muess 008 quiz 4

Macklemore Ryan Lewis

(Ben Haggerty, b. 1983) (b. 1988) who were nominated for seven Grammy awards in 2014, winning Best New Artist, Best Rap Album (The Heist), Best Rap Song and Best Rap Performance ("Thrift Shop"). The fact that The Heist won the Best Rap Album Grammy caused heated controversy within the hip-hop community, in part because it beat out the debut album by Kendrick Lamar, who, like Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, had received seven nominations, but did not win in any category. In an interview with the hip-hop website thesource.com, Macklemore said, "I am a huge supporter of what Kendrick does. And because of that, I would love to win in a different category. We obviously had massive success on commercial radio ... but Kendrick has a better rap album."8 The band's follow-up album, 2016's The Unruly Mess I've Made, debuted at number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one on its R&B/hip-hop charts. However, sales dropped over the following weeks and overall the album has not done as well as their debut.

Frank Ocean

(Christopher Edwin Breaux, b. 1987), whose idiosyncratic style straddles hip-hop and contemporary R&B. Raised in New Orleans, Ocean began his career as a "ghostwriter" (anonymous composer) of songs for Beyoncé and Justin Bieber, and in 2010 joined the Los Angeles-based hip-hop collective Odd Future. His first two albums, Channel Orange (number two pop, number one R&B/hip-hop, 2012) and Blonde (number one pop and R&B/hip-hop, 2015), incorporate musical influences ranging from the Beatles to David Bowie and Andre 3000, and his contemplative, crooner-like vocal delivery, distinctive melodies, and exploration of issues such as spirituality and sensuality on tracks like "Voodoo" (2012), released on Ocean's Tumblr account, have all contributed to his iconoclastic image. (Back in Chapter 1 we mentioned the personal courage demonstrated by Ocean in "coming out" as the first publicly bisexual figure in the hip-hop world, a parallel to contemporaneous developments in professional sports.)

Nicki Minaj

(Onika Tanya Maraj, b. 1982), the Trinidadian-born, New York City-raised rap diva and fashion icon whose animated, word-play-filled performances incorporate a cast of colorful alter egos (including Roman Zolansky, whom she has referred to as her gay Cockney twin brother). Minaj's hit singles range from pop-rap songs like "Super Bass" (number two rap/number three pop, 2012), with its catchy refrain and sexy, pink-infused music video, to 2015's "Anaconda" (number one R&B/hip-hop and number two pop), which digitally sampled the fundamental theme of Sir Mix-A-Lot's 1992 hit single "Baby Got Back." Both Drake and Minaj have worked to maximize their earning potential beyond the music business, Drake as ambassador for the Toronto Raptors NBA franchise and Minaj with celebrity endorsements for Adidas and Pepsi and a custom-made Barbie doll.

k.d. Lang

(b. 1961 in Alberta, Canada) has always occupied a marginal position in the conservative world of country music. Raised in an isolated rural town on the high plains of Canada, lang listened to classical and rock music as a young girl, discovering country music somewhat later when she played a Patsy Cline-type character in a college play. She began her career in 1982 as a Cline imitator, going so far as to christen her band the Reclines. During the early 1980s she released two albums on the Edmonton-based independent label Bumstead Records, but it was only in 1987, when Sire Records (former label of Patti Smith and the Ramones) released her Angel with a Lariat, that lang came to the attention of a broader audience. (The album was played on college radio stations and progressive country stations.) Her subsequent albums—1988's Shadowland and 1989's Absolute Torch and Twang—moved toward a more traditional honky-tonk sound, producing lang's first appearances on the country Top 40 chart and a Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance. Even at that stage, however, lang never sat quite right with the Nashville establishment, which found her campy outfits (rhinestone suits and cat-eye glasses) and somewhat androgynous image off-putting. A scandal over lang's appearance in a commercial for the "Meat Stinks" campaign of the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals led stations in the cattle-producing areas of the Midwest to boycott her records and generated an impressive volume of hate mail. In 1992 lang officially announced her homosexuality, a move that rather than hurting her career, led to New York magazine christening her an "icon of lesbian chic." During the 1990s lang moved in the direction of adult contemporary pop music, becoming an "alternative" star in that category as well. Ingénue, a 1992 album that owed little to country music, sold over a million copies in the United States. A single from Ingénue, "Constant Craving," reached the pop Top 40 and won the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Although lang has not been able to repeat this commercial success, she has maintained a dedicated following, and in 2013 was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.

Adele Adkins

(born May 5, 1988, London, England) became a pop sensation in 2008 when circumstance placed her in the right place at the right time. On tour in the United States promoting her first album 19 (2008), Adele appeared on the long-running late-night sketch show Saturday Night Live on October 18, 2008, performing the singles "Chasing Pavements" and "Cold Shoulder." The episode also featured another guest: Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The episode drew record viewership, and "Chasing Pavements" rose to the top of the iTunes charts. In 2009, she collected two Grammy Awards—Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal for "Chasing Pavements."

Beyoncé Knowles

(born September 4, 1981, Houston, Texas) came to the attention of audiences at the turn of century as the leader of the girl group Destiny's Child. As a singer, songwriter, dancer, actress, and celebrity, Beyoncé has become a symbol of female empowerment, including personal, sexual, and financial independence. Her music is closely tied to her image as a "bootylicious," strong, African-American woman, and her videos and live performances enhance this image. In many ways, the polished image of Destiny's Child with Beyoncé at the helm was a parallel to that of the Supremes and Diana Ross in the 1960s (see Chapter 9). When Beyoncé embarked on a solo career, she did so conscious of this parallel and has carefully crafted her image to recall the R&B divas of the past; she even starred in the film version of Dreamgirls (2006), a fictionalized account of the career of the Supremes, as the "Diana Ross" character. In 2003, she released her first solo album Dangerously in Love (number one pop, four times platinum) which spawned four top ten hits (including the infectious "Crazy in Love," featuring her future husband, Jay Z) and garnered five Grammy awards, including Best Contemporary R&B Record. Beyoncé's music hovers between R&B, hip-hop, dance and pop, and often includes memorable rhythmic hooks. Her 2008 smash hit "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" (number one, pop; number one, R&B/hip-hop) from her third solo album I Am ... Sasha Fierce (a reference to her performing alter-ego) perfectly exemplifies Beyoncé's female-empowered, dance-heavy, pop-friendly music. "Single Ladies" started a world-wide dance craze, and the video has over 500 million hits to date on YouTube.

Reggae

A popular form of Jamaican dance music that weds aspects of R&B and native musical styles. Bob Marley was the most famous proponent of the style.

Radiohead

A style of radio programming based on a set list of selections that are played repeatedly over the course of the broadcast day. It became the prevalent mode of radio programming from the late 1950s to the 1960s.

Creed

As bands became less economically reliant on the mass media and record stores, they faced less pressure to respect the categories that these businesses were based on. In fact, many artists have taken the opportunity offered by the diminishing practical significance of genre boundaries to develop styles that bring together entire audiences that previously would have been separated by the demands of the marketplace. Christian (or Christian-influenced) rock—at one time viewed as an entirely separate genre from mainstream rock—has come to exert a larger influence on the mainstream in the form of bands such as Creed. Historically, Christian rock had been directed primarily toward followers of American evangelical Protestantism. For this reason, Christian rock had often operated as the "rock" aspect of Christian music rather than the "Christian" aspect of rock music, a distinction that served to define the music in two ways.

Drake

Aubrey Drake Graham, b. 1986), a Canadian artist whose work combines egocentric, abrasive rapping and R&B influenced singing and features collaborations with British, African, and Caribbean artists, recorded a series of best-selling albums and in 2016 charted the first number one single ("One Dance") to surpass one billion streams on Spotify's playlist

Synth-pop

Popular music featuring primarily electronic synthesizers as accompaniment rather than traditional instrumentation. The group Eurythmics led this movement in the mid-1980s with songs like "Sweet Dreams."

Lionel Richie

Richie (b. 1949), a former member of a vocal R&B group called the Commodores, is an African American singer and songwriter whose career overarches conventional genre boundaries. Although his own big hits of the 1980s were soul-tinged variants of adult contemporary music, Richie also placed two singles in the country Top 40 during the 1980s and was the composer of "Sail On," a song covered by a number of prominent country artists. (In the mid-1980s Richie became one of the few black musicians admitted to the Country Music Association during a period when country and black popular music had less overlap then ever before.) "Lady" is a sentimental song that has much in common with popular songs of the nineteenth century, such as Stephen Foster's "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" (see Chapter 2). The song has a verse-chorus structure and uses the image of a knight in shining armor, derived from the Crusades of the Middle Ages, to profess the singer's deep and undying love. Lionel Richie, who produced the recording, followed a strategy of keeping it simple, avoiding "gimmicks," and foregrounding Rogers's sincere delivery of the lyrics.

Ska

The generic title for Jamaican music recorded between 1961 and 1967, ska emerged from Jamaican R&B, which itself was largely based on American R&B. It emphasized a heavily syncopated "jump" beat. Groups like the Ska-Lites helped popularize the style.

R.E.M

The most influential indie rock bands of the 1980s were R.E.M. (formed in 1980 in Athens, Georgia) and New York's Sonic Youth (formed in 1981). While both bands were influenced by the 1970s New York punk scene, they developed this musical impetus in different directions. R.E.M.'s reinterpretation of the punk aesthetic incorporated aspects of folk rock—particularly a ringing acoustic guitar sound reminiscent of the 1960s group the Byrds—and a propensity for catchy melodic hooks. Touring almost constantly and releasing a series of critically acclaimed and increasingly profitable albums on the independent label IRS, R.E.M. gradually grew from its roots as a regional cult phenomenon to command a large national audience. This process culminated in the release of Document, the band's first Top 10 album, in 1987. In 1988 R.E.M. signed a $10 million, five-album agreement with Warner Brothers, becoming one of the first underground bands of the 1980s to receive such a deal. By 1991, when alternative rock seemed to many observers to have suddenly erupted onto the pop music scene, R.E.M. had already been working steadily for over ten years to develop its idiosyncratic sound. That year the band released the album Out of Time, which shot to number one on the album chart, sold 4 million copies, generated two Top 10 singles, and won a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music LP. (The alternative category had been established only the year before, an indication of the music industry's awakening interest in underground rock music.) The album's success elevated the band to major rock stars, with successful followup albums and tours appearing through much of the 1990s. However, the heavy touring took its toll on the group's members, most notably drummer Bill Berry, who collapsed on stage from a brain aneurysm in 1995 and subsequently retired from the band. The group's later efforts were less successful, and they eventually disbanded in 2011.

Public Enemy. Chuck D, Flavor Flav, Terminator X, Professor Griff

The tradition of socially engaged rap that chronicled the declining fortunes of urban black communities received its strongest new impetus from the New York-based group Public Enemy. Founded in 1982, Public Enemy was organized around a core set of members who met as college students, drawn together by their interest in hip-hop culture and political activism. The standard hip-hop configuration of two MCs—Chuck D (Carlton Ridenhour, b. 1960) and Flavor Flav (William Drayton, b. 1959)—plus a DJ—Terminator X (Norman Lee Rogers, b. 1966)—was augmented by a "Minister of Information," Professor Griff (Richard Griffin, b. 1960), and the Security of the First World (S1W), a cohort of dancers who dressed in paramilitary uniforms, carried Uzi submachine guns, and performed martial arts-inspired choreography. The release of Public Enemy's second album in 1988—It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back—was a breakthrough event for rap music. The album fused the trenchant social and political analyses of Chuck D—delivered in a deep, authoritative voice—with the streetwise interjections of his sidekick Flavor Flav, who wore comical glasses and an oversized clock around his neck. Their complex verbal interplay was situated within a dense, multilayered sonic web created by the group's production team, the Bomb Squad (Hank Shocklee, Keith Shocklee, and Eric "Vietnam" Sadler). Tracks like "Countdown to Armageddon" (an apocalyptic opening instrumental track taped at a live concert in London), "Don't Believe the Hype" (a critique of white-dominated mass media), and "Party for Your Right to Fight" (a parody of the Beastie Boys' hit "[You Gotta] Fight for Your Right [to Party]" from the previous year) turned the technology of digital sampling to new artistic purposes and effectively insisted that rap music continue to engage with the real-life conditions of urban black communities

To Pimp a Butterfly

To Pimp a Butterfly, concept album written and performed by Kendrick Lamar; executive producers Anthony "Top Dawg" Tiffith and Dr. Dre; recorded 2015 "i" (single and album versions), written and performed by Kendrick Lamar; recorded 2015 The title of Kendrick Lamar's ambitious sophomore album, To Pimp a Butterfly (2015), is a play on the phrase Tu Pimp a Caterpillar (Tu.P.A.C.), an acronym for the 1990s rap artist Tupac Shakur (1971-1996). It is also the title of a poem that appears at the very end of the album. The poem presents the caterpillar as a creature whose "only job is to eat or consume everything around it." This is in contrast to the butterfly that "represents the talent, the thoughtfulness, and the beauty within the caterpillar/But having a harsh outlook on life the caterpillar sees the butterfly as weak and figures out a way to pimp it to his own benefits... ." In his struggle to grow beyond the limitations of his alienation, the caterpillar goes to work on his cocoon, which both traps him and provides a space for creative ideas to emerge, "new concepts" that he can take back to his home community, "this mad city." Finally free, the butterfly sheds light on situations that the caterpillar never considered, ending the internal struggle Although the butterfly and caterpillar are completely different, they are one and the same. Over the course of sixteen tracks, featuring a dizzying array of musical influences from soul music to rock to free jazz and contributions by artists such as Snoop Dogg, funkmaster George Clinton, the classic R&B group the Isley Brothers, and jazz musicians Robert Glasper and Kamasi Washington, Lamar explores this theme of struggle, transformation, and reconnection, mapping the creative, generative possibilities of black masculinity within a community framework. To Pimp a Butterfly traces an emotional arc from youthful braggadocio through self-doubt toward an optimistic vision of change based upon self-knowledge and respect for others.

Techno

Up-tempo, repetitive, electronic dance music that developed in various urban club scenes during the late 1980s and the early 1990s.

Kurt Cobain Krist Novoselic

While underground bands began to appear on the charts during the late 1980s, the commercial breakthrough for alternative rock—and the occasion of its enshrinement as a privileged category in the pop music marketplace—was achieved in 1992 by Nirvana, a band from the Pacific Northwest (see Box 14.2). Between 1992 and 1994, Nirvana—a trio centered on singer and guitarist Kurt Cobain (1967-1994; originally from Hoquiam, Washington) and bassist Krist Novoselic (b. 1965 in Compton, California)—released two multiplatinum albums that moved alternative rock's blend of hardcore punk and heavy metal out of the back corners of specialty record stores and into the commercial mainstream. The rise of so-called grunge rock—and the tragic demise of Kurt Cobain, who committed suicide in 1994 at the age of twenty-seven—provide some insight into the opportunities and pressures facing alternative rock musicians in the early 1990s. Cobain and Novoselic met in 1985 in the town of Aberdeen, an economically depressed logging town some hundred miles from Seattle. (Cobain's parents had divorced when he was eight years old, an event that by his own account troubled him deeply and left him shy and introspective.) Inspired by the records of underground rock and hardcore bands and the creativity of the Beatles, and frustrated with the limitations of small-town working-class life, the two formed Nirvana in 1987 and began playing gigs at local colleges and clubs. The following year they were signed by the independent label Sub Pop Records, formed in 1987 by the entrepreneurs Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman. (Sub Pop started out as a mimeographed fanzine for local bands before mutating into a record label.) Nirvana's debut album, Bleach (1989), cost slightly over six hundred dollars to record—less than the cost of thirty minutes of recording time at a major New York or Los Angeles recording studio—and sold thirty-five thousand copies, an impressive amount for a regional indie rock release. In 1991 the group signed with major label DGC

"Bodysnatchers"

Written by Colin Charles Greenwood, Jonathan Richard Guy Greenwood, Edward John O'Brien, Philip James Selway, and Thomas Edward Yorke; performed by Radiohead; released 2007 It could be argued that the eclecticism of Radiohead's business strategy—and their desire to resist corporate control—have been echoed in the sensibility of their music. The track "Bodysnatchers" (number eight rock, 2008) is in a sense a song about the music industry and also serves as an example of Radiohead's creative extension of the basic formula of alternative rock. Like other "alt rock" bands, Radiohead has drawn upon the nihilistic sensibility of hardcore punk rock and the thick, guitar-dominated textures of arena rock and heavy metal. (The band even upped the ante by using three, rather than the usual one or two, electric guitars!) At the same time, they have also brought into play a wide range of musical influences, from progressive rock and electronic dance music to orchestral music, flamenco, jazz, and the singer-songwriter tradition. Although In Rainbows has been described as Radiohead's "gentlest" album in musical terms—with tracks such as "House of Cards," "Nude," "All I Need," and "Jigsaw Falling into Place" featuring acoustic guitar and piano, falsetto singing, and moody electronic textures—"Bodysnatchers" evokes the trademark edginess and sonic power of Radiohead's earlier recordings. The track begins abruptly with a distorted, bone-crunching electric guitar riff, performed with the guitar's lowest string tuned down and left open as a more or less continuous drone. The upper part of the opening guitar riff outlines the song's melody, which is then picked up and developed by lead singer Thom Yorke. The song's lyric describes the alienation of a person incarcerated within his own body. Like an etherized yet conscious patient, the first-person subject of the song is confined within the limitations of his physical body, unable to connect directly to the world around him.

Hector Lavoe Rubén Blades

Willie Colón, fourteen years Palmieri's junior, grew up during the bugalú era and was less directly influenced by the Cuban típico style. His distinctive approach to salsa music added touches of West African, Panamanian, Colombian, and Brazilian music as well as Puerto Rican styles such as jibaro ("country") songs, which were accompanied with the cuatro (a small ten-stringed guitar); and the plena, an African-influenced narrative song genre with percussion accompaniment. Like Eddie Palmieri, Colón gave the trombone a lead role in the horn section of his band. His first album, El Malo (The Bad Dude), released by Fania in 1967, helped to create an image of Colón as a tough, streetwise guy—an impression reinforced by his band's restlessly energetic, gritty sound, an alternative to the more polite flute-and-violins texture of the then still-popular charanga (see the discussion of "El Watusi" in Chapter 9). The popularity of Colón's band was reinforced by a series of excellent lead singers, including Hector Lavoe(1946-1993), who became an icon of Nuyorican (New York Puerto Rican) immigrant identity during the 1970s, and Rubén Blades (b. 1948), the son of a middle-class family in Panama (with a Cuban father and a Colombian mother) who had attended Harvard Law School.Blades got his start in the music trade as a stock boy at Fania Records and soon rose to become one of the label's biggest stars. A gifted singer-songwriter, film actor, and political activist, Blades is best known for a series of story-songs that capture the feel of life in a neighborhood barrio populated with memorable characters. His composition "Pedro Navaja" ("Pedro the Knife"), included on the album Siembra (released by Fania Records in 1977), never appeared on the pop music charts in the United States, but it is the most popular song to emerge from the salsa movement of the 1970s, in large part because it drew upon the experience of millions of people living in urban neighborhoods throughout Latin America

Tidal

a high-definition online streaming service that started in Sweden. Tidal attracted positive attention as an artist-owned label (Jay Z's co-investors have included such A-list stars as Beyoncé, Kanye West, Alicia Keys, Madonna, Chris Martin, Nicki Minaj and Daft Punk), and generated some market leverage by offering the exclusive release for some best-selling albums. But as of May 2016 the service could only boast 4.2 million subscribers, and there were published reports that Jay Z had tried to sell it to Apple Music or other interests. The tension between the evolving revenue models of streaming sites and the demands of artists to be paid fairly for their work promises to remain a hot-button issue in coming years.

Pandora

a music streaming service that operates like an individualized radio station, offering playlists to listeners based on their own preferences. Using a model that the company calls the "Music Genome," several hundred stylistic "attributes" (and thousands of associated "traits") are assigned to each track; as listeners choose songs to play, their selections are matched with similar tracks that "match" the genomes of these favorites. However, Pandora's listeners cannot select individual tracks and hear them immediately; nor can favorite songs be repeatedly heard. By 2015 the service had over 79 million active listeners around the world, only around 5 percent of whom were paying for the premium, ad-free service. Pandora has relied on copyright clauses that allow it to stream music in more or less the same manner that traditional radio stations broadcast songs on the air. This approach has fueled battles between the company and music corporations over royalty rates, which are higher for downloading services.

George Clinton

a.k.a. Dr. Funkenstein). Clinton (b. 1940), an ex-R&B vocal group leader and songwriter, hung out with Detroit hippies, listened to the Stooges, and altered his style (as well as his consciousness) during the late 1960s. Enlisting some former members of James Brown's band (among them bassist William "Bootsy" Collins and saxophone player Maceo Parker), he developed a mixture of compelling polyrhythms, psychedelic guitar solos, jazz-influenced horn arrangements, and R&B vocal harmonies. Recording for the independent record company Casablanca (also a major player in the field of disco music), Parliament/Funkadelic placed five LPs in the Billboard Top 40 between 1976 and 1978, two of which went platinum.

Napster

an Internet-based software program that allowed computer users to share and swap files, specifically music, through a centralized file server.

YouTube

an online video website that was launched in 2005. The first big YouTube hit was a quirky video called "A Million Ways" (2005), featuring the Chicago-based rock band OK Go dancing on treadmill machines. The video itself cost the band only $4.99 to make, but it was ultimately downloaded 9 million times, transforming OK Go from locally popular musicians into international superstars. In 2006 Warner Music made a deal with YouTube to make its entire music video catalog available online, and soon thereafter Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. By the end of the 2000s, YouTube had become a major medium for the dissemination of popular music, as well as for "breaking" new pop stars. The best-known example of this phenomenon is Justin Bieber, the Canadian teen-pop star who was discovered at the age of fourteen by a music executive who saw a video that Bieber's mother had posted on YouTube. After a brief period of negotiation, Bieber was flown to Atlanta, where he met with the R&B singer Usher and signed a contract with Island Records. With a global fan base—the "Beliebers"—and over 40 million followers on Twitter (and gaining thousands every day), he was named the third most powerful celebrity in the world by Forbes in 2012. The singer and pop icon Lady Gaga also used YouTube to build her enormous international fan base. In 2010 Gaga's manager, Troy Carter, explained that her music videos were produced specifically for YouTube, confirming the website's authoritative command over territory formerly controlled by MTV.

Arcade Fire

came from the back of the field to win the 2011 Grammy award for Best Album of the Year over the pop music star Lady Gaga and the rapper Eminem, making them the first alternative rock band to achieve that recognition. The unexpected victory of their album, The Suburbs, seemed to some fans to signal the "arrival" of alternative rock at the center of popular music, a kind of culmination of the work of bands such as R.E.M. and Nirvana. (The fact that the band members themselves were not expecting to win the Grammy was revealed by the first words uttered when they came back onstage to accept the award: "What the hell?!?") Arcade Fire, based in Montreal, Canada, is a seven-piece band centered on the duo of Win Butler, a Texas-raised guitarist and singer, and Régine Chassagne, a Canadian vocalist and keyboardist of Haitian descent. Their third album, The Suburbs (number one, 2011), evokes the experiences of kids born and raised in the vast stretches of recession-impoverished suburban sprawl that surround most North American cities (including Houston, Texas, where Win Butler grew up). This theme is captured evocatively by the song "Sprawl II (Mountains beyond Mountains)," a meditation on suburban emptiness ("dead shopping malls rise like mountains ... and there's no end in sight") carried along on an ironically sprightly, synth-pop rhythm.

Nickelback

have continued to embrace a traditional approach to the music and business of rock. Formed in 1995 in Vancouver, Canada, Nickelback came to prominence in the United States in 2000 with their album, The State. Mixing a mid-tempo post-grunge sound with country influences, particularly in their vocals and use of acoustic guitars, Nickelback was well suited to appeal to America. In 2005, they released their fifth album The Right Reasons, which sold over 7 million copies. While this would have been an extraordinary accomplishment in any era, in the era of Internet downloading, it was nothing short of miraculous. The band continued to enjoy success selling albums, and were rated one of the top album acts of the 2000s by Billboard, with over 50 million sold. The success of Nickelback demonstrates that the traditional approach to rock music (albums promoted and sold to rock audiences via radio and television) is far from dead. While this approach is clearly still viable for some artists, it is available to fewer of them every year.

Linkin Park

have worked within a framework that is fundamentally rock-based, but which integrates other influences, such as hip-hop. Blending traditional rock instrumentation with turntables and other electronic instruments, Linkin Park exemplifies the decreasing significance of genre boundaries in the new millennium. Rather than taking two clear-cut genres and melding them (as might be suggested by a term like "rap-rock"), their music is more a reflection of individuals with diverse musical influences bringing them together into a whole that collectively represents their wide-ranging musical sensibilities. While musicians have always done this to some degree, in the past it required crossing not only musical and cultural boundaries but also the infrastructural boundaries of the music industry itself.

Spotify

which launched in Europe in 2008 and in the United States in 2011. Spotify allows listeners to pick and choose the tracks they want to listen to, and, like Pandora, offers both a free and a paid "premium" service. As of mid-2016 Spotify offers access to over 30 million tracks of music and claims upwards of 100 million active subscribers worldwide (though, as with Pandora, only a small percentage of those are paying subscribers). It is worth noting that prominent artists such as Radiohead, Coldplay, Adele, and Taylor Swift have at various times withheld their music from Spotify, citing concerns over inadequate royalty payments. Unlike download services like iTunes, which pay a fixed royalty per song or album, Spotify pays artists based on what they call "market share" (the number of streams of a given artist's songs as a proportion of total songs streamed on the service).

"Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" (Fred Rose) recorded by Willie Nelson, 1975

"Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain," with its simple ABAB song form and sparse accompaniment, offers a fine introduction to Willie Nelson's distinctive vocal style. He has an atypically high voice for country music, and he employs its very individual timbre to achieve expressive effects. Nelson can sing very softly; notice the tender feeling conveyed when he suddenly retreats to a near-whisper on the words "never meet again," and later as he concludes the final phrase of the song. He also allows himself a subtle vibrato that may be heard when he sings the words "blue" and "rain." Nelson's unconventional voice might have delayed his making a strong impact as a singer early in his career, but once he began to gain popularity as a vocalist, that very unconventionality made him instantly recognizable to a larger and larger audience. That audience in turn rewarded him increasingly for both his songwriting and his singing.

Annie Lennox, Dave Stewart

"Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)," a number one single from the early 1980s, exemplifies one of the directions dance music took in the postdisco era. With its heavy reliance on electronically synthesized sounds, sequenced loops, and what has been described as a cool or austere emotional tone, "Sweet Dreams" points the way toward later technology-centered music styles such as techno. Like some of the most successful techno groups of the 1990s (see Chapter 14), Eurythmics consisted of a core of only two musicians—the singer Annie Lennox (b. 1954 in Scotland) and keyboardist and technical whiz Dave Stewart (b. 1952 in England).

"When Doves Cry"

"When Doves Cry"—a last-minute addition to the Purple Rain soundtrack—is an unusual pop recording in a number of regards. To begin with, the album track runs almost six minutes, a length that, although not without precedent, was much longer than the typical Top 40 hit of the 1980s. (A shortened version was released as a single.) Pop music recordings of the 1980s—such as Madonna's "Like a Virgin"—were typically the product of collaboration among the singer, songwriter(s), producer, studio engineers, session musicians, and others. "When Doves Cry," in contrast, is essentially the work of a single person: Prince wrote the song, produced the recording, sang all of the vocal parts, and played all of the instruments, including electric guitar, keyboard synthesizers, and the Linn LM-1 digital drum machine. The lyric of "When Doves Cry," with its striking imagery and psychoanalytical implications, certainly does not conform to the usual formulas of romantic pop songs. In addition, this recording crosses over the boundaries of established pop genres, fusing a funk rhythm with the lead guitar sound of heavy metal, the digitally synthesized and sampled textures of postdisco dance music, and the aesthetic focus and control of progressive rock and the singer-songwriter tradition. In this sense it is a good example both of Prince's desire to avoid being typecast as a traditional R&B artist and of the creative eclecticism that led music critics to come up with labels such as "dance rock," "funk rock," or "new wave funk" to describe his music.

Bob Marley

(1945-1981), leader of the Wailers, quickly surpassed him in popularity. A national hero in his native Jamaica, Marley was reggae's most effective international ambassador. His songs of determination, rebellion, and faith, rooted in the Rastafarian belief system, found a worldwide audience that reached from America to Japan and from Europe to Africa. The son of a British naval officer who deserted his family when Bob was six years old, Marley migrated to Kingston from the rural parish of St. Ann at the age of fourteen. His early career reflects the economic precariousness of the music industry in a Third World country. After making a few singles for the Chinese-Jamaican producer Leslie Kong, Marley formed the Wailers in 1963 and signed with Coxsone Dodd's studios. Following a long period with little financial success (including a year in which Marley was forced to take up factory work in Wilmington, Delaware), the Wailers signed with the producer Lee Perry, who added the masterful bassist-and-drummer "riddim pair" of Aston and Carlton Barrett to the group.

Michael Jackson

(1958-2009) worked with the veteran producer Quincy Jones to create an album that achieved boundary-crossing popularity to an unprecedented degree. At a time when the pop music audience seemed to be fragmenting to a greater extent than ever before, Thriller demonstrated a kind of across-the-board appeal that established new and still unduplicated heights of commercial success. In a sense, Jackson here revived the goal that had animated his old boss at Motown, Berry Gordy Jr. (see Chapter 9): to create an African American-based pop music that was aimed squarely at the mainstream center of the market. That Jackson met his goal in such a mind-boggling fashion proved conclusively that there indeed still was a mainstream in the pop music market of the early 1980s, and that Jackson had positioned himself unquestionable To accomplish this task, Jackson had to be more than just "the sound of young America" (to quote Motown's memorable phrase from the 1960s). It is of course true that teenagers, preteenagers, and young adults made up a substantial portion of the 1980s market. But members of the baby boom generation, along with the many men and women who came to maturity during the 1970s, were also still major consumers of pop music.

Jello Biafra

(Eric Boucher, b. 1958 in Boulder, Colorado)—brim with merciless sarcasm. The song is directed at the spoiled children of suburban yuppies, who Biafra suggests ought to be sent to forced labor camps in Cambodia—then in the grip of Pol Pot's genocidal regime—to gain some perspective on the magnitude of their own problems. The recording opens with a nightmarish display of guitar pyrotechnics, a series of Hendrix-inspired whoops, slides, scratches, and feedback that are evocative of a war zone. The band—guitar, electric bass, and drums—gradually builds to an extremely fast tempo (around 208 beats per minute). Over this chaotic din, Jello Biafra's quavering voice sneers out the caustic lyrics. The Dead Kennedys' variant of hardcore was lent focus by the band's political stance, which opposed American imperialism overseas, the destruction of human rights and the environment, and what the band saw as a hypocritical and soulless suburban lifestyle. Jello Biafra composed songs with titles like "California über Alles," "Kill the Poor" (a Jonathan Swift-like suggestion for the practical application of neutron bombs), and "Chemical Warfare." As the hardcore scene began to attract right-wing racial supremacists—a problem that the genre shared with 1970s punk rock—Biafra penned a song entitled "Nazi Punks F— Off" (1981) in an attempt to distance the progressive hardcore skinheads from their fascist counterparts. Although the Dead Kennedys did not appear on the American pop music charts during the 1980s, the album Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables was eventually certified as a Gold Album in England, a testimony to the enduring loyalty of hardcore punk's fan base. The original band broke up in 1986, following a difficult trial for obscenity inspired by their inclusion of graphic artwork in their 1985 album, Frankenchrist.

Jam Master Jay

(Jason Mizell, 1965-2002)—was perhaps the most influential act in the history of rap music. Simmons, McDaniels, and Mizell were college-educated black men, raised in a middle-class neighborhood in the borough of Queens. Working with Russell Simmons (Run's older brother) and producer Rick Rubin, they established a hard-edged, rock-influenced style that was to profoundly influence the sound and sensibility of later rap music. Their raps were literate and rhythmically skilled, with Run and DMC weaving their phrases together and sometimes even completing the last few words of one another's lines. The "beats" produced by Rubin and Jam Master Jay were stark and powerful, mixing digitized loops of hard rock drumming with searing guitar sounds from heavy metal. Run DMC was the first rap group to headline a national tour and the first to appear on MTV. They popularized rap among the young, predominantly white audience for rock music, gave the genre a more rebellious image, and introduced a unique sartorial style—hats, gold chains, and untied Adidas sports shoes with fat laces—to millions of young Americans. The now familiar connection between rap music and athletic wear was established in 1986 when the Adidas corporation and Run DMC signed a $1.5 million promotional deal.

Kendrick Lamar

(Kendrick Lamar Duckworth, b. 1987). Raised in Compton, California, crucible of the groundbreaking west coast gangsta rap group N.W.A. and its alumni Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and Eazy-E, Lamar has reaffirmed both the artistic potential of the genre and its community-oriented, consciousness-raising heritage, reaching back to the groundbreaking work of Public Enemy. Charting his path between "realness" and commercialism—between duty to home, family, and the 'hood and the temptations of fame, fast fortune, and the road—Lamar has created concept albums that are cinematic in scope, drawing in a vast range of musical references, and dealing with topics seldom if ever addressed within the tough-guy framework of rap music, including depression, the fear of failure, and what he has called "survivor's guilt." Having started his musical career as a teenager under the stage name K Dot, Lamar gathered attention with a series of mixtapes distributed on the Internet and an independent studio-produced album, Section.80 (2011). His first major label album, good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012), chronicles, in a nonlinear narrative form, the experiences of the teenaged Lamar growing up in Compton amidst the harsh realities of gang-on-gang violence, endemic drug use, and sometimes brutal law enforcement. Labeled as "a short film by Kendrick Lamar," good kid, m.A.A.d city contrasts smooth, atmospheric beats and textures with rough, violent scenarios, creating an overall low-key mood quite different from most contemporaneous rap recordings. In his raps Lamar embodies a series of characters, charting his own personal evolution from a brash, skirt-chasing teen to a more subdued and seasoned young man, struggling to grow beyond, yet stay connected to, the community in which he was raised. The album was widely appreciated within the hip-hop community and praised by critics, scored three Top 40 singles, and debuted at nuving started his musical career as a teenager under the stage name K Dot, Lamar gathered attention with a series of mixtapes distributed on the Internet and an independent studio-produced album, Section.80 (2011). His first major label album, good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012), chronicles, in a nonlinear narrative form, the experiences of the teenaged Lamar growing up in Compton amidst the harsh realities of gang-on-gang violence, endemic drug use, and sometimes brutal law enforcement. Labeled as "a short film by Kendrick Lamar," good kid, m.A.A.d city contrasts smooth, atmospheric beats and textures with rough, violent scenarios, creating an overall low-key mood quite different from most contemporaneous rap recordings. In his raps Lamar embodies a series of characters, charting his own personal evolution from a brash, skirt-chasing teen to a more subdued and seasoned young man, struggling to grow beyond, yet stay connected to, the community in which he was raised. The album was widely appreciated within the hip-hop community and praised by critics, scored three Top 40 singles, and debuted at number two on the Billboard album chart, signaling the arrival of a significant new voice in popular music.mber two on the Billboard album chart, signaling the arrival of a significant new voice in popular music.

Vanilla Ice

(Robert Van Winkle, b. 1968 in Florida). Ice's first album, To the Extreme (1990), monopolized the number one position on the Billboard 200 pop album chart for sixteen weeks in early 1991, selling seven million copies in the United States. In hip-hop culture, a performer's credibility is correlated by fans not only with musical and verbal skill but also with the degree to which the artist in question possesses "street knowledge," that is, firsthand experience of the urban culture that spawned rap music. When it was discovered that Van Winkle, raised in reasonably comfortable circumstances in a middle-class neighborhood, had essentially invented a gangster persona for himself—a form of misrepresentation known in hip-hop parlance as "perpetrating"—many fans turned their backs on him. It is undeniable that race was also a factor in the rejection of Vanilla Ice, for he was widely regarded as being merely the latest in a long line of untalented white artists seeking to make a living off the fruits of black creativity. Yet some white rappers and producers—for example, the Beastie Boys—have managed to gain acceptance as legitimate hip-hop artists, largely by virtue of their ability to forge a distinctive style within the parameters of an African American tradition.

Sly Stone

(Sylvester Stewart) was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1944 and moved to San Francisco with his family in the 1950s. He began his musical career at the age of four as a gospel singer; went on to study trumpet, music theory, and composition in college; and later worked as a disc jockey at both R&B and rock-oriented radio stations in the San Francisco Bay Area. Sly formed his first band (the Stoners) in 1966 and gradually developed a style that reflected his own diverse musical experience: a blend of jazz, soul music, San Francisco psychedelia, and the socially engaged lyrics of folk rock. The Family Stone's national popularity was boosted by their fiery performance at the Woodstock Festival in 1969, which appeared in the film and soundtrack album

Ice-T

(Tracy Marrow, b. 1958), who in 1987 recorded the theme song for Colors, Dennis Hopper's violent film about gang-police warfare in South Central Los Angeles. Both the film and Ice-T's raps reflected ongoing changes in Southern California's urban communities, including a decline in industrial production, rising rates of joblessness, the continuing effects of crack cocaine, and a concomitant growth of drug-related gang violence.

Ralph Stanley,

(b. 1927 in Virginia, died 2016); he and his brother Carter (1925-1966) performed as the Stanley Brothers beginning in 1946 and produced a body of outstanding bluegrass recordings. After his brother's death, Ralph Stanley continued his own career as the leader of the Clinch Mountain Boys, another tradition-based ensemble. But Stanley can hold his own simply as a solo vocalist, and his unaccompanied performance of the eerie traditional lament "O Death" on the O Brother soundtrack is remarkably powerful.

Patti Smith

(b. 1946), a New York-based poet, journalist, and singer who had been experimenting with combining the spoken word and rock accompaniment. In 1975 Smith began a stint at CBGBs, establishing a beachhead for punk and new wave bands, and signed a contract with Arista, a new label headed by Clive Davis, the former head of Columbia Records. Her critically acclaimed album Horses reached number forty-seven on the Billboard charts in 1976. (Smith has enjoyed a longer career than many of her punk cohorts; most recently, she has distinguished herself as an author with two award-winning memoirs of her life and career, Just Kids (2010) and M Train (2015).) Other influential groups who played at CBGBs during the mid-1970s included Television (whose lengthy instrumental improvisations were inspired by the Velvet Underground and avant-garde jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler), Blondie, and the Voidoids (whose songs featured the alienated lyrics and howling voice of lead singer Richard Hell, one of the original members of Television).

Jimmy Cliff

(b. 1948). Like Ivan, the outlaw character he portrayed in the film, Cliff was only a teenager when he left the rural Jamaican town of St. James for the city of Kingston. Cliff arrived in Kingston in 1962 and made his first record within a year. Working with the producer Leslie Kong, he recorded a series of Jamaican Top 10 hits during the mid-1960s. While performing at the 1964 World's Fair in New York City, Cliff met Chris Blackwell of the English independent label Island Records, who convinced him to move to London. After working as a backup singer and scoring a few hits on the European charts, he returned to Jamaica in 1969 and recorded the song "Many Rivers to Cross," which inspired the director Perry Henzel to offer him the lead role in The Harder They Come. Although the film did not reach the mass audience commanded by many Hollywood movies, it did create a devoted audience for reggae music in the United States, particularly among young, college-educated adults who were attracted by the rebellious spirit of the music and its associations with Rastafarianism and ganja smoking. (The film played for seven years straight at a movie theater in Boston, Massachusetts, sustained mainly by the enthusiasm of that city's large student population.) Jimmy Cliff's 1972 recording of "The Harder They Come" exemplifies the reggae style of the early 1970s: a moderate tempo, strong guitar chords on the second and fourth beats of each measure, R&B-influenced singing, and a gritty lyric about the individual's struggle against oppression.

Bruce Springsteen

(b. 1949) forged a progressively more successful career in pop music while continuing to cast both his music and his personal image in the light of the rebellious rock 'n' rollers of the 1950s and the socially conscious folk rockers of the 1960s. Springsteen's songs reflected his working-class origins and sympathies, relating the stories of still young but aging men and women with dead-end jobs (or no jobs at all) who are looking for both romance and excitement in the face of repeated disappointments while seeking meaningful outlets for their seething energies and hopes in an America that seems to have no pieces of the American dream left to offer them. Some of the song titles from his first few albums are indicative: "Born to Run," "Darkness on the Edge of Town," "Hungry Heart," "Racing in the Street," "Wreck on the Highway," and so on. Springsteen performed with his E Street Band, and their music was characterized by a strong, roots-rock sound that emphasized his connections to 1950s and 1960s music. The band even included a saxophone—virtually an anachronism in the pop music of this period—to mark the link with the rhythm & blues and rock 'n' roll of earlier eras. (In this connection, it is worth noting that one of the songs on Born in the U.S.A., "Cover Me," is based on a twelve-bar blues progression. Twelve-bar blues form was also all but an anachronism in the mainstream pop music of the 1980s, but it was part of Springsteen's musical heritage and style, and his continuing employment of this form represented another obvious homage to the roots of rock.) Still, the emphasis in Springsteen's music was predominantly on the traditional rock ensemble of guitars, bass, and drums, with keyboard instruments occasionally used prominently.

Peter Gabriel

(b. 1950 in England) first achieved celebrity as a member of the art rock group Genesis. After leaving Genesis in 1976, Gabriel released four solo albums, all of them titled Peter Gabriel. Partly in an effort to clear up the consumer confusion that followed in the wake of this unusual strategy, he gave his next album a distinctive, if brief, title: So. So was an interesting and accessible amalgam of various musical styles that reflected Gabriel's knowledge of new digital technologies; his budding interest in world music (see Chapter 14); and his indebtedness to black music, particularly R&B and the soul music of the 1960s. The album peaked at number two on the Top LPs chart, sold 4 million copies, and produced Gabriel's bestselling single "Sledgehammer" (number one pop, number sixty-one R&B, 1986).

Eddie Van Halen

(b. 1955). From this perspective, the key-board synthesizer (like disco music) is viewed as a somewhat questionable, perhaps even effeminate, instrument. As Philip Bashe, an expert on heavy metal music, has put it, the fact that Eddie Van Halen played the bombastic opening theme of "Jump" on a synthesizer rather than a guitar was "a brave test of the Van Halen audience's loyalty" (Bashe 1985, 137). The success of the single was boosted by its corresponding music video, which was shot in home-movie style and featured the athletic prowess and oddball sense of humor of David Lee Roth—at that time Van Halen's lead singer.

Queen Latifah

(b. 1970) was not the first nationally popular female hip-hop artist—that honor belongs to the all-female rap crew Salt-N-Pepa, who scored a string of hits in the late 1980s and reached the peak of their commercial success with the release of the album Very Necessary (number four pop, 1994). There can be no doubt, however, that Queen Latifah is the most important woman in the history of hip-hop, in terms of both her commercial success and her effectiveness in establishing a feminist beachhead on the male-dominated field of rap music. Latifah provided an alternative to the misogynist braggadocio of gangsta rappers like Snoop Doggy Dogg, while her strong R&B-influenced voice and assertive persona evoked earlier rhythm & blues and soul artists such as Big Mama Thornton and Tina Turner. Born in inner-city Newark, New Jersey, Dana Elaine Owens received the nickname Latifah—an Arabic word signifying "gentle" or "pleasant"—from a cousin at the age of eight. She began rapping in high school, and in college participated in Afrika Bambaataa's Native Tongues collective, a group dedicated to raising the political consciousness of hip-hop. Her debut album on Tommy Boy Records, All Hail the Queen (1989), reached number six on the R&B album chart and spawned the hit single "Ladies First" (number five rap, 1990), a direct challenge to the putative supremacy of male rappers.

Alison Krauss,

(b. 1971 in Illinois), who also sings traditional material on the soundtrack, but whose career before she reached the age of thirty had already ranged much further from strict traditionalism than Ralph Stanley ever desired to go. A fiddling champion and bluegrass fan by the time she was twelve, Alison Krauss quickly went on to establish her credentials as a bandleader, vocalist, and producer, as well as a valuable collaborator on numerous recordings by other artists; at the time of this writing, she has won a total of twenty-seven Grammy Awards. (We might call particular attention to Krauss's collaboration with Robert Plant, the lead singer of Led Zeppelin; this seemingly unlikely pairing resulted in the critically acclaimed, commercially successful, and Grammy Award-winning album Raising Sand, released in 2007.)

Marshall "Eminem" Mathers

(b. 1972 in Missouri). Raised by a single mother, Mathers spent much of his youth in a lower-middle class, predominantly African American neighborhood in Detroit. Initially inspired by an Ice-T track from the 1984 movie Breakin', he honed his rapping skills at open-mic contexts at clubs on West Seven Mile Road, the epicenter of Detroit's local hip-hop scene. Coming to prominence in 1999 with The Slim Shady LP, an expanded major-label re-release of an earlier independent album, Eminem was the first white rapper to enjoy substantial mainstream success while also being accepted by the hip-hop community. While initially this was largely due to the credibility he gained by being produced by Dr. Dre (of N.W.A.), it quickly became clear that Eminem was a skilled and dedicated hip-hop artist in his own right. Particularly impressive were Eminem's extraordinary rhythmic sensibility and ability to use the sound of his words as musical elements. He was also adept at the use of compound rhymes, a skill he attributed to the influence of underground New York emcees such as Lord Finesse and Big L. In his lyrics, Eminem explored his own identity and experiences in a way that connected with multiple demographics simultaneously. Rather than renouncing his whiteness, he embraced it as a symbol of working-class midwestern anxiety. The reality of that equation for a huge segment of American society is something that had rarely, if ever, been addressed in hip-hop music.

Gretchen Wilson

(b. 1973 in Illinois). With the huge success of both that song and Wilson's subsequent efforts, including the number one album All Jacked Up in 2005, there was also no doubting the marketability of that cultural identity. Wilson presents the most complete contrast imaginable to Taylor Swift. Like many a successful country star, Wilson emerged in her thirties with a fully formed artistic profile, which she has maintained consistently. The subject matter of her songs embraces many standard country subjects, demonstrated by tracks on her 2007 album One of the Boys: hard drinking ("There's a Place in the Whiskey"), hard loving ("Come to Bed"), hard losing ("Pain Killer"), and—to be sure—country pride ("There Goes the Neighborhood" and "Good Ole Boy"); her next album (2010), released on the Redneck Records label, was aggressively titled I Got Your Country Right Here. Musically, although fiddle and steel guitar players are listed in her album credits, these instruments are usually buried in the mix in favor of a strong, rock-oriented sound. (The featured fiddle parts in the choruses of "Redneck Woman" represent an obvious exception to this general observation.) The style of Wilson's music establishes a certain kinship with that of Toby Keith, while her deliberate "tough woman" image does have something of a precedent in the rockabilly output of Wanda Jackson (see Chapter 8). Whether Wilson's image corresponds directly to her personal lifestyle and ideals or whether it is more of a savvy construct targeted at a very specific audience demographic is the sort of question that typically eludes any definitive answer.

Lauryn Hill

(b. 1975 in South Orange, New Jersey) is a hip-hop artist whose work is a self-conscious alternative to the violence and sexism of rap stars such as Dr. Dre, the Notorious B.I.G., and 2Pac Shakur. Her commitment to female empowerment builds upon the groundbreaking example of Queen Latifah, but Hill raps and sings in her own distinctive voice. She started her recording career with the Fugees, a New Jersey-based hip-hop trio that scored a number one hit in 1996 with their second album, The Score. Hill's debut solo album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998), extended the Fugees' successful blend of rap, reggae, and R&B. The album shot to number one on the charts, selling 7 million copies in a little over a year and spawning the number one hit "Doo Wop (That Thing)." However, like other artists who enjoyed great success, Hill struggled with her fame and the problems she encountered with the music business. She has recorded and performed only sporadically since.

Kanye West

(b. 1977) moved from Chicago to Brooklyn in 2000 to begin his career as a producer for Jay Z's Roc-A-Fella Records. In that capacity, he developed a signature sound based largely on sampling soul hits of the 1960s and 1970s, an approach that had fallen out of favor in the mid-1990s. In that sense, West's style was itself an indicator of hip-hop's longevity; it was widely viewed as having a "retro" element in both its sound and its style. West produced many of the biggest hits of the early 2000s, including Jay Z's "Takeover," and "Izzo," Alicia Keys's "You Don't Know My Name," Talib Kweli's "Get By," Beyoncé's "'03 Bonnie & Clyde," and Ludacris's "Stand Up." In 2004, he emerged as an artist in his own right, releasing his acclaimed first solo album College Dropout. Although many at the time questioned his skills as an MC, he was eventually embraced both for the quality of his beats, which was expected, and the highly introspective nature of his lyrics, which was not. "We all self-conscious, I'm just the first to admit it," he rhymed on the song "All Fall Down," in a startling departure from typical rap braggadocio. .

Taylor Swift

(b. 1989 , we confront a career that seems to contradict every tendency under discussion: a "teen idol" and singer-songwriter pop phenomenon who self-identified as a country artist! But Swift is an exceptional case by any standard. She was still a teenager when her second album, Fearless (2008), became the longest-running number one album of the 2000s up to that time, spending eleven weeks at the top spot in 2008-2009 and spawning eleven Hot 100 hit singles. (The remaining two tracks on the album just missed charting on the Hot 100 singles chart.) As of this writing, Fearless has sold well over 7 million copies. The "catch" is this: listening to Fearless, one might well be excused for asking in what respects it is a "country" album. Neither the lyrics nor the music reflect standard country traditions. The songs center around teenage romance and heartbreak, as is only appropriate, with titles like "Fifteen," "Love Story," "You're Not Sorry," and "The Way I Loved You." (The obvious exception, "Changes," deals in a very general way with triumphing over struggle.) Obvious country markers are inaudible in the music, which has a mainstream pop sheen, and Swift does not project a particularly noticeable Southern (or any regional) accent—in fact, she was born far from the American South, in Reading, Pennsylvania! Nevertheless, Fearless won a Grammy Award for Best Album—as well as Best Country Album—in 2008. Taylor Swift's eponymous first album from 2006, also a

Tina Turner

(born Annie Mae Bullock in 1939 in Tennessee) recorded "What's Love Got to Do with It" she had been in the popular music limelight for over twenty years. Her recording debut took place in 1960 as a member of the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. Tina's husband, Ike Turner, had begun his recording career much earlier, as a performer on Jackie Brenston's "Rocket 88" (1951), sometimes credited as the first rock 'n' roll record. Ike and Tina scored big crossover hits during the 1960s with "A Fool in Love" (number two R&B, number twenty-seven pop, 1960), "It's Gonna Work Out Fine" (number two R&B, number fourteen pop, 1961), and a gold record version of Creedence Clearwater Revival's 1969 hit "Proud Mary" (number four pop, number five R&B, 1971).

Willie Nelson

(born in Texas in 1933). Nelson had already developed a successful career as a professional songwriter when he left Nashville to return to Texas in 1971. (His song "Crazy" had been a Top 10 country and pop hit for Patsy Cline in 1961.) He settled in Austin, a university town and home to one of the most energetic and eclectic live music scenes in the country. At "cosmic cowboy" venues such as the Armadillo World Headquarters, and on Austin radio station KOKE-FM, a movement that fused country music and countercultural sensibilities was already well underway. Nelson fit right in to the Austin scene, letting his hair and beard grow long and donning a headband, an earring, jogging shoes, and blue jeans (one of the few markers of cultural identity shared by rednecks, cowboys, and hippies!). Singing in an unpolished, almost conversational voice—an approach that had frustrated his attempts to gain success as a recording artist in Nashville—Willie Nelson bridged the gap between rock and country without losing touch with his honky-tonk roots. In the summer of 1971 he organized the first of a series of outdoor festivals that included older country musicians (e.g., Roy Acuff and Earl Scruggs) as well as younger musicians who were experimenting with a blend of country and rock music. These "picnics," closer in ethos to Woodstock than to the Grand Ole Opry, brought thousands of rock fans into the fold of country music and prepared the way for Nelson's ascendance as the preeminent male country music star of the 1980s.

Waylon Jennings

1937-2002). Jennings began his career as a musician and disc jockey and in 1958 joined Buddy Holly's rock 'n' roll group the Crickets. In the early 1960s he set up shop at a nightclub in Phoenix, Arizona, where the clientele included businessmen, college students, and cowboys, a diverse audience that encouraged him to develop a broad repertoire. In 1965 he was signed by RCA Victor and relocated to Nashville. Although RCA producer Chet Atkins—who had remolded Elvis into a pop star in 1956—attempted to push him in the direction of the countrypolitan sound popular at the time, Jennings resisted these efforts, eventually winning substantial leeway in his choice of material. (His early 1970s LPs included Beatles songs such as "Norwegian Wood" and "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away.") While he chose to remain close to the music industry in Nashville rather than return to Texas, Jennings cultivated an image as a rebel, and in 1972 recorded an album called Ladies Love Outlaws. On the cover he appeared in "bad guy" dress, complete with a black cowboy hat and a six-shooter. The commercial potential of the outlaw image was soon recognized by music publicists in Nashville, who lost no time turning it into a commercial term. The Outlaws were never a cohesive performing group; in fact, the label "outlaw country" was largely a product of the record industry's search for a way to capitalize on the overlap between audiences for rock and those for country music.

Music Television (MTV)

A cable television channel founded in 1981 that featured videos of popular musical performers. It became the major means of promoting new acts during the 1980s and 1990s.

Digital samplers

A digital recording process wherein a sound source is recorded or "sampled" with a microphone, converted into a stream of binary numbers that represent the profile of the sound, quantized, and stored in computer memory. The digitized sound sample may then be retrieved in any number of ways, including "virtual recording studio" programs for the computer, or by activating the sound from an electronic keyboard or drum machine.

Hardcore

A guitar-led style of blues-flavored rock featuring dense textures, extremely loud volumes, and intense vocals. Pioneered by groups like Led Zeppelin, heavy metal has developed into various streams over the decades including hardcore, speed metal, thrash metal, and so on.

punk rock

A mid-to late-1970s movement rebelling against disco and the popular rock acts of the day. It was a stripped-down and often purposefully "nonmusical" version of rock music, with lyrics that stressed the ironic or dark dimensions of the human experience.

New wave

A more self-consciously artistic and experimental side of punk rock music, developed by groups like Talking Heads during the mid-1970s.

Funk music

A musical style derived from R&B (rhythm and blues) and soul music characterized by repeated rhythmic figures and a strong bass line.

garage band

A neighborhood group made up of young musicians who play mainly for themselves, their friends, and the occasional high school dance. Their music usually consisted of fairly simple melodies and lyrics accompanied by two or three chords and a simple beat. The rough-and-ready, do-it-yourself attitude of the garage bands paved the way for punk rock.

Salsa

A rumba-based musical style pioneered by Cuban and Puerto Rican migrants in New York City. The stars of salsa music include bandleader/percussionist Tito Puente and singer Celia Cruz

Analog recording

A system of sound recording in which the energy of sound waves is transformed into physical imprints (as in pre-1925 acoustic recordings) or into electronic waveforms that closely follow (and can be used to reproduce) the shape of the sound waves themselves. Compare Digital recording.

Digital recording

A system of sound recording that transforms sound waves into a stream of numbers (0s and 1s), which is converted back to an analog wave by a digital-to-analog converter in order to be heard. Compareanalog recording.

world music

A term developed in the late 1980s to describe non-Western music, usually those that incorporated elements of Western rock or pop music. It can encompass a diverse range of musical traditions.

MP3

A variant of the MPEG compression system that allows sound files to be compressed to as little as one-twelfth of their original size.

Auto-Tune

An audio processing software program capable of altering the pitch and quality of vocal sounds. It has been used on recordings by artists across a wide range of popular music.

Digital sequencers,

An electronic device that creates automated repeatable sequences of sound. A sequencer can record a section of a pre-existing record for manipulation on playback or a series of MIDI codes or other digital information.

Drum machines

An electronic instrument that can emulate the sound of traditional drums. A drum machine has the additional capability to record specific rhythm patterns and to play them back in various combinations

Synthesizers

An electronic instrument, usually incorporating a keyboard, capable of producing complex sounds through the manipulation of wave shapes.

Outkast

As hip-hop continued to expand, the Southern United States—and particularly cities such as Memphis, New Orleans, and Atlanta—became an increasingly important center for hip-hop music. Geographically removed from the music industry centers of New York and Los Angeles, Southern rappers tended to be signed to artist-owned independent labels, and they often created performance and promotional infrastructures to support their own local "scenes" as well, much in the same way that punk rock musicians had done in the 1980s. In short, they knew how to be successful without the help of the mainstream music industry. This, somewhat ironically, made them very attractive to major labels in the late 1990s, since most of the groundwork had already been done. The labels simply had to buy into a musical system that was already successful. Even as the music industry itself began to falter in the 2000s, these more independent groups remained relatively secure, since they were not dependent on the mainstream music industry in the first place.

Selena

As the worldwide market for Latin music began a rapid expansion during the 1990s, two female superstars embodied the ambition of many Latin American musicians to break into the mainstream pop charts while maintaining the loyalty of audiences in their own local communities. Though their lives took quite different courses—one of them able to sustain a musical career for more than three decades, the other murdered just before her twenty-fourth birthday—Gloria Estefan (b. 1957) and Selena (1971-1995) shared an ambition to reach the broadest possible audience while remaining true to their musical roots.

house music

At around the same time a genre called house music (named after the Warehouse, a popular gay dance club) was developing in Chicago. The Chicago house scene was pioneered by Frankie Knuckles, a DJ from New York who worked at the Warehouse from 1979 until 1983. Knuckles introduced New York turntable techniques to Chicago, manipulating disco records to emphasize the dance beat—the drums and bass—even more strongly. Many house recordings were purely instrumental, with elements of European synth-pop, Latin soul, reggae, rap, and jazz grafted over an insistent dance beat. By the mid-1980s house music scenes had emerged in New York and London, and in the late 1980s the genre made its first appearances on the pop charts under the names of artists like M/A/R/R/S and Madonna.

Prince

Between 1982 and 1992 Prince (a.k.a. the Artist) placed nine albums in the Top 10, reaching the top of the charts with three of them (Purple Rain in 1984, Around the World in a Day in 1985, and Batman in 1989). During the same decade he placed twenty-six singles in the Top 40 and produced five number one hits. Over the course of his career, Prince sold over 80 million albums, making him one of the most popular music superstars of the last three decades. More importantly, Prince was one of the most talented musicians ever to achieve mass commercial success in the field of popular music. Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the child of parents who migrated from Louisiana to the North and identified themselves as African Americans while acknowledging a mixed-race heritage that includes Italian and Native American ancestry. Prince stated that growing up in a middle-class Minneapolis neighborhood exposed him to a wide range of music, and that his early influences included everything from James Brown and Santana to Joni Mitchell. As he testified in a 1985 interview on MTV:

Gloria Estefan

Born in Havana, Gloria María Fajardo García fled Cuba with her family when Fidel Castro and the Communists rose to power in the late 1950s. (Her father, a soldier, had worked as a bodyguard for the deposed dictator Fulgencio Batista.) In 1975 she auditioned for the Miami Latin Boys, a local wedding band headed by keyboardist Emilio Estefan. The group soon changed its name to Miami Sound Machine, and four years later Fajardo and Estefan married. Miami Sound Machine's fusion of pop, disco, and salsa earned a devoted local following, and their breakthrough 1985 album Primitive Love scored three Top Ten pop hits in the U.S. Primitive Love included the energetic salsa-meets-disco party song "Conga" (number one dance, number ten pop, number sixty R&B), the first single to crack Billboard's pop, dance, black, and Latin charts simultaneously.

Hip-hop

Culture forged by African American, Puerto Rican, and Caribbean American youth in New York City in the late 1970s; includes distinctive styles of visual art (graffiti), dance, dress, and speech. Rap music grew out of the movement, at first spread by pioneering DJs like Afrika Bambaataa and Kool Herc, who spun and mixed different source recordings. DJs formed their own groups featuring dancers and MCs who rapped or rhymed to the musical accompaniment.

Van Halen,

During the 1980s, however, heavy metal came back with a vengeance. A slew of metal albums topped the singles and album charts, ranging from the pop metal sounds of bands like Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, and Def Leppard to the harder sound of speed metal bands such as Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeath. One of the most important moments in the mainstreaming of heavy metal was the release of Van Halen's album 1984, which featured the number one pop single "Jump."

Eurythmics

Eurythmics' first chart appearance in the United States came with the release of their second album, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), in 1983. The title track was released as a single soon after the album rocketed to number two on the English charts, and shortly afterward climbed to number one on the American charts. The popularity of "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" in the United States was boosted enormously by a video produced to promote the record, which was placed into heavy rotation by the fledgling MTV channel. In particular, the stylishly androgynous image of Annie Lennox—a female David Bowie in a business suit and close-cropped orange hair—is often identified as an important ingredient of Eurythmics' success.

Madonna

From the late 1980s through the 1990s Madonna's popularity was second only to that of Michael Jackson. Between 1984 and 1994 Madonna scored twenty-eight Top 10 singles, eleven of which reached the top spot on the charts. During the same ten-year period she recorded eight Top 10 albums, including the number one hits Like a Virgin (1984), True Blue (1986), and Like a Prayer (1989). Over the course of her career, Madonna has sold in excess of 50 million albums and has been one of the most reliable sources of profit for Warner Entertainment, corporate owner of the Sire record label, for which she records. She also paved the way for female dance music superstars of the 1990s and beyond, such as Paula Abdul and Britney Spears. As a purposefully controversial figure, Madonna has tended to elicit strongly polarized reactions. A 1987 Rolling Stone readers' poll awarded her second place for Best Female Singer and first place for Worst Female Singer. (In the same poll she also scored third place for Best-Dressed Female and first place for Worst-Dressed Female.) Jacques Chirac, the president of France, once described Madonna as "a great and beautiful artist," while the political philosopher Camille Paglia asserted that she represented "the future of feminism." The author Luc Sante's distaste for Madonna (as articulated in his 1990 article for the New Republic, "Unlike a Virgin") was based largely on aesthetic criteria: Other observers are ambivalent about Madonna, perhaps feeling as the satirist Merrill Markoe once put it: "I keep trying to like her, but she keeps pissing me off!" (Sexton 1993, 14).

Kool Herc Grandmaster Flash Afrika Bambaataa

If hip-hop music was a rejection of mainstream dance music by young black and Puerto Rican listeners, it was also profoundly shaped by the techniques of disco DJs. The first celebrities of hip-hop music—Kool Herc (Clive Campbell, b. 1955 in Jamaica), Grandmaster Flash (Joseph Saddler, b. 1958 in Barbados), and Afrika Bambaataa (Kevin Donovan, b. 1960 in the Bronx)—were DJs who began their careers in the mid-1970s, spinning records at neighborhood block parties, gym dances, and dance clubs and in public spaces such as community centers and parks. These three young men—and dozens of lesser-known DJs scattered throughout the Bronx, Harlem, and other areas of New York City and New Jersey—developed their personal styles within a grid of fierce competition for celebrity and neighborhood pride. As Fab Five Freddy, an early graffiti artist and rapper, put it: You make a new style. That's what life on the street is all about. What's at stake is honor and position on the street. That's what makes it so important, that's what makes it feel so good—the pressure on you to be the best ... to develop a new style nobody can deal with. (George 1985, 111)

Psycho Killer

Music and lyrics by David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth; performed by Talking Heads; recorded 1977 The center of attention on most Talking Heads recordings is David Byrne's trembling, high-pitched voice and eclectic songwriting. Byrne often delivers his lyrics in a nervous, almost schizophrenic stream-of-consciousness voice, like overheard fragments from a psychiatrist's office. A good example of this approach—as well as the only single from the Heads' first LP to appear on the singles charts (peaking at number ninety-two)—is the song "Psycho Killer," inspired by Norman Bates, the schizophrenic murderer in Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho. Although it now seems like an ironic commentary on mass media portrayals of the "serial killer," this song had a darker, more immediate resonance when it was released in 1977, during the Son of Sam killing spree in which a deranged man shot thirteen people in New York City.

"Smells Like Teen Spirit"

Music by Nirvana, lyrics by Kurt Cobain, performed by Nirvana (recorded 1991) One source of Nevermind's success was the platinum single "Smells Like Teen Spirit," a Top 10 hit. One of the most striking aspects of "Teen Spirit" is its combination of heavy metal instrumental textures and pop songwriting techniques, including a number of memorable verbal and melodic hooks. The band's sound, which had been thick and plodding on its Sub Pop recordings, is sleek and well focused (thanks in part to the production of Butch Vig and the mixing of engineer Andy Wallace). The song itself combines a four-chord heavy metal harmonic progression with a somewhat conventional formal structure made up of four-, eight-, and twelve-bar sections. The overall structure of the song includes a verse of eight bars ("Load up on guns..."), which we call A, and two repeated sections, or choruses, which we label B (eight bars in length) and C (twelve bars). These sections are marked off by distinctive instrumental textures, which shift from the quiet, reflective, and even somewhat depressed quality of A through the crescendo of B, with its spacey one-word mantra and continuous carpet of thick guitar chords, into the C section, where Cobain bellows his unfocused feelings of discontent and the group slams out heavy metal-style power chords. This ABC structure is repeated three times in the course of the five-minute recording, with room created between the second and final iterations for a sixteen-bar guitar solo. Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," the first alternative rock single of the 1990s to enter the Top 10, is a carefully crafted pop record. The sleek, glistening studio sound, Cobain's liberal use of melodic and verbal hooks, the trio's careful attention to textural shifts as a means of marking off formal sections of the song, and the fact that Cobain's guitar solo consists of an almost note-for-note restatement of the melodies of the A and B sections, driving these hooks even deeper into the listener's memory—all serve to remind us that the Beatles were as profound an influence on 1990s alternative rock as were bands like the Velvet Underground.

Red Headed Stranger (concept album), Willie Nelson, recorded 1975

One of the ideas that progressive country musicians adopted from rock music during the 1970s was that of the concept album. The central medium for the transmission of country music during the 1970s was still the individual song, and although some country LPs sold well, 45 r.p.m. singles remained the bread and butter of the industry. During the mid-1970s, however, progressive country musicians began to create albums unified around a single theme or dramatic character. Perhaps the best example of this trend is Willie Nelson's album Red-Headed Stranger (1975), which sold over 2 million copies and reached number twenty-eight on Billboard's Top LPs chart. (Billboard had no separate LP charts for country or soul music, since these genres were assumed by definition to be singles-oriented.) Red-Headed Stranger included Nelson's first big crossover hit as a singer, rather than as a songwriter—"Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain," number twenty-one pop and number one country—and established the notion of the country concept album. The song, originally recorded by Roy Acuff in 1947, was written by Nashville music publisher Fred Rose, who also was Hank Williams' manager.

rock steady

Rock steady was considerably slower in tempo than ska, reflecting the aforementioned influence of burru drumming, and some of its leading exponents—notably Alton Ellis, who had the first big rock steady hit in 1966—began to record songs with social and political content. The main patrons of rock steady were the Rude Boys, a social category that included anyone against "the system": urban Rastas, thugs hired by competing political parties, and lower-class youth generally. An informal and unruly Jamaican youth movement, the Rude Boys increasingly came into conflict with the Jamaican police, and media coverage of their exploits helped to create the image of romantic outlaw heroes. The film that initiated reggae music's popularity in the United States, The Harder They Come (1972), was in fact a thinly disguised biography of one such ghetto hero (Vincent Martin, a.k.a. Rhygin', a Jamaican outlaw of the early 1960s). Bob Marley's song "I Shot the Sheriff" is about a young man who is persecuted by the local sheriff and then accused of murdering both the sheriff and his deputy in cold blood.

Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth, formed in New York City in 1981, pushed underground rock music in a quite different direction. Influenced by avant-garde experimentalists such as the Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth developed a dark, menacing, feedback-drenched sound, altering the tuning of their guitars by inserting screwdrivers and drumsticks under the strings at random intervals and ignoring the conventional song structures of rock and pop music. On a series of influential (though commercially unsuccessful) recordings released during the mid-1980s on the independent label SST, Sonic Youth began to experiment with more conventional pop song forms while maintaining the discordant sound with which they were so closely identified by fans and other musicians. By the early 1990s Sonic Youth, the former underground phenomenon, had signed with the major label DGC (owned by the media magnate David Geffen) and was being widely hailed as a pioneer of the alternative movement in rock. The magazine Vanity Fair went so far as to proclaim Sonic Youth's lead singer, Kim Gordon, the "godmother of alternative rock." The 1994 album Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star, their third release on DGC, reached number thirty-four on the Top 100 album chart, proof that their national audience, like R.E.M.'s, had expanded beyond all expectations. While this period of commercial success was not long-lived, the band continued to produce both "commercial" albums and more experimental music (on their own label) through 2011, when they went on "hiatus." Band member Kim Gordon published her memoirs, Girl in A Band, in 2015.

M. C. Hammer

Stanley Kirk Burrell, b. 1962), a rapper from Oakland, California, hit the charts in March of that year with Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em, which held the number one position for twenty-one weeks and sold over 10 million copies. Hammer's celebrity was boosted by music videos that highlighted his impressive abilities as a dancer, his appearances in corporate soft drink advertisements, and even by a short-lived children's cartoon show called Hammerman. At the height of his popularity, Hammer was attacked by many in the hip-hop community for his lack of skill as a rapper and for pandering to a mass audience. There can be no denying that Hammer's success pushed rap fully into the mainstream, continuing a trend started in the mid-1980s by Run DMC and the Beastie Boys. At the same time, Hammer's pop-friendly rap style opened the door for an artist widely considered hip-hop's icon of "wackness" (weakness)

George Strait, Alan Jackson Toby Keith

Striking similarities in the personal backgrounds and music of George Strait, Alan Jackson, and Toby Keith demonstrate the persistence of certain traditions in country music and the culture surrounding it—the culture from which it arises, and which also continues to sustain it. All three were born and bred in the South or the Southwest, the heartlands of country: Strait in Texas (b. 1952), Jackson in Georgia (b. 1958), and Keith in Oklahoma (b. 1961). All three men come from working-class backgrounds—Strait was a rancher, Jackson was a car salesman and construction worker, and Keith worked in the oil fields and as a rodeo hand—and did not fully establish careers as country music performers until they were in their thirties. This trajectory is not atypical of country artists, as country has always tended to be much less of a youth-oriented genre than many other categories of pop music. It is a closely related truth that country audiences often reward their mature, stable, consistent artists with long, steady careers as consistent hit-makers, and certainly the music careers of all three men have been characterized by a consistency of style and professionalism—as well as by an attendant downplaying of concern with novelty and current pop trends. Strait came to prominence in the mid-1980s, Jackson in the early 1990s, and Keith in the mid-1990s, but all three remain among the top country artists as of this writing, continuing to rack up number one country hits well into the new millennium.

King Sunny Adé

The 1980s also saw musicians from Africa, South Asia, the Near East, Eastern Europe, and Latin America touring the United States with increasing frequency and appearing, even if rarely, on the Billboard pop charts. The first indication that musicians from the so-called Third World might gain increased access to the American market was the release in 1982 of the album Juju Music by a Nigerian group called the African Beats, led by the guitarist

Sid Vicious

The American label A&M Records then signed the Pistols for over $200,000, only to fire them the very next week. In May Virgin Records signed them and released their second single, "God Save the Queen (It's a Fascist Regime)." Despite being banned from airplay, the song went to number two (cited as a blank on the U.K. charts). The band was featured in a 1978 film called The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, a title that some critics thought captured perfectly the essence of the band's exercise in manipulation. The Sex Pistols broke up that same year during their only U.S. tour, a tour undertaken to support the release of their only studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (1977). In 1979 Sid Vicious was imprisoned in New York on charges of stabbing his girlfriend to death, and he died of a heroin overdose while out on bail. In 1986 the surviving members of the group sued Malcolm McLaren for cheating them of royalties and were awarded around $1.5 million. Though they did not represent "the end of rock 'n' roll," the Sex Pistols did manage to do away with themselves quite efficiently.

Snoop Doggy Dogg

The acrimonious breakup of N.W.A. beginning in 1989 had the effect of disseminating the group's influence over a wider territory. During the 1990s Ice Cube went on to make a series of platinum albums totaling almost 6 million in sales, including the brilliant AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted (number nineteen on the album charts in 1990), a more explicitly political album recorded in New York with Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad; and The Predator, which reached number one in 1992. Eazy-E sold over 5 million albums in the 1990s, all released on his Ruthless Records label, and M.C. Ren sold one million copies of his Kizz My Black Azz (number twelve in 1992). But the most influential and economically successful member of N.W.A. turned out to be Andre Young (Dr. Dre), who founded an independent record label called Death Row/Interscope, cultivated a number of younger rappers, and continued to develop a distinctive hip-hop production style that was christened "G-Funk" in homage to the P-funk style developed in the 1970s by George Clinton and was often sampled on Dre's productions. Dr. Dre's 1992 album The Chronic—named after a particularly potent strain of marijuana—sold over 3 million copies and introduced his protégé, Snoop Doggy Dogg (Calvin Broadus, b. 1972 in Long Beach).

N.W.A.

The emergence of West Coast gangsta rap was heralded nationwide by the release of the album Straight Outta Compton by N.W.A. (*****z With Attitude). While rap artists had previously dealt with aspects of urban street life in brutally straightforward terms, N.W.A. upped the ante with recordings that expressed the gangsta lifestyle and were saturated with images of sex and violence straight out of the prison toast tradition., N.W.A. upped the ante with recordings that expressed the gangsta lifestyle and were saturated with images of sex and violence straight out of the prison toast tradition.

Ramones Sex Pistols

The first bona fide punk rock band was the Ramones, formed in 1974 in New York City. The Ramones' high-speed, energetic, and extremely loud sound influenced English punk groups such as the Sex Pistols and the Clash and also became a blueprint for 1980s hardcore bands in Los Angeles. Although they projected a street-tough image, all of the band's members were from middle-class families in the New York City borough of Queens. The band—not a family enterprise, despite their stage names—consisted of Jeffrey Hyman (a.k.a. Joey Ramone) on vocals, John Cummings (Johnny Ramone) on guitar, Douglas Colvin (Dee Dee Ramone) on bass, and Tom Erdelyi (Tommy Ramone) on drums. The band's first manager, Danny Fields, had previously worked with the Stooges and Lou Reed and thus had a good sense of the Ramones' potential audience.

Raves

The main venues for techno are dance clubs and semipublic events called raves that are partly modeled on the be-ins of the 1960s counterculture. A controversial aspect of raves—which started in England in the late 1980s and spread, in a more limited fashion, to the United States soon thereafter—is the prevalent use by participants of a psychoactive drug called Ecstacy (MDMA), which creates visceral sensations of warmth and euphoria. Matthew Collin, a British journalist who has written extensively about the drug-rave-music connection that emerged in his country in the 1980s, has described the drug's sensation:

Tupac (2Pac) Shakur Sean "Puffy" Combs Notorious B.I.G.

The mid-1990s saw the violent eruption of conflicts between East and West Coast factions within the hip-hop business. Standing in one corner was Marion "Suge" Knight, CEO of Los Angeles-based Death Row Records, and Death Row's up-and-coming star Tupac (2Pac) Shakur (1971-1996). In the other corner stood the producer and rapper Sean "Puffy" Combs (also called Puff Daddy or P. Diddy, 1969- ), CEO of the New York-based independent label Bad Boy Records, and the up- and-coming star the Notorious B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace, also called Biggie Smalls, 1972-1997). By the time the stranger-than-fiction scenario played itself out at the end of the 1990s, Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace had been shot to death; Suge Knight, already on parole for a 1992 assault conviction, was reincarcerated after an attack on two rappers in a Las Vegas casino and had come under federal investigation for racketeering; Interscope, a subdivision of Time Warner Entertainment, had severed its formerly lucrative promotion and distribution deal with Death Row Records; Tupac Shakur's mother had sued Death Row for the rights to her dead son's tapes; and Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg, Death Row's biggest stars, had severed ties with the label. In January 1998 Snoop told the Long Beach Press-Telegram that he was leaving Death Row Records because he feared for his life:

O'Shea "Ice Cube" Jackson, "Dr. Dre" Young, Eric "Eazy-E" Wright

The nucleus of the group was formed in 1986 when O'Shea "Ice Cube" Jackson (b. 1969), the product of a middle-class home in South Central Los Angeles, met Andre "Dr. Dre" Young (b. 1965), a sometime member of a local funk group called the World Class Wreckin' Cru. Jackson and Young shared an interest in writing rap songs, an ambition that was realized when they teamed up with Eric "Eazy-E" Wright (1973-1995), a former drug dealer who was using the proceeds of that occupation to fund a record label, Ruthless Records. Soon the three began working together as N.W.A., eventually adding D.J. Yella (Antoine Carraby) and M.C. Ren (Lorenzo Patterson) to the group. When the group started work on their second album, Straight Outta Compton, the idea of establishing a distinctive West Coast identity within hip-hop was clearly in their minds. As M.C. Ren put it in a 1994 interview in the Source:

Eddie Palmieri Willie Colón Charlie Palmieri

The two most influential figures of early salsa were Eddie Palmieri (b. 1936) and Willie Colón (b. 1950), both born to Puerto Rican immigrant parents in New York City. Palmieri's musical development was influenced by his older brother, the pianist and bandleader Charlie Palmieri (1927-1988), who began playing with Tito Puente's mambo band in the late 1940s and had a key role in the Latin music of the 1960s. Eddie's approach to the piano was strongly shaped by modern jazz of the 1950s and 1960s, and his breakthrough albums Sentido (1973) and Sun of Latin Music (1974) juxtaposed his deep knowledge of the stylistic history of Latin music with various experimental moves, including solo piano preludes influenced by the style of Miles Davis's pianist McCoy Tyner and the incorporation of tape-based sound effects. Working with musically sophisticated arrangers, Eddie Palmieri's band pushed the compositional and harmonic limits of Latin dance music while always maintaining a connection to the típico style. As Palmieri himself put it:I can use the same phrasing as the old groups use, and I could extend it, and build master structures around it—make it with such high-tension chords that everybody would blow their minds—but the phrasing would not disrupt the rhythmic patterns. Rhythm is your foundation. (Roberts 1998, 189)

Run DMC

The year 1986 saw the release of the first two multi platinum rap albums, Raising Hell by Run DMC (which reached number three on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart and sold over 3 million copies) and Licensed to Ill by the Beastie Boys (number one for seven weeks, with over 10 million copies sold). That neither Run DMC nor the Beastie Boys hailed from the Bronx indicates the expanding appeal of rap music in the New York area. The key to the commercial success of these albums, however, was the expansion of the audience for hip-hop music, which now included millions of young white fans who were attracted by the transgressive, rebellious sensibility of the genre. Both Raising Hell and Licensed to Ill were released on a new independent label called Def Jam, cofounded in 1984 by the hip-hop promoter Russell Simmons and the musician-producer Rick Rubin. During the 1980s Def Jam took up where Sugar Hill Records left off, cross-promoting a new generation of artists, expanding and diversifying the national audience for hip-hop, and in 1986 becoming the first rap-oriented independent label to sign a distribution deal with one of the "Big Five" record companies, Columbia Records. Run DMC—a trio consisting of the MCs Run (Joseph Simmons, b. 1964) and DMC (Darryl McDaniels, b. 1964), and the DJ Jam Master Jay

Lou Reed John Cale

Three groups, none of them very successful in commercial terms, are frequently cited as ancestors of 1970s punk music, as well as of later genres such as new wave, hardcore, industrial, and alternative rock: the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and the New York Dolls. The Velvet Underground, a New York group, was promoted by the pop art superstar Andy Warhol, who painted the famous cartoon like image of a banana on the cover of their first LP. Their music was rough-edged, chaotic, extremely loud, and deliberately anti commercial, and the lyrics of their songs focused on topics such as sexual deviancy, drug addiction, violence, and social alienation. The leaders of the Velvet Underground were singer and guitarist Lou Reed (b. 1942)—who had worked previously as a pop songwriter in a Brill Building-style "music factory"—and John Cale (b. 1942), a viola player active in the avant-garde art music scene in New York who introduced experimental musical elements into the mix, including electronic noise and recorded industrial sounds.

"Doo Wop (That Thing)"

Written and performed by Lauryn Hill; recorded 1998 "Doo Wop" combines aspects of 1950s R&B—a soulful lead vocal, four-part vocal harmony, and a horn section—with Hill's penetrating observations on male and female behavior. The cut opens with Hill and a few of her friends reminiscing about the good old days. Then the digital drum machine's groove enters, and Hill launches into the first half of her rap, directed to female listeners:Hill admonishes the women in her audience to be more selective about their sexual relationships and to avoid being hypocritical about their personal conduct. She then turns to the men in her audience, opening up a rapid-fire volley of wordplay that strips the so-called gangstas of their tough-guy trappings, exposing them as mother-dependent, sneaky, woman-beating, sexually immature hypocrites: "Doo Wop (That Thing)" is essentially a moral parable, delivered in terms that leaven Hill's righteous anger with light-hearted and thoroughly up-to-date hip-hop jargon. She lowers her audience's potential defensiveness by admitting that she has found herself in similar situations and pleads with them to pay attention to the development of an inner life—"How you gon' win when you ain't right within?"—in order to avoid the twin traps of materialism and easy pleasure. The mixture of sweet soul singing and assertive rapping, R&B horns and a digital groove, moral seriousness and playful humor not only announced the arrival of a new and distinctive voice but also made the single "Doo Wop" a unique and important contribution to the hip-hop repertoire.

"Hey Ya"

Written and produced by Andre 3000; performed by Outkast; released 2003 "Hey Ya" was the lead single from The Love Below, the Andre 3000 half of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. Though credited to Outkast, it is essentially an Andre 3000 solo record. In spite of the fact that it was recorded by a hip-hop artist, "Hey Ya" is not a rap song by any reasonable definition of the term; for one thing, it contains no rapping. Stylistically, the song draws most clearly from the rock and pop of the mid-1960s in its instrumentation, chord structure, lyrics, and rhythmic feel. This interpretation is also supported by the song's video (see the following discussion), which directly references the 1960s. On the other hand, the song's aesthetic approach does show deep influences from the hip-hop tradition, particularly in its juxtaposition of elements from different eras of pop history. As an indicator of how this song broke the boundaries between rock, hip-hop, and pop, it is noteworthy that "Hey Ya" made appearances on no less than six different Billboard charts (Hot 100, R&B/Hip-Hop, Pop, Radio, Alternative, and Adult Pop) and also won a Grammy for Best Urban/Alternative Single. The fact that the song had such tremendous success in spite of being basically unclassifiable in terms of genre is a testament both to its broad appeal and to the decreasing significance of genre boundaries in the music industry overall. "Hey Ya" is based on an unusual six-measure line, comprising three measures of four beats each, followed by one measure with two beats, followed by another two measures of four beats. Each verse is twenty-four measures long, consisting of four of these six-measure lines. The choruses and break are also twenty-four measures long and are based on the same metric and chord structure.

"What's My Name?"

Written by George Clinton, Gary Shider, Snoop Dogg, and David Spradley; produced by Dr. Dre; performed by Snoop Doggy Dogg; recorded 1993 Snoop's soft drawl and laid-back-but-lethal gangster persona were featured on his album Doggystyle (1993), which made its debut at the top of the album charts. The million-selling single "What's My Name?"—a so-called "clean" remix of the opening track on the Doggystyle album—gives us a sense of Snoop Doggy Dogg's prowess as a rapper and of Dr. Dre's distinctive G-funk production style. (Like many rap recordings intended to cross over to the pop charts, "What's My Name?" was released on the album in its original, unexpurgated version and as a "clean" version on a single designed for radio airplay and mass distribution. We will analyze the remix here, which reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in 1993.) Although the track opens with a dense, scratchy sample reminiscent of a Public Enemy/Bomb Squad recording—actually a brief sequence from an old Parliament track, looped to create a syncopated pattern—the texture soon shifts to a smoother, more dance-oriented sound. A relaxed, medium-tempo dance groove is established by a drum machine and keyboard synthesizers (including a weighty and sinuous keyboard bass part), over which a digitally processed, nasal-sounding human voice floats, singing a melismatic phrase:

Walk this Way"

Written by Joe Perry and Steven Tyler, performed by Run DMC with Perry and Tyler (from Aerosmith); recorded 1986 The creative and commercially successful synergy between rock music and hip-hop pioneered by Def Jam Records and Run DMC is well illustrated in "Walk This Way" (number four pop, number eight R&B, 1986), the million-selling single that propelled !Raising Hell nearly to the top of the album charts. "Walk This Way," a collaboration between Run DMC and the popular hard rock group Aerosmith, was a cover version of a song written and previously recorded by Aerosmith. (Aerosmith brought a large portion of the hard rock audience to the table, having sold over 60 million albums since the early 1970s.) The recording opens with a sample of rock drumming from the original recording, which is interrupted by the sound of a turntable scratching and the main riff of the song, played by Aerosmith's guitarist Joe Perry. Run and DMC trade lines of the song's verses in an aggressive, shouted style that matches the intensity of the rock rhythm section. The chorus ("Walk this way, talk this way...") is performed by Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, who sings the lyrics in a high, strained voice, a timbre associated with heavy metal music. As the track progresses, Run, DMC, and Tyler combine vocal forces in the interest of collective mayhem, and the recording ends with a virtuoso guitar solo by Joe Perry.

U.N.I.T.Y."

Written by Queen Latifah and Kier "Kay Gee" Gist; released 1994 "U.N.I.T.Y." opens with a sample of jazz tenor saxophone with guitar, string bass, and drum set accompaniment and then moves into a slow, sultry, reggae-influenced groove that is anchored by a window-rattling bass riff and digitized snare drum backbeat. The reggae association is continued in the opening chorus, which Latifah performs in a languorous Jamaican patois, interrupted by more aggressive responses in an American dialect. The hypnotic flow of the music—with the "old school" jazz saxophone reappearing periodically—supports the chorus's idealistic message, that black men and women should treat one another with love and respect: The overall musical structure of the track is straightforward, alternating the "U.N.I.T.Y" chorus with a series of rapped verses. On this track, as in so many hip-hop recordings, the focus is on the verbal performance, and the music functions to set the mood, create a temporal flow, and (through digital sampling) evoke a range of associations. Queen Latifah's performance counterpoises her smoldering indignation over the abuse of women by men with a more empathetic and optimistic approach. (This dialectic is emphasized in the music, which plays off the assertive, even pugilistic, quality of Latifah's rapping against the laid-back, sensuous feeling of the bass-heavy groove and the hauntingly mellow jazz saxophone bathed in reverb.) If "U.N.I.T.Y" is a threat, delivered in the most straightforward terms, it is also a plea for civility and the healing power of love.

Paul Simon

interest in music that was not indigenous to the United States manifested itself in his songs long before he recorded Graceland. When he was still singing with Art Garfunkel, Simon (b. 1941) recorded "El Condor Pasa," a song that paired his own lyrics with a backing instrumental track based on an old Peruvian folk melody, performed in "native" style by a group called Los Incas. "El Condor Pasa" appeared on the 1970 Simon and Garfunkel album Bridge over Troubled Water and was released as a single that same year. Beginning his solo career in the 1970s, Simon continued to pull on diverse musical traditions, including the Latin-tinged hit "Me and Julio Down by The School Yard" (1972) and "Loves Me Like a Rock" (1973) that drew on American gospel music. These songs were indicative of the path that Simon would later pursue much more systematically and thoroughly in Graceland, an album in which many of the songs present Simon's vocals and lyrics over an accompaniment performed in South African style by South African musicians.

"Pedro Navaja"

Written by Rubén Blades, performed by Willie Colón and Rubén Blades (recorded 1977) Conceived as an homage to the song "Mack the Knife" (originally from The Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht), "Pedro Navaja" ("Pedro the Knife") tells the story of the violent demise of a street tough who attacks a prostitute. As Navaja stabs her, the woman defends herself by shooting him with a handgun. Both of them die on the spot, and their bodies are soon discovered by a drunk, who searches them, empties their pockets, and stumbles off. As he weaves down the street, the drunk sings an out-of-tune refrain that is immediately adopted as the call-and-response coro (chorus) of the montuno section that follows. The arrangement, by Luis "Perico" Ortiz, provides a sophisticated musical framework for the narrative portrait of "Pedro Navaja." The track begins with an instrumental introduction in which the sound of police sirens place us directly in the gritty urban environment of the barrio. The instruments enter one after another to accompany Blades's voice: congas during the first verse, bongó and timbales during the second, bass and piano on the third, and finally a four-trombone brass section on the fourth verse. When the trombones enter, the key rises, ratcheting up the dramatic and musical intensity—a strategy that Ortiz repeats on the sixth, eighth, and ninth choruses before launching us into the montuno section. Because its lyric is so central to the enormous impact that this song had on audiences throughout Latin America (including Latin New York), it is worth presenting in its entirety. (See Dashboard for a complete line-by-line English translation of "Pedro Navaja.")

Johnny Rotten

a stage name that stuck.) The Sex Pistols got their first gigs by showing up and posing as the opening band. Given the nature of Johnny Rotten's stage act—sneering and screaming obscenities at the audience, commanding them to applaud, and throwing beer on them when they didn't—it is perhaps not surprising that they were banned from many nightclubs. The trajectory of this band's rapid ascent and implosion is complex, and we can present only a summary here. EMI Records, England's biggest and most conservative label, signed the Sex Pistols for around sixty thousand dollars in 1976, releasing their first single, "Anarchy in the UK," in December. The single was a Top 40 hit in the U.K. but was withdrawn from record shops after Rotten uttered an obscenity during a television interview. At an annual meeting of shareholders in December 1976, the chairman of EMI, Sir John Read, made the following statement (as recorded in the December 7 formal Report of the EMI General Meeting): Sex Pistols is the only "punk rock" group that EMI Records currently has under direct recording contract and whether EMI does in fact release any more of their records will have to be very carefully considered. I need hardly add that we shall do everything we can to restrain their public behavior, although this is a matter over which we have no real control.

Pro Tools

a virtual recording board designed to run on personal computers, have permitted musicians working on a limited budget to set up a basic home studio at relatively small expense. Pro Tools was a significant departure from most previous recording systems in two ways. Older recording technology, based on the use of analog recording tape, imposed many limitations on the kinds of changes that could be made after the music had been recorded. By contrast, the new, purely digital format allowed virtually unlimited alteration of the music with no loss in sound quality. Further, Pro Tools was based on a visual interface; the sound of the music was represented graphically on the computer screen. This led to new, more visual, ways of thinking about popular music production, particularly in terms of patterns, repetition, and consistency. It became a simple matter to simply cut-and-paste the same chorus of a song each time it came around rather than play it again. This led to a more modular approach to recording, with songs being assembled from constituent parts more than performed in the recording studio.

Ravi Shankar

album Live at the Monterey Pop Festival, which reached number forty-three in 1967, as the counterculture was at its peak; "Grazing in the Grass" (1968), a number one hit by the South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela; or "Soul Makossa" (1973), the Top 40 dance club single by the Cameroonian pop musician Manu Dibango, often cited as a primary influence on disco music. But these cosmopolitan influences were typically filtered through the sensibilities of Western musicians and channeled by the strategies of American and European record companies and publishing firms. A quintessential example of this tendency is the Tokens' rock 'n' roll hit "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" (number one pop, 1961), an adaptation of a hit single by the urban folk group the Weavers entitled "Wimoweh" (number fourteen pop, 1952). "Wimoweh" had in turn been an adaptation of a 1939 South African recording by a vocal group made up of Zulu mine workers called Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds. By the time the Evening Birds' song reached the ears of Americans, it had undergone several bouts of invasive surgery, including the insertion of a pop-friendly melodic hook and English lyrics, and the removal of all royalty rights pertaining to the original performers.

Dave Grohl

b. 1969] had become a steady member of the group.) Following a European tour with Sonic Youth, their album Nevermind was released in September 1991, quickly selling out its initial shipment of fifty thousand copies and creating a shortage in record stores across America. By the beginning of 1992 Nevermind had reached number one, displacing Michael Jackson's highly publicized comeback album Dangerous. The album stayed on the charts for almost five years, eventually selling more than 10 million copies. Although alternative bands like R.E.M. and Sonic Youth handled their rise to fame with relative aplomb, success destroyed Nirvana. The group's attitude toward the music industry appears to have crystallized early on, as this 1989 Sub Pop press release indicates:

David Byrne

born in Scotland in 1952), Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth, who met as art students at the Rhode Island School of Design. They first appeared at CBGBs in 1975 as the opening act for the Ramones, though they attracted a somewhat different audience, made up of college students, artists, and music critics. In 1976 they were signed to a recording contract by Sire Records, and their first album, Talking Heads: 77, achieved critical acclaim and broke into the Top 100 on the Billboard album charts. The band's style reflected their interest in an aesthetic called minimalism, which stresses the use of combinations of a limited number of basic elements—colors, shapes, sounds, or words. This approach was popular in the New York art music scene of the 1960s and 1970s, as represented in the work of composers such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass, who made use of simple musical patterns that were repeated and combined in various ways. The Talking Heads' instrumental arrangements fused this approach with the interlocking, riff-based rhythms pioneered by African American popular musicians, particularly James Brown (see the following discussion of funk music). Clarity is another important aspect of the minimalist aesthetic, and the Talking Heads' songs were generally quite simple in structural terms, with strong pop hooks and contrasting sections marked off by carefully arranged changes in instrumental texture.

Phish

created a loyal following by extending the approach of the quintessential 1960s concert band, the Grateful Dead. Like the Dead, the members of Phish embraced eclectic tastes and influences. A typical Phish concert would weave together strands of rock, folk, jazz, country, bluegrass, and pop. A band devoted to improvisation, Phish required a live performance environment to be fully appreciated. There are some obvious differences between Phish and the Dead—Phish being a smaller and in some regards a more technically adept band, with a range of stylistic references arguably even broader than that of the Grateful Dead. Be that as it may, bands like Phish, Blues Traveler, and Dave Matthews Band, inspired by the counterculture of the 1960s and the improvisational work of jazz musicians such as Miles Davis and Sun Ra, provide an optimistic, energetic, and open-minded alternative to the nihilism and relentless self-absorption of many alternative rock bands. The fact that Phish has often been dismissed by rock critics—in part because their music doesn't make sense in terms of the rock-as-rebellion scenario that dominates such criticism—didn't impede their success as a live act. Unlike bands such as R.E.M., Nirvana, and Pearl Jam, however, their popularity as a touring act never translated into massive record sales. By the mid-1990s Phish was able to pack stadiums—selling out New York's Madison Square Garden in merely four hours—but none of their albums has sold as many as a million copies.

Union Station

demonstrate both her close connections to traditional bluegrass and her interest in creating a distinctive and original sound that grows out of those connections. While Union Station employs the instruments of a typical bluegrass ensemble (fiddle, guitar, mandolin, dobro, banjo, and acoustic bass), the group also occasionally adds drums and even an upright electric bass to its sound, and their repertoire ranges far and wide—from traditional country material and Woody Guthrie's "Pastures of Plenty" to the 1968 pop hit "Baby, Now That I've Found You" and newly composed material by group member Ron Block and other rising artists in the "alternative country" field (such as Gillian Welch, a talented singer-songwriter who is also heard on the O Brother soundtrack). That the term "bluegrass" can be employed to characterize the music of two excellent musicians as different in age, temperament, and musical proclivities—not to mention gender (female bluegrass stars are still unquestionably the exception)!—as Ralph Stanley and Alison Krauss attests to the liveliness and importance of this supposedly "marginal" genre of music.

Iggy Pop

orn James Osterburg in 1947), was famous for his outrageous stage performances, which included flinging himself into the crowd, cutting himself with beer bottles, and rubbing himself with raw meat. Guitarist Ron Asheton has described the Stooges' approach: Usually we got up there and jammed one riff and built into an energy freak-out, until finally we'd broken a guitar, or one of my hands would be twice as big as the other and my guitar would be covered in blood. (Palmer 1995, 263) The Stooges' eponymous first album (1969), produced by the Velvet Underground's John Cale, created a devoted if small national audience for the band's demented "garage band" sound. A good example of the sensibility that underlay much of the Stooges' work—the depression of unemployed Michigan youth caught in the middle of a severe economic recession—is the song "1969," which evokes a world light-years distant from the utopianism of the hippie movement and the Woodstock Festival, held that same summer. The song's protagonist laments that 1969 will be "another year with nothing to do," just like the year before and presumably all the following years.

iPod

player, which could store up to one thousand CD-quality tracks on its internal hard drive. The iPod and other MP3 players soon came to dominate the market for portable listening devices, in part because they provide the listener with the ability to build a unique library of music reflecting his or her personal tastes. (This trend had been initiated half a century earlier with the introduction of the 45 r.p.m. record changer, which to a more limited degree allowed consumers to play their favorite songs in whatever order they chose; see Chapter 7.) The ability of the iPod to "shuffle" music—that is, to play tracks in a random order, mixing genres, performers, and historical periods—not only exerted an influence on personal listening habits but also provided a metaphor for the contemporary (some would say postmodern) state of consumer culture. (In 2005 Apple introduced the iPod Shuffle, promoted with the catchy slogans "Random Is the New Order" and "Lose Control. Love It.") The iPod has itself faded from popularity, due largely to the massive success of music- and video-capable "smartphones," including Apple's own iPhone (introduced in 2007) and the Samsung Galaxy.

Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)

the trade association representing the major labels that controlled the sale and distribution of approximately 90 percent of the offline music in the United States—filed suit against Napster, charging them with "tributary copyright infringement." (This meant that the firm was accused not of violating copyright itself but of contributing to and facilitating other people's violation of the law.) In its countersuit, Napster argued that because the actual files were not permanently stored on its servers but rather transferred from user to user, it was not acting illegally. A federal court injunction finally forced Napster to shut down operations in February 2001, and users exchanged some 2.79 billion files in the closing days of Napster's existence as a free service.