48 items
The Queens mixtape king who survived being shot nine times, got signed by Eminem and Dr. Dre, and turned his bulletproof origin story into one of the biggest rap debuts of the decade. For a few years in the mid-2000s, 'In da Club' and 'Get Rich or Die Tryin'' were everywhere, and 50 Cent was the most bankable name in hip-hop.
The Backstreet Boy's little brother, who opened for the band at nine, sold three million copies of Aaron's Party in the United States, and rapped about beating Shaquille O'Neal one-on-one while Shaq himself played along in the video. For a few years around 2000 he was the biggest pop star in the fourth grade.
Pop-punk's sneakiest hit started as an SR-71 album track before Bowling for Soup rebuilt it into a double-Platinum sing-along about a suburban mom stuck in the era of "Springsteen, Madonna, way before Nirvana." The cruel joke wrote itself: the song about being nostalgic for the wrong decade is now the thing you're nostalgic for.
![Video thumbnail — Busta Rhymes - Woo-Hah!! Got You All In Check (Official Video) [Explicit]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/EQzvQO2LcA4/maxresdefault.jpg)
The human cartoon of 90s rap—hip-hop's most watchable man, a blur of dreadlocks and rubbery limbs who moved like he was made of springs. Trevor Smith stole posse cuts for a living and built a solo career on being impossible to look away from.
The mail-order music gamble that tangled millions in negative-option billing: "Get 12 CDs for a penny," then buy more albums at full price or face automatic charges. Columbia House was the trap that snapped shut after the free shipment arrived—and every kid who signed up under a fake name was trying to outsmart the system.
Konami's iconic rhythm game where players step on a four-arrow dance pad in time with on-screen cues and music. Debuting in Japanese arcades in 1998, DDR became a global phenomenon—from arcade halls to living rooms—defining an entire genre of music-timing games.
Knight Rider's Michael Knight, Baywatch's Mitch Buchannon, and — no joke — the biggest thing on the German pop charts in 1989. He revived a canceled show with his own money, sang on the Berlin Wall in a light-up jacket, and then laughed at the punchline harder than anyone.
The ritual of portable CD life: a Sony Discman clipped to your waist or backpack, Electronic Skip Protection bragged on the box, and a zip-up CD binder holding exactly 24 discs — the ones that defined you. CD binders like Case Logic wallets replaced jewel cases, turning your music taste into curated, tangible proof of personality.
The barking Yonkers growl who crash-landed on the glossy late-90s rap charts like a dog off its chain. Earl Simmons snarled prayers over Swizz Beatz beats, made Ruff Ryders a household name, and opened a #1 movie at the box office. Equal parts menace and open wound, he was hip-hop's most ferocious voice when it needed one most.
Marshall Mathers from Detroit, a white rapper in a Black art form, exploded into stardom with shock-rap alter ego Slim Shady and relentless rhymes. The blond buzzcut, unapologetic controversy, Dr. Dre mentorship, and hits like 'Stan' and 'The Real Slim Shady' made him the biggest and most polarizing star in music during the early 2000s.
![Video thumbnail — En Vogue - My Lovin' (You're Never Gonna Get It) (Official Music Video) [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/JIuYQ_4TcXg/maxresdefault.jpg)
The Oakland quartet that brought four-part girl-group harmony into '90s R&B: "Hold On," "My Lovin' (You're Never Gonna Get It)," "Free Your Mind," and three #2 pop hits. A 2010 Billboard ranking put them third among female R&B groups of the previous 25 years, behind only TLC and Destiny's Child.
"And we'll all float on, okay?" — the shrugging, off-kilter singalong that carried indie rock onto every radio station, mall speaker, and burned CD of 2004. A decade-old cult band from Washington state suddenly had the most reassuring song in America.
Garth Brooks made country music arena-sized. The wireless headset, the hit-after-hit albums, and "Friends in Low Places" became the sound of the '90s — country that didn't apologize for being enormous, and made it look like the point all along.
A band made entirely of cartoons — four animated characters with biographies and feuds, fronting music made by people you never saw. Their videos ran on MTV like Saturday-morning cartoons for teenagers, and when Gorillaz opened the 2006 Grammys as life-size projections, a genuinely new kind of pop star had arrived.
![Video thumbnail — Guitar Hero (PS2) - Trailer [2005]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NLncFUN2plc/hqdefault.jpg)
The plastic guitar controller that turned living rooms into rock venues and made you feel like you could shred—Guitar Hero arrived in November 2005 with just five fret buttons and a strum bar, playing note-scrolling highways to licensed rock songs. It became a living-room phenomenon. Guitar Hero III (2007) and its brutal finale 'Through the Fire and Flames' defined the genre's peak before the plastic-instrument bubble burst from over-saturation around 2010.
After a decade fronting No Doubt, Gwen Stefani reinvented herself as a solo pop force in 2004 — dropping "Hollaback Girl," parading her Harajuku Girls, and launching a fashion empire. It was maximalist, brand-savvy 2000s pop at its peak.
Steve Jobs unveiled the iPod on October 23, 2001, promising "1,000 songs in your pocket." The original model packed a 5GB hard drive, mechanical scroll wheel, and FireWire connection—Mac-only, $399. The click wheel, iTunes Music Store (2003), and later Windows support made it the gateway device to digital music and one of the most influential electronics ever built.
A gum-stick iPod with no screen: you loaded it with iTunes' AutoFill, hung it around your neck, pressed play and took what it gave you. Announced in 2005 as the first iPod under $100, sold with the tagline "Life is random." It bet that surrendering control of your music could feel like freedom — which is roughly how everyone listens now.
The Nirvana singer and songwriter whose Nevermind knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the Billboard chart in January 1992 and pulled grunge and Aberdeen, Washington, into the mainstream. He was called the voice of his generation and never made peace with it, and his death in April 1994, at 27, is the line a lot of people draw under their adolescence.
Born in 1982, LeAnn Rimes released "Blue" at thirteen in 1996 and became an overnight country sensation with an impossibly mature voice. She won Grammy Awards for Best New Artist and Best Female Country Vocal Performance in 1997, becoming the youngest person ever to win those awards. Her 1997 ballad "How Do I Live" spent a record 69 weeks on the Hot 100—Billboard later ranked it the most successful song of the 1990s.
The Los Angeles radio-rock band behind "Hanging by a Moment" — a famous Billboard chart anomaly. Frontman Jason Wade's five-minute songwriting session produced a single that never hit weekly No. 1 yet finished as Billboard's No. 1 song of 2001. Earnest, huge-chorused, everywhere.
The lawless era of free music: you queued up a download that would take three hours on dial-up, crossed your fingers it wasn't mislabeled, and hoped even harder it wasn't a virus. Napster and LimeWire were the P2P revolution that detonated the music industry, made kids into accidental outlaws, and eventually gave way to iTunes.
The Jacksonville metal band that defined nu-metal's MTV dominance. Fred Durst's backwards red Yankees cap and Wes Borland's shock-value body paint made them impossible to ignore. They broke through with a cover of George Michael's "Faith" reimagined as down-tuned metal. They became the sound of late-90s TRL, then evaporated just as fast.
Microsoft's answer to the iPod arrived in November 2006 — thicker, later, and available in brown. The Zune became tech's favorite punchline, but the punchline hid real ideas: wireless song-sharing, a subscription music pass years before streaming won, and a UI so good it became the design language of Windows Phone.
Sony's 1992 answer to the cassette: a recordable digital disc in a plastic shell that let you name tracks, shuffle them around and copy a CD without a hiss, and that played on through a bump thanks to a memory buffer. Japan bought it for twenty years. America shrugged.
The mixtape of the CD-R era: download MP3s from file-sharing sites, burn them to a blank disc in Nero or iTunes, label it with Sharpie, and pray it didn't skip. Mix CDs were the late-90s and 2000s ritual—track order agonized over, burnable only by those with a CD-R drive, given as love offerings and road-trip soundtracks.
The compact cassette made music personal; the Walkman made it portable; and the mixtape made it meaningful. A hand-labeled tape was a love letter, a friendship offering, an identity statement — hovering over the record button to catch a song off the radio, agonizing over track order, building the perfect sequence for someone who mattered.
Oasis's second album was the sound of the 1990s reaching critical mass: brothers Noel (songwriter, deadpan guitar) and Liam (arrogant vocals) Gallagher channeling The Beatles, bombast, and Manchester swagger into 12 tracks that became anthems. One of the best-selling albums ever, it made Oasis briefly the biggest rock band on Earth.
MTV's 1990s golden era transformed the channel from music-video jukebox into a cultural force, with Total Request Live (TRL), The Real World, Beavis and Butt-Head, MTV Unplugged, and a rotation of music videos that defined the decade's soundtrack. Music Television delivered exactly what it promised: a place where youth culture, music, and rebellion converged on cable.
Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl didn't invent grunge—but their 1991 album Nevermind accidentally blew it up worldwide, displacing Michael Jackson from #1 and making flannel shirts and angst the uniform of the decade.
![Video thumbnail — The Notorious B.I.G. - Juicy (Official Video) [4K]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_JZom_gVfuw/maxresdefault.jpg)
Brooklyn's rap king — Christopher Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls — whose effortless flow and vivid street storytelling made him the defining East Coast voice of the mid-90s. His 1997 murder, still unsolved, cut short one of hip-hop's greatest careers at just 24.
A paper-thin dog raps his way through karate class, a driving test and a bathroom line to win over a flower-like girl named Sunny Funny — "Kick! Punch! It's all in the mind!" Sony's U.S. arm had a rule against 2D games and released it anyway, and it set the template for a whole genre.
Seattle's other grunge titans: Eddie Vedder's baritone over the anthems of Ten, then a career spent actively refusing rock stardom — no more music videos, few interviews, and a one-band war against Ticketmaster.
The Vermont jam band that never had a hit single and never needed one. While the radio played everyone else, Phish built an empire out of marathon two-set shows, fan-taped cassettes traded hand to hand, and festivals so big they were briefly the largest concerts in America.
Five schoolmates from Abingdon who went from one self-loathing hit to the album that redefined what a rock band could be. Radiohead's 90s arc — Creep, The Bends, OK Computer — is rock's great escape from one-hit-wonder purgatory.
From college-radio cult band to the thinking fan's arena colossus — R.E.M. was the bridge between the 1980s underground and the 1990s alternative explosion. "Losing My Religion" and "Everybody Hurts" became anthems for a generation, and the Athens, Georgia quartet proved that you could be smart, cryptic, and absolutely massive all at once.
A teenager from Barbados who walked into a New York audition and walked out with a six-album deal, then spent the back half of the 2000s taking over pop radio. From the steel-drum bounce of 'Pon de Replay' to the umbrella-ella-ella hook that owned the summer of 2007, Robyn Rihanna Fenty went from island newcomer to global star before she turned 21.
A former Missouri music teacher and Michael Jackson backup singer who broke through in 1994 with "All I Wanna Do," then followed it with "If It Makes You Happy," "Everyday Is a Winding Road" and "Soak Up the Sun." She won nine Grammys along the way.
Five animal buddies, one magical backyard, and a different musical genre every episode. Created by Janice Burgess for Nickelodeon in 2004, it should have been forgotten years ago — except the soundtrack went so unreasonably hard that TikTok rediscovered it in 2021 and refused to let go.
A Limerick band fronted by Dolores O'Riordan's unmistakable keening wail, The Cranberries seemed to come out of nowhere in 1993 and then were impossible to escape — "Linger," "Dreams," and then "Zombie," the stadium-sized protest song that outlived the decade.
The Orange County lifers who took punk from the underground to total radio domination in one 1994 stroke. Smash became one of the best-selling albums ever released on an independent label, with "Come Out and Play" and "Self Esteem" detonating on modern-rock radio. A second, goofier peak followed with Americana and "Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)." Decades later, frontman Dexter Holland finished a PhD in molecular biology—and the band never stopped touring.
The best-selling American girl group since the Supremes. T-Boz, Left Eye, and Chilli fused hip-hop, R&B, and a playful safe-sex message into era-defining hits — "Waterfalls," "No Scrubs," "Creep" — in baggy streetwear that a generation copied.
Poet, movie star, and the most magnetic voice hip-hop ever produced — Tupac Shakur went from Digital Underground backup dancer to the center of the rap universe in five furious years. Then a Las Vegas drive-by ended his life at 25, and the legend only grew.
Dublin's titanic arena-rock band, who peaked once in the 1980s and reinvented themselves entirely in the 1990s as ironic multimedia spectacle. The Nineties U2 was fearless—Berlin studios, video walls the size of buildings, prank calls to the White House. They nearly broke up, then wrote "One" and changed everything.
Sony's cassette player made music something you carried: foam-pad headphones, a belt clip, and a pocketful of AA batteries it drained by the week. Born in 1979, it was such a default fact of 90s life that 'Walkman' had long since stopped meaning Sony and started meaning the whole idea.
The Los Angeles band that made being a nerd sound like the coolest thing in the world. The 1994 "Blue Album" and its Spike Jonze videos — the Happy Days-themed "Buddy Holly" chief among them — turned Rivers Cuomo's sweater-clad geek-rock into a generational touchstone.
The king of musical parody, Alfred Matthew Yankovic turned accordion jokes and lyrical hijinks into a decade-long MTV empire. He made fun of the songs everyone loved—and everyone watched him do it.
The Voice, no qualifier needed. Whitney Houston arrived in 1985 with a record-breaking debut and never slowed down: seven consecutive #1 singles — still unmatched — and, with The Bodyguard, the best-selling soundtrack of all time. For a stretch of the '90s, she simply was the pop ballad.