The golden age of hip-hop and pop music … and the sell-out of rock? Hip-hop wasn’t born in the 90s, but that’s when its seeds “positively mushroomed,” DW says. But the decade also nearly spelled disaster for the genre, Complex notes. Black radio stations were playing less and less hip-hop, which gave the genre little airtime unless artists succumbed to the pressure of “softening” their music until it no longer fit the real hip-hop bill. Cultural appropriation was rife, golden age artists were marginalized, and rap records were threatened with legal action for their explicit lyrics. We can’t talk about 1990s hip-hop without mentioning the likes of Tupac, the Notorious B.I.G., Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, and Ice Cube. Tupac and Biggie’s East Coast/West Coast rivalry spanned the better part of the decade, and culminated in both rappers getting murdered one year apart. Their shootings nudged the genre towards less violent music, some scholars say.

Pop music also skyrocketed in the 90s with the emergence of boy- and girl-bands such as Backstreet Boys, NSync, Destiny’s Child, the Spice Girls, and TLC (we don’t want No Scrubs). Individual artists also dominated the spotlight: Britney Spears released her chart-topper …Baby One More Time (remember the Catholic school girl music video?) in 1998, everybody was Vogue-ing to Madonna’s voice in 1990, and Prince has far too many iconic songs from the decade for us to only name one.

Underground punk and rock music found their way into the mainstream in the 1990s, but the transition was more confusing than anything for these genres, Craig Schuftan writes for Radio National. The music, which had long been called “alternative” for being an alternative to popular genres, suddenly found itself a popular genre and somewhat unsure of its identity. It was both seen as a “gigantic sellout [and] celebrated as a revolution … It was an intellectual balancing act.”