here is my opinion on how hip hop took over from rock in popularity in the mid 90's

around 1996 or so record company exec's of rock artists started to get greedy and
said "hey! why release singles to the public when we could sell these saps a full cd of songs for
$15..lets stop releasing singles and make them buy the whole album!..." so they did

but around that time to be eligible to have your song chart on the billboard singles chart you had to have a cd single released to retail outlets or else it wouldnt chart at all

well at the time hip hop & rap acts continued to pump out cd singles for retail stores therefore when each weeks billboard singles chart came out the chart was dominated by hip hop acts and rock acts were no longer found on the chart

so now radio stations who use billboard magazine as their bible look at each weeks chart and notice that most of the artists in the top 40 are all hip hop and began to drop rock acts from the playlists thinking that since they no longer appear on the singles chart they must not be what people want to hear

then eventually stations that had a pretty good balance of rock and r&b all became top 40 hip hop
rhythmic stations...now the young record buying public who everytime they turned on the radio would hear nothing but hip hop and dance made this stuff their music of choice because they really never hear much of anything else on the radio

so in my opinion just for a mid 90's slip up rock music will be paying a long time and may never recover back to the popularity it once had

but then again thats just my opinion

Nah nahh... it's just that "rock" by 1996 just seemed like played out grunge, and people were tired of that. I know I was.

Besides, in 1996 I remember there being no CD single for "Killing Me Softly" by The Fugees and that's one single that brought hip-hop to higher levels in pop/mainstream.

CinisterCee said:

I believe so too. I think hip hop just grew in popularity.

CinisterCee said:

yea i agree grunge really killed things

How do you like emo rock of today?

CinisterCee said:

i do like bands such as AFI and My Chemical Romance but i will always like 80's metal in fact with vh1 classic showing metal mania 8 hours total on the weekend im all set but it would be nice if i liked more new stuff

Mazerati said:

Ehh...that explains a little bit, at least on the commercial end. As for the artistic end, I think that grunge was really played out by 1996, and it was about this time that you had the perfect storm of musical events. Granted, Kurt Cobain had already been dead for about two years, but after Soundgarden broke up, Alice In Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, and Smashing Pumpkins all began imploding due to problems with their lead singers or key band members getting addicted to hard drugs, Tupac and Biggie were murdered, the Spice Girls and Hanson ushered in the new age of teen pop, and Mariah making hip-hop safe for the masses by suddenly having rappers appearing on the remixes of her hit singles, rock 'n roll really went on the skids. Even Pearl Jam. U2 and R.E.M., who had been the darlings of rock only a few years earlier, had lackluster commercial and/or artistic musical efforts.

As for hip-hop, I don't really believe it began to dominate over all pop and rock music until Eminem and the whole crunk scene blew up. Granted, hip-hop became huge in the late 90s and early 2000s, but it had to share the spotlight with all of the teen pop acts (Backstreet Boys, 'Nsync, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Destiny's Child, etc.). I think that the other thing that happened was that hip-hop itself became the music of rebellion for young teenagers. Rock 'n Roll used to be the rebellion of choice for young people, but since most kids today had parents who grew up listening to artists like the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Alice Cooper, parents themselves weren't shocked at all to hear kids listening to loud guitars or dark subject matter like drugs or suicide, Marilyn Manson notwithstanding. However, parents couldn't relate at all to gangsta rap or even cared for the loud thumping bass beats, and they became mortified when they heard lyrics about shooting people, bitches and hoes, etc. Since young kids always have wanted to rebel at their parents by doing things they knew that their parents would hate, they embraced hip-hop eagerly.

Rock was dead by 96, 94 was the last big year. 95 had some sparks.....

728huey said:

As DJ Yella pointed out, most of the fans of N.W.A. that were at their concerts at the height of Straight Outta Compton were white teens...and THIS was 1988-89. THOSE kids (along with the black & latino teens) made rap's gangsta style a huge kind of rebellion.....and it piss off their white parents a lot often than the most satanic-kind of heavy metal.
[Edited 9/17/06 22:04pm]

CinisterCee said:

.....and this is why rap-metal/rapcore went mainstream! THIS was a last attempt in trying to save rock & roll.

TonyVanDam said:

I agree with that!