Electronic music in the 1990s
Electronic music in the 1990s experienced a significant transformation driven by technological advancements in synthesizers and computers, making music production more accessible to individual artists. This era saw the rise of dance music genres such as house and techno, which originated in Chicago and Detroit, respectively, and rapidly spread to urban centers across the United States. The underground rave scene flourished as these genres merged with European influences, giving birth to subgenres like acid techno and epic trance.
While house and techno became synonymous with rave culture, other genres such as Krautrock and ambient music remained somewhat detached from this scene. Krautrock, characterized by its blend of psychedelic rock and avant-garde electronics, influenced notable artists like Moby, who would go on to achieve mainstream success. Ambient music, initiated by Brian Eno, also found its way into the broader music landscape, affecting various genres and artists.
By the late 1990s, electronic music had gained a larger audience, although it often went unrecognized by mainstream critics. However, the incorporation of electronic sounds into pop music was significant, exemplified by successful collaborations and hits from artists like C+C Music Factory and Madonna. The decade marked a notable shift where deejays and electronic producers became essential contributors to mainstream music, leaving a lasting impact on both the music industry and popular culture, including film soundtracks.
Subject Terms
Electronic music in the 1990s
Music produced and heard through electronic means
Electronic music evolved significantly in the 1990’s, creating dozens of new music genres and hundreds of new subgenres, as well as spurring a vibrant underground rave culture in many American cities. Moreover, electronic music influenced mainstream pop, hip-hop, and rock music and was incorporated into movie sound tracks.
Technological advances in electronic music equipment generated a turn in the American music industry toward increasingly accessible and easy-to-use synthesizers and computers, which allowed individual musicians to create music in the domestic confines of their house or apartment. Consequently, a number of dance music artists, or deejays, emerged from major urban centers where they found an audience who embraced their music in all-night dance clubs. House music, coming out of Chicago, and techno music, originating in Detroit, spread quickly into other American cities during the early 1990’s, combining with other genres like European trance and British trip-hop to form new subgenres such as acid techno, anthem house, and epic trance, all of which contributed to and became associated with the growing underground rave scene.
Two major electronic music genres, however, remained detached from rave culture. Krautrock combined psychedelic rock with avant-garde electronics to create a dark, mechanical sound more appealing to listeners at home than audiences at concerts or nightclubs. The audience, then, was relatively small in America, but German Krautrock groups like Kraftwerk, who describe their own music as “robot pop,” had far-reaching influence on more popular musicians of the latter 1990’s such as New York deejay Moby. The other major genre not formally associated with rave culture, ambient music, is often characterized by what it lacks, frequently leaving out lyrics, beats, and the typical song structure of a general rhythm leading to a lyrical or melodic refrain. Begun by British musician and producer Brian Eno, ambient music, like Krautrock, had a limited audience but widespread influence on other genres, like trance, and other musicians, finding its most popular expression, again, in Moby.
Although electronic dance music in the latter 1990’s became associated with rave culture and the drug use associated with raves, this did not deter some music artists from going mainstream. The English electronica group The Prodigy found mainstream success in America with The Fat of the Land (1997), which included best-selling singles “Breathe” and “Firestarter,” both of which were made into music videos that aired on MTV that year. Moby was the only American electronic artist to gain consistent mainstream success in the United States. His 1999 platinum album, Play, met with success on the radio and on MTV, and all eighteen songs on the album were licensed out for commercials, television shows, and movies, earning him criticism from techno purists and praise from mainstream critics. Nevertheless, during the late 1990’s, Moby’s name was synonymous with electronic music in the United States.
Electronic Music and Mainstream Music
As a genre in itself, electronic music gained a larger audience in the 1990’s, though, with a few exceptions, it generally went unacknowledged by mainstream critics and news media. However, the same sounds that had fueled clubgoers in urban American dance clubs were readily adopted by popular musicians and producers as musical background for singers’ lyrics and vocal melodies. Particularly influential in the spread of electronic music into the pop mainstream, C+C Music Factory, an American group formed by two former deejays, Robert Clivillés and David Cole, released their incredibly successful debut album in 1990, Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now), which combined the sounds of Chicago house music with R&B female vocals and deep-voiced male rapping. Though the contribution from dance genres to the genres of R&B, rap, and hip-hop varied in the 1990’s, C+C Music Factory set a standard of combining electronically produced rhythms with soulful vocals and rap lyrics in all three categories.
Marking a general turn in popular music, the deejays and producers of dance music became crucial participants in the production of mainstream popular music. An early example, two British dance music producers, Neal Slateford and Nick Batt, remixed American alternative musician Suzanne Vega’s 1981 a cappella song, “Tom’s Diner,” which became a hit upon its release in 1990. Beyond the remixing and sampling that became common among dance music deejays in the 1990’s, controversial singer Madonna collaborated with dance and ambient musician William Orbit for her 1998 album, Ray of Light, which won three Grammy Awards in 1999. Deejays such as Orbit, who also worked with rock musicians Seal, Sting, Peter Gabriel, and Prince, were often behind the scenes as collaborators and producers of some of the most popular songs of the decade.
Impact
While deejays earned modest sums performing at clubs and raves, they left an indelible mark on popular music, as described above, and in American film. In addition to the widespread use of Moby’s music in television and film, ambient and techno music began to appear more prominently in film. The often eerie soundscapes ambient composers were able to produce fit the dark moods and serious tone of psychological crime movies, such as Michael Mann’s Heat (1995), which featured tracks composed by Brian Eno, William Orbit, and Moby. Dramas and action films such as Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996) and Larry and Andy Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999) incorporated more upbeat tracks from techno groups like Underworld and The Prodigy. Fitting the overall trend toward Americans’ increased reliance on electronics, electronic music both reflected and influenced this trend.
Bibliography
Gilbert, Jeremy, and Ewan Pearson. Discographies: Dance Music, Culture, and the Politics of Sound. New York: Routledge, 1999. This critical study on dance music and culture engages with the intersection of conservative ideologies and social perceptions of the body, a combination that explains, in part, the hostility to this subculture.
Holmes, Thomas B. Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in Technology and Composition. New York: Routledge, 2002. A well-documented study on the people and innovations that made electronic music possible, this book focuses on the aesthetic production of music rather than the troubling task of categorizing all electronically produced music.
Manning, Peter. Electronic and Computer Music . New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. While the influence of cultural factors are touched upon in this historically insightful book, its strength rests on Manning’s insight into the technological evolution of instruments that led to modern electronic music.
Shapiro, Peter, ed. Modulations: A History of Electronic Music—Throbbing Words on Sound. New York: Caipirinha Productions, 2000. With chapters written by musicians and interviews with some of electronic music’s innovators, this survey of the major electronic music genres serves as an excellent introduction to this diverse and growing field.