- Mariah Carey, Emotions
- Vanilla Ice, To the Extreme
- Sting, The Soul Cages
- Wilson Phillips, Wilson Phillips
- Whitney Houston, I'm Your Baby Tonight
- M.C. Hammer, Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em
- Bette Midler, Some People's Lives
- Gloria Estefan, Into the Light
- The Black Crowes, Shake Your Money Maker
- C&C Music Factory, Gonna Make You Sweat
I would classify most of this music as lite pop, adult contemporary, pretty homogenous. SoundScan was instituted in May 1991. By the time the dust settled, the top 10 looked like this in November 1991:
- Garth Brooks, Ropin' the Wind
- Ice Cube, Death Certificate
- M.C. Hammer, Too Legit To Quit
- Guns 'n' Roses, Use Your Illusion II
- Metallica, Metallica
- Prince and the N.P.G., Diamonds
- Guns 'n' Roses, Use Your Illusion I
- Mariah Carey, Emotions
- Nirvana, Nevermind
- Boyz II Men, Cooleyhighharmony
Put simply, the first chart reflects what the record companies thought people were buying (or probably more accurately, what they wanted them to be buying); the second chart represents what people were actually buying. A few remarks about the second chart: first, country music is at the top: Ropin' the Wind debuted at #1 on the pop charts. This surprised many in the industry. Second, rap music--the "dangerous" kind represented by Ice Cube, not the "safe" (i.e., "white") rap of Vanilla Ice--was in a close second. Third, heavy metal figures very prominently.
This chart shake-up resulted in the major labels snatching up independent labels and artists as the industry began to consolidate. From this point on, I would argue, the history of country music and the history of rap music become intertwined, so much so that I would argue that country music and rap become mirror images of one another. Once both genres were recognized as profitable, labels would sign anyone that looked the part and could carry a tune. Travis Tritt referred to artists like Garth Brooks as "hat acts," a disparaging way of suggesting that anyone with a cowboy hat and boots could get a recording contract--they lacked the authenticity of "real" country artists. A similar phenomenon occurs in rap music, the so-called "studio gangster." Both monikers imply that authenticity is an important part of both genres: in order to sing about it (or rap about it), you must have lived it.
A second problem comes from what I see as a fundamental misreading of early examples of each genre. I'll speak only to rap music here, since I don't really know much about country music. In the early days of rap, the genre was remarkably diverse and dealt mainly with partying (i.e., "Rapper's Delight") or subjects of social importance (Grandmaster Flash, "The Message"). It wasn't until the emergence of gangsta rap on the West Coast in the late 1980s that profanity, violence, and misogyny started creeping into rap music. If you listen to just about any song by Ice-T, considered by many to be the first gangsta rapper, you'll find that most of his songs are cautionary tales: he is a victim of his circumstances and occasionally has to respond violently, and his songs often have tragic endings (consider my favorite, "Midnight"). Once the record industry started signing rap artists, they looked for people who would deliver the violent, profane, and misogynist content abstracted from the original cautionary context. The violence, etc. became an end in itself rather than a means to an end.
The consolidation of record labels, radio stations, and television stations that took place in the latter part of the 1990s compounded these problems. The diversity of representations was gone from the airwaves and viewers/listeners were subjected to an increasingly narrow number of artists that were carefully groomed and promoted to achieve maximum profit. Part of the problem here also has to do with the kind of rap music that was popular when SoundScan emerged: mainstream rap today might be considerably different if, say, Talib Kweli and Common had been at the top of the charts.
In her book The Hip-Hop Wars, Tricia Rose presents five arguments in defense of hip-hop and five arguments against hip-hop, aligning herself with the political left and right, respectively. Her arguments against hip hop are as follows:
- Hip hop causes violence
- Hip hop reflects black dysfunctional ghetto culture
- Hip hop hurts black people
- Hip hop is destroying America's values
- Hip hop demeans women
Her arguments in defense of hip hop:
- Just keeping it real
- Hip hop is not responsible for sexism
- "There are bitches and hos"
- We're not role models
- Nobody talks about the positive in hip hop
It seems to me that we could construct an identical list for country music post-1990. It might look something like this:
- Country music reflects white, dysfunctional rural culture
- Country music hurts white rural residents
- Country music reinforces America's [traditional conservative] values
- Country music demeans women
We could offer similar defenses for the current state of country music as well: it didn't create sexism, we're just singing about our lives, etc.
By way of illustration, I offer the following two examples:
The comparison is made explicit by the following seemingly unlikely collaboration:
This "distinction" between rap and country is suggestive of the early "distinction" between "race" records and "hillbilly" music: from a musical perspective, the two genres had quite a lot in common; the only real difference between them was the way that they were marketed. Race music was black music; hillbilly music was white music.
Feedback is always welcome in the comments. I'd be particularly interested in what those knowledgeable about country music have to say.