Having lived through it once again, I have to say that my mockery of 1999 music in the time following post-modernism’s penultimate year was misplaced in some ways and accurate in others. I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that 1999 really delivers for me. It’s the year my favorite Nine Inch Nails album, The Fragile, released. And I can’t claim to like all of the albums I’m about to list, but you can’t ignore how impactful 1999 was with it being the year of The Slim Shady LP, Beck’s Midnite Vultures, Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides, RHCP’s Californication, Mary J. Blige’s Mary, Dre’s 2001, MF Doom’s Operation: Doomsday, Limp Bizkit’s Significant Other, Incubus’s Make Yourself and dozens more. Someone is bound to have a special memory related to at least one of those albums and that’s only scratching the surface of albums that I am guessing most people reading this would recognize. That doesn’t even count the ones that dominated airwaves, like Backstreet Boys’ Millennium, TLC’s FanMail, and Britney’s Baby One More Time.

While 1999 music fired on all cylinders and provided plenty for fans of almost every genre to be happy about, it also ushered in a wave of pop that divided everyone. You loved it or you absolutely despised it. Britney Spears singlehandedly revived teen pop with one song that, still to this day, no one really understands what the lyrics mean, and an accompanying music video that accelerated puberty in a generation of tween males. Britney paved the way for eventual artists like Christina Aguilera, Pink, Rihanna, and even Avril Lavigne to follow. The Backstreet Boys’ rise to popularity made way for a geyser of boyband fever unseen since New Kids on the Block, with NSYNC, O-Town, and later One Direction all lip syncing on stage for arenas of screaming girls, young women, and confident cougars. The popularity of Creed’s Human Clay album from 1999 pushed the post-grunge era further toward a future where Nickelback and Creed were the most popular radio rock bands in the world. If Y2K wasn’t going to get us, then pop music would.

In 1999, pop music was on steroids. I blame MTV and the internet. Thanks to MTV’s Total Request Live, which premiered in September 1998 and still felt fresh a year later, music fandom was suddenly more interactive than it had ever been. The daily competition for top music video in a countdown of ten motivated teenagers in ways that clinical researchers and parents just wishing for their kids to clean their bedroom are still trying to understand. Young teen interests were over-represented on TRL, they being the only demographic with the time and awareness to vote, and thus shoved non-teeny bopper music into the dirt and changed out the entire guard.

Combine that with the boom of home internet and the arrival of OG pirating site Napster, which served to bring music to the masses like an electronic drug dealer, you have a recipe for a cultural revolution. I suspect that the demographic that enjoyed music outside of the teeny-bop sphere were more equipped to download their music illegally, perhaps altering sales figures and the perception of popularity ever so slightly. In the years since, artist have said that the success of Napster and successive file sharing sites helped get their music heard, spread around, and ultimately improved their long-term sales but at the time statistics were skewed in certain directions. While you were downloading Radiohead’s Kid A or that new Sigur Ros album from that year because you were (and still are) cool as hell, your mom was buying your little sister Backstreet Boys Millennium and to any executive wearing a tie in 1999, the future looked bright for teen pop.

“How can I listen to Load and Re-Load without letting Metallica know…?”

It's fair to point out that the impact of Napster was most felt in 2000 after the program had time to spread worldwide following its June 1, 1999 debut. In the year 2000, record sales figures decreased 33%, a significant figure. The global music industry changed immediately; it had no choice.

Of course, this is just my opinion and not a thing I’ve researched to any great extent, but I see post-1999 as much more pop-influenced than the grunge and alternative led early and mid-90’s had been. After 1999, we start seeing even more shallow reality TV, we see teen pop take center stage over the prior era’s leading artists, and we see a lot more Carson Daly for the next decade. Teens have largely always been the driving force for marketing, but thanks to their over-representation during this era, the music world shifted in a hard direction that placed other music genres completely out of view.

The Music of 1999

Columbine and Elian Gonzalez