1991: The Most Important Year in Pop-Music History
Historical, musical, and quantitative evidence shows that the rise of rap is the most important thing that has ever happened to the genre.
By Derek ThompsonMay 8, 2015
On June 22, 1991, Billboard announced a new album had surpassed Out of Time, by R.E.M., to become the most popular in the country. It was N****z4life, by N.W.A., which had debuted the previous week at number 2 and sold nearly a million copies in its first seven days. Billboard had published an album chart for 45 years, but this marked a historic week: It was the first time that a rap group claimed the top spot on the Billboard 200.
For several years, music historians have considered this, the consecration of rap on mainstream music charts, the watershed moment in modern music, marking the death of hard rock and the dawn of a period where hip-hop has merged with several genres, including country, dance, and even alt-rock, to become the modern sound of pop.
Now the theory gets some quantitative cred. New analysis from researchers in the United Kingdom, who studied the chord structure and sounds of 17,000 songs in last half-century, determined that 1991 marked the most significant revolution in the history of modern pop music. The rise of rap and hip-hop, they authors wrote, marked “the single most important event that has shaped the musical structure of the American charts."
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