The 90’s didn’t really bring any new genres. Instead, it was a time when people expanded on existing genres and created subgenres.
-Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, and others takes the “rap-rock” of Beastie Boys, Aerosmith/Run-DMC, etc, and makes it insanely popular.
-Moby, Paul Oakenfield, Crystal Method, the squarepusher, etc take electronic dance and split it into a dozen subgenres. Subgeneres ranging from a more tradition House all the way to whatever you call squarepusher and autechre’s twisted version of drum&bass.
-Modest Mouse and other groups (sorry I dont know much about Emo) take the grunge/rock and turn it into a whining depression dance known as Emo.
-Eminem, NWA, Dr.Dre, Big L, etc take the oldschool and funk influenced rock of Run-DMC, Boogie Down Productions, Sugarhill Gang, etc, and turn it into modern Hip-Hop and ‘Gangster’ Rap.
-Brittney Spears, Christina Aguilerra, etc take pop to the next level.
-Traditional orchestral music goes on life support.
I could probely list more evolutions but those are the big ones. Note: I know there were a lot more people responsible for all this stuff that I did not list and some of these people may have started in the 1980s but did not reach fame until the 1990s.
The difficulty everyone’s having here says something about the 90s. They were really very derivative, musically. I remember, late in the 90s, my sister-in-law being very excited about a forthcoming U2 album, and I said, “Well, they did a late 60s psychedelic album, then an early 70s glam album, then a late 70s disco album. So they should be up to the early 80s by now. Which is great, 'cause U2 rocked then.”
As you’ve probably guessed, my musical tastes were formed in the 80s. They were a great decade for music, but it was almost all underground, off the charts. Since the early 90s, the musical subcultures barely get to chance to be born before they have their own cable channel.
Nope, wrong. Ska began in the 1960s and has been kicking around in various forms since then, moving from Jamaica (where it was invented, and predates reggae) to Britain to America at various points in its past.
While **Modest Mouse **are cool as fuck, they probably can’t be credited for coming up with emo. Rites of Spring and Fugazi took the D.C. hardcore punk scene and start writing melodic songs about their own social lives instead of “fuck the man”, a few years before Modest Mouse. The term emo-core was coined to describe those bands. [/nit-pick]
One new genre from the 90’s would probably be post-rock (most pretentious genre name EVER). Slint’s Spiderland came out in '91, and pretty much gave birth to the Chicago post-rock scene. Nothing had sounded like that before.
Just to top Dryga_Yes giving post-rock the title of most pretentious genre name ever, I’ll mention IDM (intelligent dance music), which I believe is a 90s phenomenon. You might have heard of Aphex Twin.
I think emo may even have started in the 80s with, as D_Y said, Rites of Spring and Fugazi.
Other 90s genres: Trip-hop (legitimately different to hip-hop - I’d say Portishead and Snoop Dogg have very little in common), Big Beat, Drum n Bass, Glitch, G-Funk and Nu-Metal.
And while all of those except trip-hop are subgenres, I think the 90s is notable for developing so many subgenres. The 90s was when music really began to splinter.
brit pop people!!! Jaesus, were you all asleep for the big Oasis vs Blur Battle? Brit pop was created in the 90’s and helped to put the British art seen back onto the world stage (damn Goldsmith’s, it’s overated IMHO).
But how was it a musical genre? It was just a pompous, self-referential label for a rehash of The Beatles (Oasis), The Kinks (Blur), Bowie (Suede), Wire (Elastica) and others (and this is from someone who loved most of the Britpop bands!).
Brit Pop is refered to as not just a musical genre but also a social movement, remember “Cool Britania”? Asking how that is a musical genre is like asking me to explain how Impressionism was an art movement.
I have to say I disagree (it was a nice marketing label, not anything more substantial, to me) but in any case the OP was asking for examples of musical genres, hence my comments.
Wish some of those bands were as good today as they were then, though.
I think the problem here is that it’s too soon to tell. All the popular styles of the 90’s started in the 80’s, but they weren’t really either popular or styles at the time, just isolated incidents that could be pointed back to in hindsight.
The implication is that the “new” styles of this decade will be the ones that debuted in the 90’s, in isolated small incidents.
I’d second Slint and post-rock. I’d imagine that there had been indications of such a sound previously, but the creation of a band dedicated to that sound was completely a 90’s phenomenon.
"-Traditional orchestral music goes on life support. "
I’d actually disagree. The rising popularity of video games and movies (notably ones like Lord of the Rings) are becoming a bigger and bigger outlet for traditional orchestral, with more and more being made for them. It’s one of the few ways one can write music for a symphony and make money off it.
Those of you saying that Big Beat came from the 90’s need to listen to Meat Beat Manifesto’s Storm The Studio from '88 or '89. You will then change your mind and realize just about all of Big Beat came from that (incredibly good) album.
What was actually born in the 90s? As far as I can tell most everything from the 90s was hybridization of earlier forms, but what sets it apart from any other era is the scale. Just about everything got thrown together at one point: rap/metal, country/techno, ambient/noise, electronic/lounge, etc. So we may have run out of original formats, but cross-pollenation was the theme of all the “new sounds.”
Late 80’s. Ministry’s The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste came out in '89, and that is the closest you’ll probably get to what NIN was doing later on. Or if not Ministry you could point to Big Black. Maybe Foetus, but I’m not very familliar with their/his material, so I’m not sure how rock-y it is.
I find it apalling that no one has mentioned The Prodigy when discussing the birth of techno music. Please name a more influential / genre-starting album than Experience (October 20th, 1992).
How about the kind of music played by Beck? Or Cake? They’re pretty origional. Of course, since I haven’t heard of any other singer or band sounding like them, I don’t know if you could say that they created new genres or not.
