Ciara
The First Lady of Crunk&B. Ciara arrived in 2004 with "Goodies" and a run of singles that owned school dances for half a decade — icy vocals over crunk beats, and choreography so sharp the music-video channels basically belonged to her.
Ciara Princess Harris was a teenager when she rewired the sound of 2004. Signed to LaFace Records, she released her debut single "Goodies" — featuring Petey Pablo and produced by crunk architect Lil Jon — and watched it sit at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for seven straight weeks. The song fused crunk's stomping club energy with cool, melodic R&B, and the press coined a genre on the spot: crunk&B, with Ciara crowned its First Lady. She was still in her teens.
The debut album Goodies proved it was no fluke — it would eventually be certified quadruple platinum — on the strength of a flawless singles run: "1, 2 Step" with Missy Elliott and "Oh" with Ludacris both climbed to number two, and each came with a video that did half the work — because Ciara's real superpower was movement. Her clean, popping choreography made her the era's must-watch music-video artist, and the "1, 2 Step" routine was replicated at every middle-school dance in America. At the 48th Grammy Awards she took home Best Short Form Music Video for Missy Elliott's "Lose Control," the hit she featured on.
Her 2006 follow-up, Ciara: The Evolution, debuted atop the Billboard 200, trading some club heat for slow-burn cuts like "Promise" and the gender-flipping "Like a Boy." In 2009 she notched another global top-ten with the slinky Justin Timberlake duet "Love Sex Magic." The hits cooled after that, but her cultural stock never did — later singles like "Body Party" and "Level Up" kept bringing her back to the center of the dance-challenge internet she'd helped invent. For anyone who grew up in the 2000s, though, it's simpler: Ciara is the sound of a gym floor clearing so somebody can hit the 1, 2 Step.
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