous women, fast cars, and flashy jewelry featured in the songs always strongly implied (and often stated) to be paid for by criminal activity. West, however, carved out a place for more introspective and emotional material that explored subjects like religion, family, sexuality, injustice, and the struggles of everyday life as opposed to hustling, paving the way for everybody from Kendrick Lamar to J. Cole to Childish Gambino to The Weeknd to Macklemore. West's impact was best evidenced in 2007, when his album Graduation went head-to-head with 50 Cent's album Curtis — and decisively trounced the competition.
    • And what West didn't do on The College Dropout, he did on his 2008 album 808s & Heartbreak. Not only did it build upon the aforementioned introspection that West was famous for at that point, its experimental sparse, electronic sound and heavy use of Auto-Tune caused him to compare it to New Wave Music. At the time, the album caused a Broken Base for being far outside what many people defined as rap music, but it was soon Vindicated by History once its sound came to define hip-hop in the late '00s and early '10s, most notably with the rise of Drake.
    • His 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, larger and more ambitious than his previous projects, featured significantly more singing and electronics than any of them save for 808s and Heartbreak. The result was not only heavily praised by critics, but set the stage for even larger, more ambitious, encyclopedic hip hop projects, such as the work of Kendrick Lamar, Astroworld by Travis Scott, and the orchestral Sometimes I Might Be Introvert by UK rapper Little Simz.
  • In Russia, Hip-Hop had been very divisive throughout The '90s, with many of the biggest homegrown acts perceived as manufactured copycats of American street style without much of its substance. Kasta, a group from Rostov-on-Don, changed that by taking their Wu-Tang Clan inspirations and applying them to the reality of Russian neighborhoods. After their 2002 album Громче воды, выше травы ("Louder than Water, Taller than Grass"), much of Russian hip-hop shifted from imitating American street culture to reflecting Russian street culture, and suddenly many of the Russian youths who used to beat up "rappers" started embracing rap music, propelling Kasta to one of the biggest and most influential rap acts of Russia.
  • While the Boy Band and Girl Group boom died out in the US in the early '00s, in the UK it enjoyed a revival around that time and thrived well into the 2000s, in no small part thanks to Girls Aloud. Born from the show Popstars: The Rivals in 2002, their success established Reality TV music competitions as a route to music stardom in the UK in a way that the American show American Idol was only able to pull off a few times (mostly in the Country Music genre). Furthermore, their debut single "Sound of the Underground", courtesy of the songwriting/production team Xenomania, brought the influence of Drum and Bass and dance music into British pop, pulling it away from the family-friendly camp of the Spice Girls and establishing it as sexy, stylish, and notably distinct from the Hip-Hop/R&B-inflected American pop landscape of the '00s.
  • In the early 2000s, underground musicians in the UK fused Hip-Hop, Drum and Bass, and House Music into a new genre, known as grime. Two of them, Wiley and Dizzee Rascal, are often credited with bringing grime into the mainstream as the first major rap scene from outside the US to gain global attention, the former through his 2002 track "Eskimo" and the latter through his 2003 album Boy in da Corner.
  • As outlined in this article from Saving Country Music, the backlash against the Dixie Chicks in 2003 following Natalie Maines' anti-war comments at a London concert massively impacted the culture and politics of Country Music.
    • The genre always had a streak of small-town conservatism owing to its roots in the rural South. As far back as 1969, Merle Haggard's anti-counterculture anthem "Okie from Muskogee" became a Sleeper Hit, and while it's long been debated, including by Haggard himself, whether or not the song itself was meant to be satirical (and if so, how much), many fans took it seriously and embraced its message without irony. The Dixie Chicks affair, however, made country's celebration of a particular type of "red state" Americana explicitly politicized and right-wing, to the point where left-leaning artists came under suspicion from country fandom and radio. Taylor Swift, despite officially leaving country behind and going pop in 2014, directly cited this incident as a huge reason for her reluctance to speak out politically until 2018.
    • It also left its mark musically, not just on country but also, tangentially, on rock music. At the time, the Chicks were arguably the biggest act in country playing "traditional" country sounds, writing their own music and playing acoustic instruments like the banjo, the fiddle, the mandolin, and the guitar. Meanwhile, Toby Keith, who symbolized an Arena Rock approach to country with loud, electric instruments and production, positioned himself as the Spiritual Antithesis to the Chicks in both his politics and his sound, and he saw his career take off just as the Chicks crashed and burned. The result was that country and rock music saw their sounds and influences flip in the late '00s and early '10s; while country became slick, polished, and boisterous, culminating in the rise of "bro-country" in the mid-'10s, rock saw the rise of acoustic bands like Mumford & Sons, The Lumineers, and the Avett Brothers that were more influenced by Folk Music and Indie Pop.
  • From outside the music world, the Fox Teen Drama The O.C., which aired from 2003 through 2007, has been credited with bringing Indie Pop into the mainstream, not unlike how the aforementioned Saturday Night Fever did with disco. As this video by Patrick (H) Willems explains, the show's fusion of the glamour of a SoCal teen drama with a satirical, countercultural tone (he compared it to Freaks and Geeks dressed up like Beverly Hills, 90210) turned it into a pipeline for early '00s indie culture to flow into the mainstream, and nowhere was this more apparent than with its soundtrack, which was dominated by the kinds of indie bands that Seth Cohen was a fan of and produced five soundtrack albums (not counting the Christmas album) in three years. Even after the show ended, indie remained one of the most popular forms of rock music well into the 2010s.
  • AKB48, upon their debut in 2005, popularized the idea of "idols you can meet". Before, Japanese Pop Music was defined by idols who most people encountered from afar at concerts or on TV. AKB48's producer Yasushi Akimoto wanted to create a Girl Group that had its own theater where they could not only perform daily concerts but also conduct meet-and-greets with fans, a project that he accomplished by building a group consisting of dozens of members working in multiple "teams" who split the workload. The result became a pop culture phenomenon in Japan that marked a sea change in how idols were presented to fans, leading to a flurry of spinoffs and rival idol groups emerging in the late '00s and early '10s, a period that some observers referred to as the "Warring Idols Period".
  • Taylor Swift was the first Country Music artist to have global crossover success outside the few nations (such as Canada and Australia) that already had their own significant country fandoms, chiefly by breaking from traditionalism and rural Americana themes to incorporate a more pop-influenced sound and confessional lyrics, writing about romance, heartbreak, and personal struggles from the point of view of a teenage girl in the suburbs. After her 2006 breakthrough, Nashville scrambled to find the "next Taylor", and her influence quickly crept into pop music as well (especially after her Genre Shift in the mid-'10s), with many singer-songwriters in the 2010s in both country and pop citing her as an influence. She's even been credited with reviving the guitar in pop music, particularly among female artists, after it was seen as having gone into decline in the '00s and early '10s. On the business side of the industry, Swift also became one of the leading activists for musicians' intellectual property rights in the age of streaming, especially in the wake of her long battle with Scooter Braun over the rights to her earlier music.
  • Although Britney Spears is considered a global female pop icon in her own right, her 2007 album Blackout stands out in terms of influence on the pop landscape. Its combination of grimy electronic instrumentation with lyrics ranging from Intercourse with You to deeply confessional musings on the price of fame, and sometimes both at once, made a landmark impact, even if it only became apparent years later after some time had passed from the tabloid storm that raged around her in the late '00s. It was among the first mainstream pop albums to include dubstep instrumentation on the song "Freakshow", a sound that many pop artists would imitate in the new decade, and Spears herself would lean further into on her 2011 album Femme Fatale. Many pop artists well into the 2020s have cited this album as an influence, most notably Charli XCX, Slayyyter, and Kim Petras. And Spears’ bridging the gap of underground sounds with mainstream appeal and confessional lyrics have led some to consider Blackout the Ur-Example of the hyperpop genre.
  • Since her 2008 breakthrough, Lady Gaga has often been described as having revolutionized the popular music landscape. Among other things, her work was credited with renewing mainstream interest in Synth-Pop, legitimizing pop music in general as an art form much like the aforementioned David Bowie did for rock music, kicking off the "poptimism" boom in music criticism in the process, restoring the emphasis on spectacle in pop that had mostly gone away in the '00s with the end of the MTV era, and increasing the mainstream acceptance of both openly LGBT+ and politically active celebrities, Gaga having been openly bisexual from the start and using her platform to discuss social and cultural issues.
  • Just as Napster's launch ten years prior killed the "old" music industry by destroying its album-based business model, the launch of Spotify's free service, first in the UK in February 2009 and then internationally in 2011, heralded the rise of a new one built around singles. Spotify was far from the first legal, internet-based music service, but its marriage of zero cost (especially compared to iTunes' 99-cent-per-song model) and high convenience made it a phenomenon, one that allowed the record industry to recover from the beating it took from file sharing and digital piracy in the '00s and push back against such.
  • Drake, starting with his breakthrough 2009 mixtape So Far Gone, exerted a towering influence on Hip-Hop in The New '10s. For starters, as the biggest rap star to come out of Canada (specifically Toronto) and one who emerged at the start of the streaming era of music, he served as a bridge between the American and international rap scenes, incorporating influence from British grime in particular and bringing it to North America, while also reducing the importance of albums in hip-hop and restoring mixtapes and singles to the genre's forefront. Furthermore, while he was hardly the first hip-hop artist to combine rapping and singing on the same songs, he made them go hand-in-hand in a way that many of his predecessors didn't, elevating melody as a core component of the genre. More traditional rappers often found themselves in conflict with Drake and exchanging ruthless diss tracks with him, but by the end of the decade, his new-school sound had decisively won the debate over hip-hop's future. Jon Caramanica, writing for The New York Times, described his impact thusly:
    "Drake’s So Far Gone mixtape — released in February 2009 — marked the arrival of new path: singing as rapping, rapping as singing, singing and rapping all woven together into one holistic whole. Drake exploded the notion that those component parts had to be delivered by two different people, and also deconstructed what was expected from each of them. His hip-hop was fluid, not dogmatic. And in so remaking it, he set the template for what would eventually become the global pop norm."
  • While many musicians in the 2000s had built their fanbases through the internet, most of them had worked in niche subgenres, particularly Emo Music and its offshoots. Justin Bieber, the Teen Pop singer who released his first single in 2009 after the record executive Scooter Braun stumbled upon his YouTube videos, was the first mainstream pop superstar to be discovered via social media, laying down the blueprint for a generation of influencers and amateur musicians seeking to become successful in the internet age.

    2010s 
  • Momoiro Clover Z, upon their debut in 2010, were the first "anti-idol" group that deviated from the cutesy, fluffy Japanese Idol Singer style, with an anarchic, hyperactive stage show and public image that incorporated dance moves from ballet and gymnastics and far more flamboyant costumes.
  • The 2010 release of Waka Flocka Flame's debut studio album, Flockaveli, wasn’t the first Trap album, but propelled the style into the Mainstream eyes.
  • Chief Keef helped popularize the drill sub genre of trap, and, with his Auto-Tune vocals and repetitive flows, influenced dozens of future rappers.
  • Three female pop singer-songwriters in the early 2010s have been credited with leading a backlash against the Synth-Pop of the late '00s and bringing a more low-key, Darker and Edgier sound and themes into mainstream pop music, especially among female artists.
    • First, Adele's 2011 album 21 ended the late 2000s domination of club music and spurred a revival of R&B and the neo-soul genre, with a cross-generational appeal that attracted both older listeners nostalgic for its throwback sound and teenagers who embraced her lyrics about heartbreak.
    • Second was Lana Del Rey's 2012 major label debut Born to Die. Her hushed, breathy vocal style was incredibly controversial at the time (her Saturday Night Live performance was widely derided as one of the show's worst), but would very quickly be Vindicated by History as one of the defining traits of female pop singers in the 2010s. Her lyrics, with subject matter ranging from death to abusive relationships to satire and criticism of The American Dream, were also a seminal influence, as was her persona that evoked a bygone, faded Hollywood glamour. Richard S. He, writing for Billboard, described her influence thusly:
      "[Born to Die] became one of the main catalysts for pop's mid-2010s shift from brash EDM to a moodier, hip-hop-inflected palette. She's influenced not just her peers, but the next generation of alternative-leaning pop stars: Lorde, Halsey, Billie Eilish, Banks, Sky Ferreira, Father John Misty, Sia, Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, even Taylor Swift."
    • Last but not least came Lorde, who brought Lana's sound into the mainstream with her 2013 debut Pure Heroine, particularly the lead-off single "Royals". While she wasn't the biggest hitmaker, her hushed vocals, use of minor key, and goth-inflected lyrics and image (which included direct criticism of the made-for-the-nightclub dance-pop trends of the time) proved massively influential on pop music in the 2010s, most notably with the female alt-pop and Bedroom Pop singers like Halsey, Alessia Cara, Charli XCX, and Billie Eilish who followed in her wake. Even the ascent of Trap Music into the mainstream can arguably be pinned on Lorde opening the door for darker subject matter. Todd in the Shadows, while reviewing Halsey's song "Without Me", joked that, as an unironic fan of the larger-than-life Idol Singers who Lorde displaced, he should probably hate her legacy as much as fans of Hair Metal hate that of Kurt Cobain.
      Todd: In hindsight, Lorde's big anti-pop pop anthem "Royals" seems like the shockwave that destroyed everything. Basically, Lorde killed Superman, and now we're in some kind of post-apocalyptic dystopia comic instead. It didn't happen right away, of course, and obviously, you can't pin everything on one song. But it feels like the turning point that explains where we are now. How we got from Pitbull to Post Malone, from "Party in the USA" to "Stressed Out".
  • Florida Georgia Line changed the direction of Country Music with their 2012 single "Cruise", especially the remix with Nelly that turned it into a smash hit. Wile Country Rap had been a trend in the genre for a while by that point, Florida Georgia Line gave it sex appeal and a Lighter and Softer touch inspired more by Pop Rap and Hair Metal, kicking off the "bro-country" boom of the early-mid-2010s that was characterized by party anthems aiming for crossover pop success. Even though bro-country itself proved incredibly controversial within the country fandom and faced a backlash late in the decade, the idea of combining country and Hip-Hop, once seen as heretical by fans of both genres, was there to stay.
  • Swedish rapper Yung Lean is often credited with inventing what would become known as "SoundCloud rap", a movement that would sweep across the Hip-Hop landscape in the latter half of the 2010s. Mixing Trap Music, the aesthetics of vaporwave, and downbeat lyrics and tone inspired by Emo Music, and then sharing the results on the music website SoundCloud, Yung Lean laid down most of the tropes of the genre on his 2013 mixtape Unknown Death 2002. While his mainstream success was short-circuited by drug addiction leading to hospitalization, within a few years his style had exploded into a movement that many compared to Punk Rock in its rejection of traditional hip-hop form.


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