Klein, Allison.What Would Murphy Brown Do? How the
Women of Prime Time Changed Our Lives. Emery-
ville, Calif.: Seal Press, 2006.
Lowe, Denise.Women and American Television: An En-
cyclopedia. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1999.
Martin J. Manning
See also Clooney, George;ER; Journalism; Quayle,
Dan; Television; Women in the workforce; Women’s
rights.
Music
Definition The many styles of popular music and
its subgenres
The 1990’s, in terms of popular music, was the decade in
which subgenres of all styles that had developed in previous
decades rose to mainstream prominence. Additionally, tech-
nological advances at the end of the decade influenced the
way musicians shared their work with fans, and how fans
shared music with one another. The rise of new genres chal-
lenged the way rock, pop, and rap music were classified.
Further, in regard to performers, the 1990’s gave rise to
iconoclastic female performers, boy bands, and a new gener-
ation of teen performers whose looks and sounds separated
them from their counterparts of previous decades.
By the 1990’s, rock music was forty years old, and
popular music in all its forms had become such a
part of the North American entertainment land-
scape that individuals from a variety of ethnicities
and social and political designations wanted to rep-
resent their style and need for expression in the new
varieties of music that began during the decade. As a
result, the demographics of popular performers
were beginning to more closely resemble that of the
United States and North America as a whole.
The 1990’s were seemingly a time for all popular
music genres to reinvent themselves. By 1990, Music
Television (MTV) was almost a decade old. Audi-
ences expected to see their favorite performers and
up-and-coming acts on the video channel. In short,
what had been new and important in the previous
decade was at risk of becoming irrelevant in the new
decade.
Like the previous decade, pop music as a dance-
and fashion-oriented genre remained popular
throughout the 1990’s. However, new performers
created dances to go with their songs in a number of
crazes that swept through club scenes and wedding
receptions. The new dances punctuated beats from
drum machines that were harsher than those of the
1980’s, and the high-energy dances were often more
strictly aerobic than their smoother counterparts of
the previous decade. Relevant to the musical style
revolution of the 1990’s is techno, a type of elec-
tronic dance music that was invented in the United
Kingdom in the 1980’s, and house music, a form of
electronic music that is a hybrid of American funk
and soul combined with European techno, featur-
ing strong, often anthemic vocals. These styles en-
tered the mainstream via chart-topping singles.
Guitar-oriented rock music underwent a revolu-
tion as well. The 1990’s were ushered in by an under-
ground rock sound that, prior to 1990, was known
mostly around the Seattle, Washington, area of the
United States. It was called “grunge.” Typified by
heavy guitar riffs, reminiscent of punk rock, but
played at a slower tempo, with energetic drums and
rough-edged vocals that often grew into sounds that
resembled screams, grunge at first was difficult to
define. A number of bands became popular as
grunge moved from the West Coast to all of North
America.
Even rap music, the relative newcomer to the
popular music scene, underwent a metamorphosis
to remain relevant to a changing audience base and
the music industry—which at one time in the 1980’s
had disparaged it as a fad because of its apparent
lack of live instruments—and as a result became one
of definitive genres of the 1990’s.
While genres as a whole made changes, individual
performers, especially in the genres of rhythm and
blues, pop, and rap, and in particular those whose
careers began in previous decades, also revised their
styles, or in some cases, switched from their typical
genres to maintain their place in music history
throughout the 1990’s. In addition, the teen per-
formers of the 1990’s displayed an adult sensibility
that was largely absent in their counterparts of the
previous decade.Rock While the public backlash against disco as
early as 1980 allowed Top 40 Pop and various forms
of rock music to dominant the decade and in effect
bring about the extinction of disco, arguably, it was
heavy metal’s inability to develop and, as a result,
parody itself that made it possible for grunge to take
over as the hard rock sound of the 1990’s.The Nineties in America Music 595