Music of the United Kingdom (1990s-2000s)
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| Part of a series of articles on British Music |
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In the early 1990s, American grunge bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam helped inspire the British alternative rock scene. By the middle of the decade, the British charts were dominated by Britpop, a melding of British rock and roll forms from the last 30 years. Bands such as Blur, Suede and Oasis helped lead this charge. Pop group Spice Girls had great commercial succes and became one of the biggest British music exports of the decade. As the audience for electronica, techno and other forms of electronic dance music matured, various acts topped the charts in the middle of the decade, such as Leftfield, The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Massive Attack and Paul Oakenfold. These music genres fused and mutated into dozens of subgenres, including drum and bass, trance, house and trip hop. In the late 1990s and into the 2000s, melodic British rock groups such as Radiohead and Coldplay achieved great critical and commercial success.
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[edit] Neo soul
In the early 1990s, a new wave of soul acts emerged from the United Kingdom, drawing on 1980s pioneers such as Sade. Popular neo soul acts included Soul II Soul, Lisa Stansfield, Brand New Heavies, Mica Paris, Cathy Dennis and Caron Wheeler. The Brand New Heavies' 1970s-style funk-soul was perhaps the most influential neo soul act, paralleling and influencing the rise of American nu soul artists such as Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige and D'Angelo.
[edit] Dance music
In the early 1990s, many raves continued to be organized, despite their illegality, and legal dance gatherings also occurred. Dance music saw more exposure at rock music festivals in Glastonbury and Reading. The tension caused by police attention and the increase of harder music at raves caused many dance music fans to return to legal night clubs, where rave music had given way to progressive house. Other clubs emerged to play the ever-splintering genres associated with the house music and rave scene, including hardcore techno, downtempo and trance. Recorded artists further split the scene into subgenres, taking influences from across the musical spectrum. In the course of a few years, genres such as hardcore arose, only to diverge into subgenres such as drum and bass and happy hardcore.
[edit] Drum and Bass
Until the 1990s, the British dance scene included countless adaptations of American forms of acid house, techno, rare groove and other electronic music, and there was no distinctively British dance genre. The 1990s saw the development of drum and bass (also known as jungle]]), which originated in East London and the east coast the United Kingdom. Drum and bass is an extension of rock and roll's breakbeat heritage, and is often compared to hip hop. Unlike hip hop, drum andd bass uses beats in a much looser, more malleable fashion, sometimes creating polyrhythmic compositions. Drum and bass has incorporated beats and rhythms from calypso, dub and ragga, and led to the creation of ragga jungle. Other subgenres of drum and bass, included darkstep and hardstep, both of which attempted to maintain a more passionate and intense sound than the pop gimmicks of mainstream drum and bass.
[edit] Trip hop (Bristol Sound)
Trip hop (also known as the Bristol Sound is a term coined by United Kingdom dance magazine Mixmag, to describe a musical trend in the mid-1990s. Trip hop is downtempo electronic music that grew out of England's hip hop and house scenes. It is a fusion of breakbeat with jazz, funk, downtempo, soul and hip hop. Trip hop used sampled drum breaks with psychotropic soundscapes and few or no vocals. Notable trip hop artists include Massive Attack, Portishead, DJ Shadow, Tricky, Ruby, Howie B, Morcheeba and Glideascope. A more recent trip hop artist is Jem. Trip hop arose around the time of the 1992 release of Massive Attack's album Blue Lines. The Massive Attack song "Unfinished Sympathy" typifies genre, and has been voted the best song of all time by BBC Radio 1, NME, MTV2 and other broadcasters. Salon magazine has said that "Trip-hop and its offshoots in this country prove once more that lively ears and lots of inexpensive electronic equipment can forge, however briefly, an international community of taste."[1]
[edit] Jamaican music
The 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of Saxon DJs from Wood Green, North London, including Peter King and Smiley Culture. Later in the 1990s, fusions with hip hop became popular, led by London Posse and the crossover star Apache Indian. A techno fusion with reggae called jungle became popular among a new generations of Jamaican-Brits.
[edit] Indian music
The 1990s saw fusions of Indian music with Jamaican music in the United Kingdom, such as Apache Indian's bhangramuffin fusion of bhangra and raggamuffin. Mainstream success continued to build as prominent night clubs, record labels and the British pop charts saw major South Asian influence, culminating in Apache Indian's 1994 presentation on BBC Radio One. That same year, Outcaste Records released the album Migration by Nitin Sawhney fused flamenco and other genres with bhangra. By 1997, Indian music artists such as Talvin Singh had become mainstream stars in the UK.
[edit] Madchester, shoegazing, Britpop & indie rock
Early in the 1990s, shoegazing was the most popular genre of British alternative rock. [My Bloody Valentine]]'s 1991 album Loveless is often considered the pinnacle of shoegazing. That same year, Primal Scream released Screamadelica, combining rock inspired by the Rolling Stones with dance and house music production techniques. Screamadelica was a critical and commercial success, opening the way for the 1990s house-rock-hip hop-techno fusion bands such as Aphex Twin, Portishead and Massive Attack. Madchester and shoegazing had a wide enough audience that the British music trade magazines focused on them, even as both scenes were waning. The United States grunge music scene helped popularize British alternative rock.
Suede played guitar-based pop music that drew on The Smiths and 1970s glam rock performers such as David Bowie. The band released a series of singles and then the albumSuede, the fastest-selling record in British history. Blur was the most popular band to emerge in the wake of Suede's self-destruction. The band already had found an audience with 1993's Modern Life Is Rubbish, and they made a commercial and critical breakthrough with 1994's Parklife. Parklife featured influences from new wave, synth and jangle pop, psychedelic and glam rock, and grunge. 1994 also saw the Manchester-based Oasis begin to receive some attention in the British press. Skyrocketing from critical excitement to mainstream superstardom in a matter of months, Oasis' Definitely Maybe unseated Suede as the fastest-selling debut in history. Oasis rivalled Blur and defined what came to be known as Britpop. Britpop is characterized by influences from 1960s and 1970s, big and catchy hooks and glamour Many of the previous decades biggest cult bands found mainstream success in the wake of Oasis and Blur, and bands such as Boo Radleys, Pulp, Elastica and Supergrass experience commercial succes.
