Who Killed Rock And Roll?
Welcome to**** Listening Habits,a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.
The year 1996 marked a major shift in music. An era-defining rap beef seemed to pit the entire city of Los Angeles against the entire city of New York. Rap as a whole saw its position in the industry skyrocket, as its biggest artists were becoming true pop stars, a phenomenon lead by Bad Boy Records and a certain producer who had completely overtaken rap radio. Even the genre's regional scenes, like in Atlanta and Houston, were blowing up and opening the door to even more overlooked markets to break through. Elsewhere, the boy-band movement was getting revved up in Florida. Alternative rock, which had exploded with bands like Nirvana and Alice in Chains, was running on fumes—concerns over which heaped pressure on Pavement, fresh off 1995's Wowee Zowee (still their best album, idc), whom legions of unkempt white guys hoped would become the next big thing for the MTV Generation. Rock would soon undergo its own change to close out the '90s, getting more aggro, more hyper-masculine, more hip hop; this was in part a response by the labels to the changing landscape of popular music, and also a reflection that rock's rising stars were just as influenced by Public Enemy and the Wu-Tang Clan as by Metallica and Led Zeppelin.
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