Painting of a long corridor of record spines, their colour running from gold in the foreground to cold blue in the distance

Free reference  ·  from all thirty-one volumes

A timeline of
popular music.

926 dated entries, 1900 to the 2020s, taken in full from the back of every volume in the series. Free to read, free to quote with attribution.

1900s

1907JAZZ
  • Buddy Bolden is committed to the Louisiana state hospital at Jackson. He is never recorded.

1910s

1912BLUES
  • W. C. Handy begins publishing blues compositions in Memphis; the word enters the sheet-music trade.
1917JAZZ
  • 26 February: the Original Dixieland Jazz Band record for Victor in New York; the first jazz record. Autumn: the copyright suit over it collapses in Chicago; the Storyville district is closed by Navy order.
1918JAZZ
  • Joe Oliver leaves New Orleans for Chicago.

1920s

1920BLUES
  • 14 February. Mamie Smith records two Perry Bradford songs for OKeh: the first blues-adjacent record by a Black singer aimed at a general catalogue.
  • 10 August, Crazy Blues, with Her Jazz Hounds. The race-record market is proven in one release.
1920JAZZ
  • January: Prohibition begins. August: Crazy Blues; the race-record market is discovered.
1921BLUES
  • OKeh organises its dedicated race series. Harry Pace founds Black Swan, the first significant Black-owned label; Ethel Waters’s Down Home Blues carries it.
1921JAZZ
  • Harry Pace founds Black Swan, the first substantial black-owned label.
1922BLUES
  • Paramount, the Wisconsin Chair Company’s label, enters the race market; mail-order advertising in the Chicago Defender follows.
1922COUNTRY
  • June. Eck Robertson records fiddle sides for Victor in New York. Commercially, almost nothing happens.
  • Atlanta’s WSB begins broadcasting; Fiddlin’ John Carson becomes a radio fixture.
1922JAZZ
  • Oliver, at Lincoln Gardens, sends to New Orleans for Louis Armstrong.
1923BLUES
  • June, Ralph Peer’s OKeh unit records in Atlanta: the first significant southern field trip. Columbia signs Bessie Smith; Downhearted Blues becomes one of the decade’s biggest sellers. Paramount signs Ma Rainey. December, Black Swan stops recording; bankruptcy follows.
1923COUNTRY
  • June. Ralph Peer records Carson in Atlanta for OKeh at Polk Brockman’s urging. The unnumbered first pressing sells out; the hillbilly record business begins.
1923JAZZ
  • The Creole Jazz Band records at Gennett, Richmond, Indiana. Dipper Mouth Blues.
1924BLUES
  • Papa Charlie Jackson’s self-accompanied blues sides for Paramount open the male country-blues market. Ma Rainey records See See Rider Blues with Louis Armstrong.
1924COUNTRY
  • April. WLS Chicago, owned by Sears, first broadcasts the programme that becomes the National Barn Dance.
1924JAZZ
  • Armstrong joins Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra at Roseland, New York.
1925BLUES
  • Western Electric’s electrical recording system reaches Victor and Columbia. The microphone replaces the horn.
1925COUNTRY
  • January. Al Hopkins’s band, asked its name, supplies the word the whole catalogue will wear. Electrical recording arrives in the industry. October. WSM Nashville, owned by National Life and Accident Insurance, goes on the air.
  • 28 November. Uncle Jimmy Thompson fiddles on WSM. The mail arrives in sacks; the barn dance becomes a fixture.
1925JAZZ
  • Electrical recording arrives at the major companies. May: Sugar Foot Stomp, Armstrong inside Henderson’s written orchestra. November: the Hot Five sessions begin in Chicago.
1926BLUES
  • Paramount’s first Blind Lemon Jefferson blues releases sell nationally. Reverend J. M. Gates begins his recorded-sermon career. Victoria Spivey records Black Snake Blues.
1926JAZZ
  • March: the Savoy Ballroom opens, integrated, in Harlem. September: Black Bottom Stomp.
1927BLUES
  • The peak field-trip year: company units through Memphis, Dallas, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Bristol, Tennessee, where the country volume of this series ignites. The Mississippi flood displaces hundreds of thousands.
1927COUNTRY
  • Early in the year. Peer moves to Victor under the arrangement described in Movement Four. 25 July–5 August, the Bristol sessions: about seventy-six sides by nineteen acts.
  • 1–2 August, the Carter Family record six sides.
  • 4 August. Jimmie Rodgers, his band gone, records two sides alone.
  • November. Rodgers talks his way into Camden and cuts the first Blue Yodel.
  • December, by Hay’s telling, the WSM Barn Dance becomes the Grand Ole Opry.
1927JAZZ
  • February: Singin’ the Blues. 4 December: Ellington opens at the Cotton Club, on the radio wire.
1928BLUES
  • Mississippi John Hurt records for OKeh; the sides fail. Tampa Red and Georgia Tom’s It’s Tight Like That starts the hokum craze. Peer founds Southern Music.
1928COUNTRY
  • February, Blue Yodel released; Rodgers becomes the genre’s first national star. May, the Carters record Wildwood Flower at Camden. Southern Music is incorporated.
1928JAZZ
  • 28 June: West End Blues.
1929BLUES
  • June. Charley Patton records Pony Blues at Gennett’s Richmond, Indiana studio; Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie record When the Levee Breaks. October. The stock market crashes. December. Blind Lemon Jefferson dies in Chicago.
1929–1932COUNTRY
  • Victor is absorbed by RCA. Record sales collapse from the figures usually given above a hundred million discs to about six million. The genre’s economy moves to radio. WSM reaches fifty thousand watts, clear channel.
1929–33JAZZ
  • The record industry collapses to a fraction of its size; Victor is bought by RCA.

1930s

1930BLUES
  • The Mississippi Sheiks’ Sitting on Top of the World travels both racks. Son House, and Geeshie Wiley with Elvie Thomas, record at Grafton into a collapsing market.
1930JAZZ
  • October: Mood Indigo, from the Cotton Club residency and its radio wire.
1930REGGAE
  • Ras Tafari Makonnen is crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia. Preachers in Jamaica, reading the coronation through Marcus Garvey, found what becomes Rastafari.
1931BLUES
  • February. Skip James’s Grafton sessions, including Devil Got My Woman.
1931JAZZ
  • Bolden dies at Jackson. Bix Beiderbecke dies at twenty-eight.
1932BLUES
  • Paramount ceases recording; the masters are eventually scrapped. Industry sales are a fraction of their 1927 peak.
1932JAZZ
  • February: It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing) puts the word on a label three years early. December: Bennie Moten’s Camden session, Moten Swing, four beats to the bar; and Henderson records New King Porter Stomp, to no effect whatever.
1933BLUES
  • July. John and Alan Lomax record Lead Belly at Angola for the Library of Congress.
1933COUNTRY
  • 26 May. Jimmie Rodgers dies in New York, two days after his final session.
  • December. Prohibition is repealed. The honky-tonk and the jukebox begin their work.
1933JAZZ
  • December: repeal. The jukebox era begins. The Cherry Blossom session in Kansas City is dated to this month by its tellers.
1934BLUES
  • Lead Belly is released (for time served, whatever the folklore says) and enters the Lomax management arrangement; it collapses within the year. Charley Patton dies in April. Decca launches at thirty-five cents.
1934–1936COUNTRY
  • Decca relaunches at thirty-five cents. Gene Autry goes to Hollywood. Patsy Montana records the cowgirl’s answer. The Carters record the circle song; Sara and A.P. divorce; Acuff records the speckled bird.
1934JAZZ
  • Decca launches the thirty-five-cent record. December: the Let’s Dance broadcasts begin, with Henderson’s arrangements in Goodman’s book.
1935JAZZ
  • April: Bennie Moten dies; Basie regroups the remnant at the Reno Club. August, the 21st: the Palomar Ballroom; the swing era’s conventional starting gun.
1936BLUES
  • November. Robert Johnson’s San Antonio sessions at the Gunter Hotel, including Terraplane Blues and Cross Road Blues.
1936JAZZ
  • John Hammond, by his own account, hears the Reno Club band on W9XBY and drives to Kansas City.
1937BLUES
  • June, Johnson’s Dallas sessions. Sonny Boy Williamson’s Good Morning, School Girl anchors the Bluebird beat. September, Bessie Smith dies after a road accident in Mississippi.
1937JAZZ
  • 7 July: One O’Clock Jump, on the Decca contract.
1938BLUES
  • August. Robert Johnson dies near Greenwood, Mississippi. 23 December. At Carnegie Hall, John Hammond’s From Spirituals to Swing plays Johnson’s records from the stage.
1938COUNTRY
  • Roy Acuff joins the Opry; the singing star displaces the string band. The Carter Family goes to border radio at Del Rio.
1938JAZZ
  • May–June: Morton’s Library of Congress sessions.
1939COUNTRY
  • The Opry gains its NBC network segment. Bill Monroe joins the cast. The Coon Creek Girls play the White House.
1939JAZZ
  • April: Strange Fruit at Commodore. October: Body and Soul. Pendergast is convicted; the Kansas City scene disperses. BMI is founded. Blanton joins Ellington.
1939DOO-WOP
  • Johannesburg. Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds record Mbube at the Gallo studio. The improvised falsetto line will travel further than any melody in this book.

1940s

1940–1941COUNTRY
  • New San Antonio Rose; BMI opens for business; the ASCAP boycott takes the old catalogue off the radio for most of 1941 and hands country songwriters performance income. XERA is silenced. DeFord Bailey is dismissed. Ernest Tubb’s electric guitar reaches the jukeboxes.
1940JAZZ
  • 6 March: Ellington’s Ko-Ko. Minton’s Playhouse, under Teddy Hill, becomes the after-hours laboratory. Petrillo becomes AFM president.
1940REGGAE
  • Leonard Howell establishes the Pinnacle commune at Sligoville. It is raided repeatedly and destroyed in 1954; its people scatter into West Kingston.
1941BLUES
  • August. The Library of Congress and Fisk University record Muddy Waters at Stovall, Mississippi. November. King Biscuit Time begins on KFFA, Helena: blues on daily radio.
1941JAZZ
  • January–October: the ASCAP blackout; BMI’s door opens. Jerry Newman carries his disc recorder into Minton’s.
1942BLUES
  • Wartime shellac restriction; the musicians’ union recording ban begins. Billboard launches its Harlem Hit Parade.
1942COUNTRY
  • Acuff-Rose founded in Nashville. Shellac is rationed; the musicians’ union recording ban begins. Brinkley dies broke.
1942JAZZ
  • March: Charlie Christian dies at twenty-five. July: Jimmie Blanton dies at twenty-three. 1 August: the recording ban begins.
1942RHYTHM & BLUES
  • Early in the year, war production cuts shellac; the majors trim their race catalogues. Cash Box founded for the coin-machine trade.
  • 1 August, the first AFM recording ban empties every studio in the country.
  • October, Billboard launches the Harlem Hit Parade.
1943–1945COUNTRY
  • The original Carter Family disbands. Pistol Packin’ Mama conquers the war-plant jukeboxes; the trade press starts a folk chart in January 1944 to count what is happening. Wills brings his drums to the Opry stage. Scruggs joins Monroe in December 1945.
1943JAZZ
  • September: Decca settles with the union; Capitol follows. The a-cappella and V-Disc years.
1943RHYTHM & BLUES
  • Syd Nathan founds King in Cincinnati. Decca settles with the union.
1944BLUES
  • Sister Rosetta Tharpe records Strange Things Happening Every Day; it crosses to the race chart’s top places the following spring.
1944JAZZ
  • April: the cabaret tax. October: Petrillo declines President Roosevelt’s telegram. 11 November: RCA Victor and Columbia capitulate.
1944RHYTHM & BLUES
  • April, the federal cabaret tax makes dance floors a taxable liability.
  • Late in the year. RCA Victor and Columbia settle; the ban ends. Sister Rosetta Tharpe records Strange Things Happening Every Day.
1945JAZZ
  • 26 November: the Savoy session; Parker’s Ko-Ko.
1945RHYTHM & BLUES
  • The war ends. Cosimo Matassa opens J&M in New Orleans; Don Robey opens the Bronze Peacock in Houston; the Bihari brothers start Modern in Los Angeles. The Honeydripper holds number one on the race chart for eighteen weeks. Caldonia.
1946COUNTRY
  • September. Monroe’s classic band records Blue Moon of Kentucky in Chicago. Hank Williams signs with Acuff-Rose. WSM engineers open Nashville’s first professional studio. The National Barn Dance loses its network berth.
1946JAZZ
  • July: Parker is confined at Camarillo. December: eight name bands disband inside a month.
1946RHYTHM & BLUES
  • R.M. Blues establishes Art Rupe’s company. Lew Chudd founds Imperial. Choo Choo Ch’Boogie.
  • December, eight of the most famous big bands in America fold within weeks.
1947JAZZ
  • Monk’s first Blue Note sessions; 'Round Midnight. Holiday loses her cabaret card after conviction.
1947RHYTHM & BLUES
  • Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson found Atlantic on a dentist’s ten thousand dollars. The Chess brothers buy into Aristocrat. Roy Brown records Good Rocking Tonight in New Orleans; in December, Wynonie Harris covers it for King.
1947DOO-WOP
  • Chicago, Peg o’ My Heart, cut at Bill Putnam’s Universal Recording with a bathroom as an echo chamber, demonstrates manufactured space to the American record industry.
  • New York, the Ravens put the bass voice out front.
1948BLUES
  • April. Muddy Waters’s I Can’t Be Satisfied on Aristocrat sells out its first pressing. WDIA in Memphis moves to all-Black programming. Sonny Boy Williamson is murdered in Chicago.
1948–1949COUNTRY
  • Flatt and Scruggs leave Monroe. The Louisiana Hayride launches in Shreveport. Lovesick Blues, cut in Cincinnati against the publisher’s advice, spends its sixteen weeks at the top; the Opry debut and its multiplying encores follow in June 1949. The chart is renamed country and western. Foggy Mountain Breakdown.
1948JAZZ
  • June: Columbia introduces the LP. The second recording ban runs most of the year. 52nd Street begins converting to strip clubs.
1948RHYTHM & BLUES
  • The second AFM ban shuts the studios for the year. Harris’s Good Rocking Tonight reaches number one. Columbia introduces the LP.
  • October. WDIA Memphis puts Nat D. Williams on the air; within a year the station is programmed entirely for Black listeners.
1948DOO-WOP
  • Memphis. WDIA pivots to Black-oriented programming; Black-appeal radio begins switching on nationally.
  • Baltimore. Deborah Chessler takes on the Vibra-Naires; renamed the Orioles, they record It’s Too Soon to Know. Number one on the race records chart; the span of this book opens.
1948FOLK REVIVAL
  • June. Columbia introduces the twelve-inch microgroove LP. The machine, twenty years early.
1949BLUES
  • Billboard renames the race chart: rhythm and blues.
1949JAZZ
  • January and April: the Davis nonet sessions. June: the trade renames the race chart rhythm and blues. 30 November: Parker with strings. 15 December: Birdland opens.
1949RHYTHM & BLUES
  • February. Atlantic’s re-recorded Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee. RCA introduces the 45. The Huckle-Buck holds number one for fourteen weeks. Robey founds Peacock.
  • 25 June, Billboard renames the race chart: Rhythm & Blues.
  • 10 December. Fats Domino cuts The Fat Man at J&M.
1949ROCK 'N' ROLL
  • RCA introduces the 45 rpm single. Billboard renames its race-records chart rhythm and blues. December. Fats Domino records The Fat Man at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M studio.
1949DOO-WOP
  • RCA introduces the seven-inch 45. Billboard renames its race records chart rhythm and blues.

1950s

1950BLUES
  • Aristocrat becomes Chess. The Weavers’ version of Goodnight, Irene (six months after Lead Belly’s death) tops the pop chart for months.
1950–1952COUNTRY
  • Patti Page’s Tennessee Waltz teaches the industry what a Nashville copyright is worth; Tony Bennett’s Cold, Cold Heart confirms it. WSM’s announcer coins Music City U.S.A. Kitty Wells answers the honky-tonk men and becomes the first woman atop the country chart. The Harry Smith Anthology quietly hands the first age’s catalogue to the folk revival. Hank Williams is fired from the Opry in August 1952 and cuts his last session in September.
1950RHYTHM & BLUES
  • January. Sam Phillips opens the Memphis Recording Service. Seeburg ships jukeboxes built for the 45. Randy Wood founds Dot. Teardrops from My Eyes holds number one for eleven weeks.
1950ROCK 'N' ROLL
  • January. Sam Phillips opens the Memphis Recording Service at 706 Union Avenue.
1950FOLK REVIVAL
  • The Weavers’ Goodnight Irene spends thirteen weeks at number one. Red Channels is published; the blacklist machinery engages. Sing Out! founded.
Early 1950sREGGAE
  • Tom the Great Sebastian, with Hedley Jones’s hand-built amplifiers, sets the sound-system template. Duke Reid and Coxsone Dodd build the trade’s great rivalry.
Late 1950sREGGAE
  • the American rhythm and blues supply dries up; the sound men begin commissioning local recordings, first as one-off exclusives.
1951BLUES
  • March, Rocket 88, cut at the Phillips studio in Memphis, leased to Chess. Howlin’ Wolf’s first Memphis sides; B. B. King’s Three O’Clock Blues reaches the top of the rhythm-and-blues chart soon after.
1951RHYTHM & BLUES
  • March, Rocket 88, the damaged amplifier and all, cut in Memphis and leased to Chess. Sixty Minute Man holds number one for fourteen weeks and crosses to the pop top twenty.
  • July. Alan Freed begins playing rhythm and blues on Cleveland radio.
1951ROCK 'N' ROLL
  • March. Rocket 88, with its damaged amplifier, is recorded in Memphis and leased to Chess. July. Alan Freed begins playing rhythm and blues on WJW Cleveland, sponsored by Leo Mintz.
1951DOO-WOP
  • Cincinnati/New York, the Dominoes’ Sixty Minute Man, fourteen weeks at number one R&B, crosses into the pop top twenty.
  • Cleveland. Alan Freed begins his rhythm and blues radio show.
1952BLUES
  • Little Walter’s Juke spends weeks at the top of the rhythm-and-blues chart. Harry Smith’s anthology of old 78s seeds the folk revival.
1952RHYTHM & BLUES
  • 21 March, the Moondog Coronation Ball is stopped almost as it begins.
  • Sam Phillips launches Sun. Robey takes control of Duke.
  • 13 August. Big Mama Thornton records Hound Dog in Los Angeles.
1952ROCK 'N' ROLL
  • February. Phillips founds Sun Records. 21 March. The Moondog Coronation Ball is shut down at the overfilled Cleveland Arena.
1952DOO-WOP
  • March, the Moondog Coronation Ball is shut down by police almost as it begins, the crossover audience’s first public headcount.
  • The Weavers’ Wimoweh carries Solomon Linda’s melody into the American charts under a pseudonymous credit.
1952FOLK REVIVAL
  • The Weavers, unbookable, suspend work. Folkways issues Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music.
1953BLUES
  • Vee-Jay founded in Gary, Indiana. Howlin’ Wolf moves to Chicago, by his own proud account, in his own car, with cash.
1953COUNTRY
  • 1 January. Hank Williams is pronounced dead at Oak Hill, West Virginia, aged twenty-nine. His posthumous releases dominate the year. Meridian stages the Rodgers memorial festival; Peer speaks. Ralph Peer’s protégés now run an industry.
1953RHYTHM & BLUES
  • Hound Dog holds number one for seven weeks. Shake a Hand crosses to the pop lists. Vivian Carter and James Bracken found Vee-Jay.
1953ROCK 'N' ROLL
  • May, Bill Haley’s Crazy Man, Crazy becomes the first record of the kind to reach the national pop charts. Big Mama Thornton’s Hound Dog spends seven weeks atop the R&B chart. Summer, a truck driver pays to cut two ballads at the Memphis Recording Service.
1953DOO-WOP
  • Chicago/Gary. Vivian Carter and James Bracken found Vee-Jay, the era’s most significant Black-owned label. The Orioles’ Crying in the Chapel reaches the pop top fifteen. Clyde McPhatter leaves the Dominoes to found the Drifters.
1954BLUES
  • January. Hoochie Coochie Man, the electric Delta’s commercial peak. July. At the Phillips studio, a truck driver records Arthur Crudup’s blues, and the rock-and-roll volume of this series begins.
1954COUNTRY
  • 5–7 July, at Sun in Memphis, Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore and Bill Black cut a blues on one side and Monroe’s waltz, in the wrong time signature, on the other.
  • 2 October. Presley’s single, polite Opry appearance.
  • 16 October, the Hayride signs him for a year of Saturdays.
  • December. Fred Rose dies. Monroe recuts his own waltz, new tempo included.
1954RHYTHM & BLUES
  • The Things That I Used to Do holds number one for fourteen weeks. Shake, Rattle and Roll: Turner in the spring, the Comets (Milt Gabler producing) in the summer.
  • April, the Comets record Rock Around the Clock.
  • 5 July. Presley cuts That’s All Right at Sun; in September, his Good Rockin’ Tonight. Freed moves to WINS New York, loses the Moondog name in court, and renames his show rock and roll.
  • 18 November. Ray Charles records I Got a Woman in Atlanta.
  • 25 December. Johnny Ace dies backstage in Houston.
1954ROCK 'N' ROLL
  • 12 April. Rock Around the Clock is recorded in forty spare minutes; the session guitarist is paid twenty-one dollars. 5 July. That’s All Right is recorded at Sun. September. Freed moves to WINS New York. October. The Regency TR-1, the first transistor radio, goes on sale in the same month Presley debuts on the Louisiana Hayride.
1954DOO-WOP
  • Spring, the Crows’ Gee crosses to the pop chart via West Coast radio.
  • June, the Chords’ Sh-Boom reaches the pop top ten; the Crew-Cuts’ cover takes number one within weeks, and the cover economy is running.
  • Autumn, the Penguins’ Earth Angel, cut in Ted Brinson’s garage, released on Dootone; the Moonglows’ Sincerely, with Alan Freed’s name in the writing credit, released on Chess. Freed moves to WINS, New York.
1955BLUES
  • July. Chess releases Chuck Berry’s Maybellene: top of the rhythm-and-blues chart, deep into the pop top ten. The audience’s children have voted, and this book’s era ends on its own label.
  • Afterwards
  • 1958. Muddy Waters tours Britain, electric, and scandalises the folk purists. 1961. Columbia’s Robert Johnson album begins the cult. 1963-64. Hurt, House and James are found alive; the revival stages them. 1964. The Rolling Stones record at 2120 South Michigan Avenue. 1969. Chess is sold. 1971. Memphis Minnie is credited on a British rework of the levee record. 1977. Alberta Hunter, eighty-two, begins her celebrated New York comeback. 1985-87. Willie Dixon’s settlements over British rock adaptations fund his royalty-recovery foundation. 1990. Johnson’s complete recordings go platinum. 1998-2000. Mississippi courts confirm Claud Johnson as Robert Johnson’s heir; the escrowed royalties, over a million dollars, reach the family. 2019, a press investigation reports, and the company disputes, the scale of master-tape losses in a 2008 vault fire.
1955COUNTRY
  • Presley tours the country package circuit all year, billed among the hillbilly acts, pulling the young audience out of the tent as he goes. By the autumn the majors are bidding for his contract. The first age of country music has ended; almost nobody on the barn dances says so out loud yet.
1955RHYTHM & BLUES
  • Pledging My Love holds number one for ten weeks. Maybellene (with two names on the credit that Chuck Berry spent decades removing) reaches number one on the rhythm and blues chart and the pop top five. Rock Around the Clock, attached to a film about a city classroom, holds number one on the pop chart for eight weeks. Boone covers Domino.
  • 14 September, Tutti Frutti, at J&M, with the crew from The Fat Man.
  • November. RCA buys Presley’s contract from Sun.
1955ROCK 'N' ROLL
  • March. Blackboard Jungle opens; the year-old Haley record starts its climb to eight weeks at number one. May. Chuck Berry records Maybellene; the credit gains two names. September. Tutti Frutti is cut in the last fifteen minutes of a New Orleans session. November. RCA buys Presley’s contract for thirty-five thousand dollars plus five for the singer.
1955DOO-WOP
  • The Platters sign to Mercury as the makeweight in the Penguins deal; Only You, then The Great Pretender, the first number one pop record by a group of this lineage.
1955FOLK REVIVAL
  • August. Seeger declines to answer HUAC on First Amendment grounds. December. The Weavers’ Carnegie Hall reunion, promoted by Harold Leventhal.
1956ROCK 'N' ROLL
  • January. Heartbreak Hotel and Blue Suede Shoes released within days of each other; both cross all three charts. March. Carl Perkins’s car crash. April. Nat King Cole is attacked on a Birmingham stage. July. Hound Dog / Don’t Be Cruel.
1956DOO-WOP
  • January, Why Do Fools Fall in Love; Frankie Lymon, thirteen, becomes the first Black teenage pop star. A settlement recognises Gaynel Hodge as co-author of Earth Angel.
  • February, the Five Satins record In the Still of the Night in a New Haven church-school basement.
1956FOLK REVIVAL
  • Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues. Belafonte’s Calypso becomes, by the usual account, the first million-selling LP by a solo artist. The Gate of Horn opens in Chicago.
1956FUNK
  • Please Please Please, on Federal: James Brown’s first hit, and the beginning of the revue economy.
1957ROCK 'N' ROLL
  • Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On and That’ll Be the Day. August. American Bandstand goes national. October. Little Richard quits mid-tour in Australia.
1957DOO-WOP
  • The Del-Vikings, racially integrated, reach the pop top five with Come Go with Me. The Gladiolas’ Little Darlin' is outsold many times over by the Diamonds’ cover; Maurice Williams, seventeen, keeps his writer’s credit. The Bobbettes chart with Mr. Lee. Sam Cooke leaves the Soul Stirrers.
1957SOUL
  • Memphis (Jim Stewart founds Satellite Records, recording country and pop in a garage in Brunswick, Tennessee. Detroit) Reet Petite, the first of the Jackie Wilson hits co-written by Berry Gordy, whose royalty statements become the founding grievance of this book.
1957THE BRITISH INVASION
  • January, the Cavern opens in Mathew Street, Liverpool, as a jazz club.
  • 6 July, at the St Peter’s church fete, Woolton, John Lennon meets Paul McCartney, who auditions with a fully transcribed American rock and roll song.
1957FOLK REVIVAL
  • Izzy Young opens the Folklore Center on MacDougal Street. Freight Train charts in Britain under other names; the Cotten credit fight begins. The Old Town School of Folk Music opens in Chicago.
1958ROCK 'N' ROLL
  • Johnny B. Goode, Summertime Blues, La Bamba. March. Presley is inducted into the Army. May. The Lewis marriage scandal breaks in London. Aldon Music founded.
1958DOO-WOP
  • January, the Chantels’ Maybe, the writing credit reading George Goldner. The Silhouettes’ Get a Job reaches number one. The Elegants’ Little Star reaches number one; the group never charts again. George Treadwell dismisses the entire Drifters line-up and hires the Five Crowns under the name.
1958SOUL
  • Estelle Axton remortgages her house to buy Satellite an Ampex recorder. Gordy forms the publishing company Jobete, before the record company exists.
1958THE BRITISH INVASION
  • Muddy Waters tours Britain, electric, and scandalises the folk purists, the visit this series’ blues volume describes from the American shore.
1958FOLK REVIVAL
  • Tom Dooley reaches number one; the boom begins. Club 47 opens in Cambridge; the Kingston Trio’s label discovers the college album market. MacColl’s Radio Ballads begin at the BBC.
1959ROCK 'N' ROLL
  • January. Berry Gordy borrows eight hundred dollars and founds the company that becomes Motown. 3 February. The Winter Dance Party crash kills Holly, Valens, Richardson and their pilot. June. What’d I Say. November. The payola investigation opens; Freed is fired. December. Chuck Berry is arrested.
1959DOO-WOP
  • The new Drifters’ There Goes My Baby, strings, baião rhythm, Ben E. King, reaches number two and points past the genre. The Flamingos’ I Only Have Eyes for You, the echo chamber’s masterpiece. November, the payola investigation opens; Freed is dismissed in New York.
1959SOUL
  • 12 January. The Ber-Berry Co-operative lends Berry Gordy eight hundred dollars; Tamla Records begins. Summer. Gordy buys 2648 West Grand Boulevard and hangs the Hitsville U.S.A. sign. Money (That’s What I Want) is cut with the receptionist as co-writer.
1959THE BRITISH INVASION
  • Postwar import restrictions relax; American electric guitars begin appearing legally in British shops. Pye International takes up the Chess catalogue.
1959FOLK REVIVAL
  • July, the first Newport Folk Festival; Baez, unbilled, is the discovery. Four Kingston Trio albums sit in the Billboard top ten in a single week.
1959–1963HIP-HOP
  • the Cross Bronx Expressway opens in sections, having displaced tens of thousands of people.

1960s

1960ROCK 'N' ROLL
  • February–May. The payola hearings. April. Eddie Cochran dies in England. September, undisclosed pay-for-play becomes a federal offence. Chubby Checker’s The Twist reaches number one.
1960DOO-WOP
  • February, Jesse Belvin dies at twenty-seven after the first integrated show in Little Rock. Congress hears the payola testimony and amends the Communications Act. Ben E. King leaves the Drifters over a refused raise. November, Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ Stay, the shortest number one on record.
1960SOUL
  • Satellite moves into the Capitol Theatre on East McLemore Avenue, South Memphis; the record shop opens in the lobby. Rufus and Carla Thomas cut Cause I Love You; Atlantic licenses it, beginning the relationship. The Miracles’ Shop Around, re-cut after a three a.m. phone call, becomes Motown’s first million-seller.
1960THE BRITISH INVASION
  • August, the Beatles’ first Hamburg residency begins; the trip ends in deportations.
1960FOLK REVIVAL
  • November, Joan Baez released on Vanguard, chosen over Columbia.
1960REGGAE
  • Prince Buster records the Folkes Brothers with Count Ossie’s Rastafarian drummers: Oh Carolina.
1961DOO-WOP
  • The Marcels’ Blue Moon (number one), the Tokens’ The Lion Sleeps Tonight (number one), Little Caesar and the Romans’ Those Oldies But Goodies, the genre nostalgic for itself while still alive. In New York, the Times Square record shop anchors the collector scene that will name the genre.
1961SOUL
  • Satellite becomes Stax. The Mar-Keys’ Last Night reaches number three. Please Mr. Postman becomes Motown’s first pop number one.
1961THE BRITISH INVASION
  • June, in Hamburg, the Beatles back Tony Sheridan on the Polydor session that produces My Bonnie.
  • 17 October. Mick Jagger, carrying mail-ordered Chess LPs, meets Keith Richards on the platform at Dartford station.
  • 28 October, by Brian Epstein’s account, a customer asks the NEMS counter for My Bonnie.
  • 9 November. Epstein watches a Cavern lunchtime session.
1961FOLK REVIVAL
  • January. Dylan arrives in New York; the Guthrie hospital visits begin. April. The Washington Square permit confrontation. September. Shelton’s New York Times review; Hammond signs Dylan within weeks. November. The debut album cut in two afternoons; Izzy Young’s Carnegie Chapter Hall concert sells a few dozen tickets.
1962–1965ROCK 'N' ROLL
  • Freed pleads guilty to commercial bribery (1962); Berry is released (1963); the American catalogue returns from Britain re-recorded (1964); Freed dies, aged forty-three (January 1965).
1962DOO-WOP
  • February. Gene Chandler’s Duke of Earl, cut by the Dukays, number one under a name invented for contractual reasons.
  • September. Solomon Linda dies in Soweto; his widow cannot immediately afford a headstone. The span of this book closes.
1962SOUL
  • Summer. Green Onions, cut in session downtime by an integrated house band with a seventeen-year-old at the organ. October. Otis Redding, present as a driver, records These Arms of Mine in the session’s last half-hour. The first Motortown Revue tours the segregated South.
1962THE BRITISH INVASION
  • 1 January, the Beatles’ Decca audition. Decca declines.
  • 24 January, the first NEMS management contract, unsigned by Epstein himself.
  • 17 March. Korner and Davies open the Ealing club: London’s blues room.
  • April. Stuart Sutcliffe dies in Hamburg, aged twenty-one. The Star-Club opens. June. George Martin signs the Beatles to Parlophone at a royalty of one old penny per record.
  • July, the Rolling Stones play their first show, at the Marquee.
  • August. Pete Best is dismissed; Ringo Starr joins.
  • October, Love Me Do reaches number seventeen. The five-year NEMS contract sets commission at twenty-five per cent of gross.
  • December, Telstar, from a flat in Holloway Road, becomes the first British number one on the American chart.
1962FOLK REVIVAL
  • March, Bob Dylan released; the building calls it Hammond’s Folly. Broadside founded. Dylan signs to M. Witmark & Sons; Grossman becomes his manager. November, Baez on the cover of Time. The Tom Dooley settlement recognises the collectors’ claim. Solomon Linda dies in Soweto.
1962REGGAE
  • Jamaica becomes independent, 6 August. Ska is the new nation’s sound. Island Records moves to London.
1962FUNK
  • 24 October. Brown records the Apollo show at his own expense, against his label’s judgement.
1963SOUL
  • Fingertips Pt. 2 makes a twelve-year-old the first artist to top the singles and album charts simultaneously. Heat Wave fixes the Holland-Dozier-Holland template. The Beatles record three Jobete songs in London; the mechanical royalties flow to Detroit.
1963THE BRITISH INVASION
  • 11 February, the first Beatles LP is recorded in one working day for about four hundred pounds. February. Northern Songs is formed: the writers are minority shareholders in their own songs.
  • April. Andrew Loog Oldham sees the Stones at the Crawdaddy; Impact Sound signs them and leases their tapes to Decca.
  • August, She Loves You: the biggest-selling British single of the decade.
  • Autumn. Beatlemania is named; the Stones tour Britain on a package with Bo Diddley and the Everly Brothers; American merchandising rights pass to Seltaeb on a ninety-ten split.
  • November, With the Beatles publishes the import syllabus: three Motown covers, Berry, and the girl groups.
1963FOLK REVIVAL
  • April. ABC’s Hootenanny launches, blacklisting Seeger; Baez and others refuse the show. May. Dylan walks off the Ed Sullivan Show; Columbia withdraws the Birch song; The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan released. June. Peter, Paul and Mary’s Blowin’ in the Wind sells past three hundred thousand inside weeks; Seeger’s Carnegie Hall concert taped. July. Newport reconvenes as a foundation: every performer on the same fifty-dollar scale; the anthem closes the festival, arm in arm. August. The March on Washington; Baez leads the anthem. November. Newsweek publishes the Hibbing exposé.
1963REGGAE
  • Studio One opens on Brentford Road. In April, the Coral Gardens incident: Rastafari rounded up, beaten and jailed across St James; the state apologises in 2017.
1963FUNK
  • Live at the Apollo released; it reaches number two on the album chart and stays on the chart over a year.
1963SYNTH-POP
  • Delia Derbyshire realises the Doctor Who theme at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, from oscillators and tape.
1964SOUL
  • Summer, Where Did Our Love Go begins the Supremes’ run of five consecutive number ones. Mary Wells, at twenty-one, voids her minority contract and leaves. Dancing in the Street.
1964THE BRITISH INVASION
  • January. Cyril Davies dies in his early thirties.
  • 1 February, I Want to Hold Your Hand is number one in America.
  • 9 February, the Sullivan broadcast: the figure usually given is seventy-three million viewers.
  • Spring. Radio Caroline anchors off Essex; Cilla Black’s Anyone Who Had a Heart buries Dionne Warwick’s original in Britain; Millie’s My Boy Lollipop takes ska into both countries’ top five.
  • 4 April. Beatles records hold the top five places on the Billboard singles chart.
  • April, the Rolling Stones’ untitled first LP, mostly covers, enters the British chart at number one.
  • June, the Animals record The House of the Rising Sun in one take; the Stones record at 2120 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago.
  • August, You Really Got Me: distortion as a featured voice.
  • September. The Animals are number one in America. October. John Lee Hooker’s eight-year-old Dimples charts in Britain.
  • November. Them’s Gloria is released as a B-side; Dusty Springfield is deported from South Africa for refusing segregated audiences.
1964FOLK REVIVAL
  • January. The Times They Are A-Changin'. It’s My Way! released. Summer. The Animals’ House of the Rising Sun, credited to one arranger, tops both countries’ charts. October, the Halloween concert: the mask remark.
1964REGGAE
  • Simmer Down; the Skatalites form; My Boy Lollipop reaches number two in Britain and America.
1964GLAM
  • 1 January, the first edition of Top of the Pops, from a converted church in Manchester. Jimmy Savile presents.
1964–65FUNK
  • (Brown’s contract war: a release through a rival label, an injunction, and the 1965 settlement that gives him a production company and unprecedented terms. February 1965) Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag cut in Charlotte.
1965DOO-WOP
  • Alan Freed dies at forty-three.
1965SOUL
  • My Girl reaches number one. Wilson Pickett and Steve Cropper write In the Midnight Hour at the Lorraine Motel. May, the formal Stax-Atlantic distribution agreement is signed, unread by one side, with a masters-ownership clause in the boilerplate. The Supremes play the Copacabana. Autumn, Stax closes its studio to outside productions; Atlantic moves Pickett to Muscle Shoals.
1965THE BRITISH INVASION
  • January, Downtown is number one in America.
  • March, For Your Love; Eric Clapton leaves the Yardbirds for the Bluesbreakers over it. EMI launches the Tamla Motown label; the Motown revue tours Britain; Dusty Springfield fronts its television special.
  • Spring. Howlin’ Wolf appears on American pop television at the Rolling Stones’ urging. The Kinks lose their American work permits, for four years.
  • February. Northern Songs floats on the London Stock Exchange.
  • Summer, Satisfaction is number one in America for a month; Allen Klein renegotiates the Stones’ Decca deal, the advance paid to a company that proves to be his; Otis Redding cuts Satisfaction at Stax.
  • 15 August. Shea Stadium: the first stadium show of the rock era.
  • October. My Generation. December. Rubber Soul.
1965FOLK REVIVAL
  • March. Bringing It All Back Home, one side electric, one acoustic. April. Bert Jansch sold to Transatlantic for a hundred pounds. June, the Byrds’ Mr. Tambourine Man at number one; Wilson overdubs The Sound of Silence without telling the duo. 20 July, Like a Rolling Stone released, six minutes and thirteen seconds. 25 July. The electric set at Newport. August. Highway 61 Revisited. The Witmark term ends; Dwarf Music follows.
1965PSYCHEDELIA
  • Summer, the Red Dog Saloon opens in Virginia City, Nevada, with the Charlatans as house band. 16 October, the Family Dog’s first dance at Longshoreman’s Hall, San Francisco. December. Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests begin moving from parties to rented halls. LSD is legal.
1965REGGAE
  • Don Drummond kills Anita Mahfood and is committed; the Skatalites dissolve within the year.
1965HEAVY METAL
  • Tony Iommi loses two fingertips to a press on his last day at a Birmingham sheet-metal factory. The Beatles play Shea Stadium through the house announcement system, inaudibly. Marshall builds the first hundred-watt amplifiers for Pete Townshend.
1966DOO-WOP
  • Vee-Jay collapses.
1966SOUL
  • Hold On, I’m Comin', Reach Out I’ll Be There, You Keep Me Hangin’ On, Knock on Wood, Try a Little Tenderness, both machines at peak output. Holland-Dozier-Holland’s productivity begins its contractual slowdown.
1966THE BRITISH INVASION
  • February, the Cavern goes into bankruptcy.
  • April, Aftermath: the Stones’ first all-original album.
  • July. The Manila incident; Cream forms. August. The bigger-than-Jesus furore breaks in America; Revolver; on the twenty-ninth, Candlestick Park: the Beatles’ last concert.
  • September. Chas Chandler brings Jimi Hendrix to London.
1966FOLK REVIVAL
  • January. The Sound of Silence at number one. Summer. Blonde on Blonde, the double. 29 July, the motorcycle accident; the withdrawal begins.
1966PSYCHEDELIA
  • January, the Trips Festival at Longshoreman’s Hall. Bill Graham runs the door. Spring. Graham takes the Fillmore Auditorium; Chet Helms and the Family Dog take the Avalon. March, Eight Miles High, dropped by stations after a tip sheet flags the title.
  • 6–7 April, the tape-loop session for Tomorrow Never Knows at Abbey Road; the same month, Ken Townsend invents artificial double tracking.
  • August, Revolver.
  • 29 August, the Beatles play San Francisco and never tour again.
  • 6 October. LSD becomes illegal in California.
  • Autumn, the 13th Floor Elevators’ debut album puts the word psychedelic on a sleeve; You’re Gonna Miss Me grazes the national chart.
  • 15 October, International Times launches at the Roundhouse, London.
  • December, Good Vibrations reaches number one in America; UFO opens in a Tottenham Court Road basement on the 23rd.
1966REGGAE
  • 21 April: Haile Selassie I lands at Palisadoes before an enormous crowd. State of emergency in West Kingston. The music slows: rocksteady begins.
1966HEAVY METAL
  • Eric Clapton records with John Mayall through an overdriven Marshall combo; Cream form. Jimi Hendrix arrives in London.
1967SOUL
  • February. Aretha Franklin cuts Respect in New York for Atlantic. June. Otis Redding and the Stax band play Monterey. July. Detroit burns; the word soul on shopfronts becomes Soul Man. October. Atlantic is sold to Warner Bros.-Seven Arts for seventeen and a half million dollars; Gladys Knight’s Grapevine becomes Motown’s biggest seller to date. Florence Ballard is removed from the Supremes. 10 December, the plane goes down in Lake Monona: Otis Redding, twenty-six, and four teenage Bar-Kays.
1967THE BRITISH INVASION
  • May, Waterloo Sunset; A Whiter Shade of Pale begins six weeks at number one. 1 June, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: five months and some twenty-five thousand pounds.
  • June. Monterey: Hendrix and the Who arrive in America as British imports; Otis Redding headlines with Booker T and the MGs.
  • 14 August, the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act silences the pirate fleet.
  • 27 August. Brian Epstein dies, aged thirty-two.
  • 30 September. BBC Radio 1 opens: official Britain finally broadcasts the music it rationed for fifteen years.
1967FOLK REVIVAL
  • Woody Guthrie dies in October. Judy Collins records Both Sides Now; Mitchell’s publishing sits in her own company. December, Songs of Leonard Cohen.
1967PSYCHEDELIA
  • 14 January, the Human Be-In, Golden Gate Park.
  • February, Surrealistic Pillow; Pink Floyd sign to EMI.
  • Spring. Tom Donahue begins free-form broadcasting on KMPX; Smile is shelved in May.
  • 29 April, the 14 Hour Technicolour Dream, Alexandra Palace.
  • May, Are You Experienced.
  • 1 June, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
  • 16–18 June, the Monterey International Pop Festival. The artists play free; the film money does not.
  • Summer, the Summer of Love; the Haight fills past capacity.
  • 5 August, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
  • 27 August. Brian Epstein dies, aged thirty-two.
  • Autumn. UFO closes. Forever Changes and Easter Everywhere are released to national indifference.
  • 6 October, the Diggers stage the Death of Hippie procession.
  • 9 November, the first issue of Rolling Stone.
  • December, Their Satanic Majesties Request.
1967REGGAE
  • Treasure Isle’s golden run. In Spanish Town, in the standard telling, an acetate cut without its vocal, the version is discovered.
1967HEAVY METAL
  • Charlie Watkins’s WEM rig delivers a thousand watts at the Windsor festival. Lyndon Laney begins building amplifiers in a Birmingham garden shed.
1967FUNK
  • May, Cold Sweat cut at King, Cincinnati: one chord, the break, the credit shared with the arranger.
  • Summer, Funky Broadway puts the word on the charts. The Parliaments finally hit; the label collapses; the name is lost.
  • Sly and the Family Stone, formed the previous year, sign to Epic.
1968DOO-WOP
  • Frankie Lymon dies at twenty-five in Harlem.
1968SOUL
  • March. (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay becomes the first posthumous number one in American chart history. 4 April. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated at the Lorraine Motel, a mile from Stax. May, Stax discovers the 1965 clause’s meaning, breaks with Atlantic, loses its catalogue and Sam and Dave, and sells itself to Gulf+Western. Motown sues Holland-Dozier-Holland; they countersue for twenty-two million dollars. Autumn, Who’s Making Love proves the rebuilt Stax can live; Marvin Gaye’s Grapevine begins seven weeks at number one.
1968FOLK REVIVAL
  • March, Song to a Seagull. Club 47 closes. Both Sides Now reaches the American top ten.
1968PSYCHEDELIA
  • Early. Pink Floyd add David Gilmour; by spring Syd Barrett is out of the band.
  • Through the year, the American majors delete mono; the standard album now sells at the former premium price.
  • April, Odessey and Oracle, released after the band that made it has split.
  • June–October, the sprawl: In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Anthem of the Sun, Cheap Thrills, Electric Ladyland.
  • December. Brazil’s regime suspends civil liberties; Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil are arrested within weeks.
1968REGGAE
  • Do the Reggay names the new beat. The Twelve Tribes of Israel is founded. The Rodney riots. Trojan Records is formed in London.
1968HEAVY METAL
  • January. Blue Cheer’s Vincebus Eruptum. June. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. August. The Jeff Beck Group’s Truth. September. The future Led Zeppelin play their first dates; in November Peter Grant signs them to Atlantic. Earth, in Birmingham, will shortly rename themselves Black Sabbath.
1968FUNK
  • 5 April, the televised Boston Garden show, the night after Dr King’s murder.
  • Spring, Dance to the Music top ten.
  • August. Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud) recorded; number one rhythm and blues for six weeks.
  • Brown buys his first radio station.
1968–1975HIP-HOP
  • manufacturing leaves the Bronx; landlord arson runs at scale; the city, near bankruptcy in 1975, cuts fire companies in the districts with the most fires.
1968SYNTH-POP
  • Switched-On Bach, Wendy Carlos. The synthesiser’s first best-selling album.
1969DOO-WOP
  • Richard Nader’s first Rock and Roll Revival at Madison Square Garden; Sha Na Na play Woodstock.
1969SOUL
  • May, the Soul Explosion: some twenty-seven albums at once, Hot Buttered Soul among them. The Jackson 5’s I Want You Back, built by the deliberately anonymous Corporation. Benny Benjamin dies in Detroit.
1969FOLK REVIVAL
  • Karen Dalton’s debut released. Newport flinches from the rock year; the folk circuit’s trade listings thin.
1969PSYCHEDELIA
  • Spring. Dick James sells control of Northern Songs to ATV; Lennon and McCartney fight the takeover and lose.
  • Summer. Roky Erickson, facing a Texas drug sentence, pleads insanity and is committed to Rusk.
  • 9–10 August, the Manson murders.
  • 15–17 August. Woodstock. The fences are never finished; the gate never exists; the film pays for everything, later.
  • 6 December. Altamont. Meredith Hunter is killed near the stage, on camera.
1969REGGAE
  • Israelites is the first Jamaican record at number one in Britain; the skinhead reggae boom begins. Duke Reid begins pressing versions on B-sides as standard.
1969HEAVY METAL
  • January. Led Zeppelin’s debut. August. Bill Hanley’s sound system carries Woodstock. October, Led Zeppelin II.
1969PROGRESSIVE ROCK
  • 13 January. King Crimson begin rehearsals in a basement below a café on the Fulham Palace Road.
  • April, first show, at the Speakeasy.
  • 5 July. Hyde Park, before the Rolling Stones, crowd estimates from a quarter-million upward.
  • October, In the Court of the Crimson King, in Barry Godber’s gatefold with no title on the front. Top five in Britain. The signing rush begins. Rick Wakeman, session man, plays Mellotron on a single about a stranded astronaut.
1969GLAM
  • February, the BMRB begins compiling the official singles chart from a sample of shops’ sales diaries.
  • July, Space Oddity, released into the fortnight of the moon landing, becomes Bowie’s first hit.
  • November. BBC1 and ITV begin colour broadcasts.
1969FUNK
  • Spring (Cissy Strut; Stand!; It’s Your Thing, on the Isleys’ relaunched T-Neck) Motown’s suit over it eventually fails.
  • August. Woodstock, half past three in the morning.
  • November, the Funky Drummer session at King.

1970s

1970SOUL
  • Bell and Stewart buy Stax back from Gulf+Western. Tammi Terrell dies at twenty-four.
1970FOLK REVIVAL
  • February, Sweet Baby James. Cold Fact released and sinks in America. Dylan and Grossman’s management relationship ends.
1970PSYCHEDELIA
  • 10 April. McCartney announces the Beatles’ end.
  • June–November, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty pay off the Grateful Dead’s studio debt.
  • Late July, the Powder Ridge festival is banned by injunction; thirty thousand people attend anyway.
  • 26 August. Electric Lady opens in Greenwich Village. The Isle of Wight festival, the same week, is declared free mid-weekend.
  • 3 September. Alan Wilson dies; 18 September. Jimi Hendrix; 4 October. Janis Joplin. All twenty-seven.
  • 31 December. McCartney files suit in London to dissolve the Beatles’ partnership.
1970REGGAE
  • U-Roy’s first Treasure Isle sides make the deejay a recording artist; the standard telling has them holding the top chart places simultaneously in early 1971.
1970HEAVY METAL
  • 13 February. Black Sabbath. June. Deep Purple’s In Rock. September, Paranoid reaches number one in Britain; Jimi Hendrix dies in London on the eighteenth.
1970PROGRESSIVE ROCK
  • The Mellotron M400 goes on sale: thirty-five keys, removable tape frames, around a thousand pounds. The Minimoog lists at one thousand four hundred and ninety-five dollars. Soft Machine play the Proms. ELP debut at Plymouth, then the Isle of Wight, with cannons. Genesis, out of Charterhouse via Jonathan King’s label, release Trespass and find their audience in Italy. Curved Air’s debut is pressed as a mass-market picture disc, in most tellings the first.
1970GLAM
  • October, Ride a White Swan. Tyrannosaurus Rex has become T. Rex, and the acoustic duo has become an electric band.
1970FUNK
  • March, the band’s ultimatum and the overnight replacement: Bootsy Collins’s Pacemakers become the J.B.'s.
  • July, Sex Machine. Funky Drummer released.
  • December. Brown’s band and Fela Kuti’s watch each other in Lagos.
1970DISCO
  • 14 February. David Mancuso’s first Loft party, 647 Broadway, New York: private, invitation-only, no alcohol. The room this book descends from.
  • Around this year, at the Sanctuary, Francis Grasso is mixing records into one another with headphone cueing and slip-cues: the DJ as performer.
Mid-1970sHIP-HOP
  • Afrika Bambaataa founds the Universal Zulu Nation at the Bronx River Houses.
1970SYNTH-POP
  • The Minimoog: the first synthesiser packaged for performing musicians.
1970HOUSE & TECHNO
  • a private party begins in a loft on Broadway in New York: members only, no alcohol, an obsessive sound system. Everything in this book descends from that room.
1971SOUL
  • What’s Going On, released over the founder’s misgivings, credits the Funk Brothers by name after eleven years. Theme from Shaft reaches number one. Stevie Wonder turns twenty-one, collects his trust, and returns with lawyers and his own publishing.
1971FOLK REVIVAL
  • February. Tapestry begins fifteen weeks at number one. March. Taylor on the cover of Time. June, Blue. Asylum Records founded. After crowd trouble, Newport’s folk festival is suspended, not to return to the island for fourteen years.
1971PSYCHEDELIA
  • Summer. Bill Graham closes both Fillmores. Jim Morrison dies in Paris, aged twenty-seven.
1971REGGAE
  • Double Barrel at number one in Britain. Better Must Come.
1971HEAVY METAL
  • Mike Saunders’s Creem review of Sir Lord Baltimore supplies the citation most often produced as the naming of heavy metal. Grand Funk sell out Shea Stadium.
1971PROGRESSIVE ROCK
  • March, The Yes Album: the covers gone, the writing arrived.
  • Tarkus and Pictures at an Exhibition, the Mussorgsky arrangement as budget-priced live album.
  • October, Moving Waves, Amsterdam’s answer, with the yodel that will out-chart the flagships in America. Pawn Hearts tops the Italian chart in most accounts.
  • November, Fragile, with Roger Dean’s first Yes sleeve; the American edit of its opener reaches the top twenty and FM takes the long version.
1971GLAM
  • February–March, Hot Love begins six weeks at number one. On a Top of the Pops appearance that spring, Bolan performs with glitter under his eyes.
  • June. Slade’s revival of a fifties shouter reaches the chart; television does the rest.
  • September, Electric Warrior.
  • Autumn. Bowie signs to RCA. Tony Defries incorporates MainMan the following year.
1971FUNK
  • March. Arlester "Dyke" Christian shot dead in Phoenix.
  • July, Maggot Brain.
  • November, There’s a Riot Goin’ On; Family Affair number one, a rhythm box keeping time.
December 1971HIP-HOP
  • a truce meeting after the killing of a Bronx peacemaker; the gang structure begins to shift.
1972DOO-WOP
  • WCBS-FM flips to oldies; Clyde McPhatter dies at thirty-nine.
1972SOUL
  • April. Isaac Hayes wins the Academy Award for Theme from Shaft. Spring. I’ll Take You There, number one, cut in Alabama. June. Motown moves its headquarters to Los Angeles. 20 August. Wattstax at the Los Angeles Coliseum, a dollar a ticket. October. Lady Sings the Blues opens; Stax signs its distribution agreement with CBS, with a six-million-dollar advance. December. Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone at number one. The span of this book closes.
  • After the span, compressed because endings have paperwork.
1972FOLK REVIVAL
  • February, Pink Moon delivered to Island, by hand, in versions that differ. Flack’s recording of MacColl’s song spends six weeks at number one after its film placement.
1972REGGAE
  • Michael Manley wins power with the yards’ music as soundtrack. The Harder They Come premieres at the Carib. King Tubby acquires the Dynamic console; Channel One opens on Maxfield Avenue.
1972HEAVY METAL
  • March. Machine Head, recorded in Montreux after the casino fire of 4 December 1971. December. Made in Japan.
1972PROGRESSIVE ROCK
  • March, Thick as a Brick, with the newspaper sleeve: number one in America.
  • September, Close to the Edge; Bruford leaves for Crimson upon completion.
  • October, Foxtrot, opened by the two-chord Mellotron curtain. Octopus.
1972GLAM
  • January. Bowie tells Melody Maker he is gay; the interview is part of the Ziggy launch. March, as Gary Glitter, the former Paul Raven releases the two-part stomp built with Mike Leander.
  • June, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
  • 6 July, Starman on Top of the Pops: the arm around Ronson, the finger down the lens.
  • August, School’s Out is number one; Virginia Plain and All the Young Dudes arrive in the same weeks.
  • November, the New York Dolls’ first British visit ends with the death of their drummer Billy Murcia.
1972FUNK
  • 15 February, federal copyright extended to sound recordings, prospectively only: the masters of nearly everything above remain outside it.
  • Summer, Think (About It), on People.
  • October, Superstition.
1972DISCO
  • December, the Tenth Floor opens: the Loft’s architecture, refitted for the white gay A-list.
  • Eddie Kendricks releases the seven-minute album track whose stripped-down breakdowns teach the early DJs what a floor can do.
1973DOO-WOP
  • American Graffiti.
1973SOUL
  • Clive Davis is fired at CBS; the Stax-CBS relationship sours. Paul Williams of the Temptations dies at thirty-four.
1973REGGAE
  • Catch a Fire, in the lighter sleeve. The Black Ark is built. The contested first dub albums appear. Clive Campbell, Kingston-born, throws a party in the Bronx, the hip-hop volume begins.
1973HEAVY METAL
  • 5 May. Led Zeppelin play Tampa Stadium to 56,800 people on the rewritten promoter split.
1973PROGRESSIVE ROCK
  • March, The Dark Side of the Moon: an American number one for one week, then seven hundred-odd consecutive weeks on the chart; never number one in Britain.
  • May, Tubular Bells founds Virgin’s label; The Exorcist licenses its opening minutes in the autumn.
  • July, A Passion Play: savaged in print, number one in America; the management announces a retirement the band, by Anderson’s account, learned of from the papers.
  • October, Selling England by the Pound; a Kent farm boy becomes Genesis’s first hit single.
  • November, Brain Salad Surgery, in the Giger gate; Manticore signs PFM, whose Sinfield-worded Photos of Ghosts puts Italian progressive rock on American FM.
  • December, Tales from Topographic Oceans, gold on advance orders in most tellings; Wakeman’s dissent begins in print.
1973GLAM
  • January, Blockbuster at number one with The Jean Genie beneath it: the same borrowed riff, twice.
  • March, Cum On Feel the Noize enters at number one, the first record to do so since the Beatles. 20th Century Boy.
  • April, Aladdin Sane enters at number one on six-figure advance orders.
  • June, Can the Can: Suzi Quatro, the genre’s one full female franchise, at number one.
  • 3 July. Hammersmith Odeon. Bowie retires Ziggy Stardust from the stage.
  • July, the New York Dolls’ debut album is released and fails commercially.
  • September, Ballroom Blitz. Wizzard’s second number one of the year.
  • October, the oil embargo begins; Jobriath’s hyped debut is released into American indifference.
  • December, Merry Xmas Everybody against I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday; a million-selling Christmas pressed against a vinyl shortage, with television under a crisis curfew and the three-day week announced.
1973FUNK
  • October, Head Hunters. Wild and Peaceful. Funky Worm has topped the rhythm-and-blues chart; The Payback is cut and rejected by the film it was made for.
1973DISCO
  • February. Nicky Siano’s Gallery opens; two of the teenagers helping run it are Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles.
  • Summer, Soul Makossa, found in a Brooklyn import bin and broken at the Loft, reaches the American top forty with no radio plan: the mechanism demonstrated.
  • August, in the Bronx, a back-to-school party built on isolated drum breaks opens the story this series’ hip-hop volume tells.
  • September, The Love I Lost: Earl Young’s four-on-the-floor. The beat exists. Vince Aletti’s Rolling Stone piece gives the scene its first national coverage and its name’s stub.
1973PUNK
  • December. Hilly Kristal puts up the CBGB awning at 315 Bowery, New York, intending to book country and bluegrass.
11 August 1973HIP-HOP
  • Cindy Campbell’s back-to-school party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Her brother plays the records and extends the break.
1974FOLK REVIVAL
  • November. Nick Drake dies at twenty-six.
1974–75REGGAE
  • dub becomes the standard B-side; rockers drumming retools the beat; Island’s roots signings multiply. September 1974: Haile Selassie is deposed; he dies in custody in August 1975.
1974PROGRESSIVE ROCK
  • May. Wakeman leaves Yes; his orchestral Journey album has topped the British chart.
  • October, Red, released by a King Crimson that no longer exists; Fripp describes the band as completely over, and forecasts small, mobile, intelligent units.
  • November, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway; the tour’s hundred-plus nights lose money on every telling the band has given.
1974GLAM
  • January, Tiger Feet, the year’s biggest British single.
  • February, Rebel Rebel, Bowie’s farewell single to the genre.
  • May, This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us: Sparks conquer the machine by standing still.
  • July, The Six Teens, the factory’s last Sweet top-tenner; the partnership dissolves within months.
  • Autumn. Bell Records is folded into Arista. Bowie tours America; the soul pivot follows in the spring.
1974FUNK
  • September. Robbie McIntosh dies at twenty-four.
  • The Meters play the New Orleans sessions for the following spring’s number one. The Payback is reported as Brown’s first gold album.
1974DISCO
  • Winter–summer, Love’s Theme, then TSOP, then Rock the Boat and Rock Your Baby in consecutive weeks: four club-driven records at number one inside six months.
  • Autumn, Billboard launches its first club-play charts, compiled from DJ reports.
1974PUNK
  • Spring. Television persuade Kristal to book them. His condition, which becomes the rule of the house: you play your own songs.
  • Summer. Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye and Richard Sohl record two songs, paid for by Robert Mapplethorpe, released on their own label. The first object in this book.
  • August, the Ramones play their first show at CBGB.
  • Autumn. Malcolm McLaren, in New York, briefly manages the New York Dolls and observes Richard Hell.
1974SYNTH-POP
  • Autobahn. Kraftwerk reach the international charts from Düsseldorf.
1975SOUL
  • Al Jackson Jr. is shot dead at home, unsolved; involuntary bankruptcy proceedings open against Stax in December.
1975REGGAE
  • Marcus Garvey. Trojan goes into receivership. Louisa Mark’s Caught You in a Lie opens lovers rock in London.
1975PROGRESSIVE ROCK
  • May, The Snow Goose, retitled after the novelist’s objection; toured with the LSO.
  • August. Gabriel announces his departure from Genesis in a wry public letter. Scheherazade fills American theatres for a band Britain declines. The top British tax rate stands at eighty-three per cent, ninety-eight on investment income; the residential-studio diaspora is general.
1975GLAM
  • March, Fox on the Run, self-written, out-charts the factory’s work for the Sweet at home and in America.
  • Spring–summer. Rollermania: the machine runs at full power on an act with no glam in it. Gary Glitter’s run of top-tens ends.
  • September. Bowie’s first American number one: a funk record about fame, co-written with John Lennon.
  • October, Love Is the Drug: Roxy Music arrive at the dancefloor.
  • November–January, Bohemian Rhapsody holds number one for nine weeks behind a promotional film made because the band could not attend; the machine learns the performer is optional.
1975FUNK
  • February–May, Fire, Pick Up the Pieces and Shining Star all reach number one within four months: the boom’s peak.
  • Wesley and Parker leave Brown for Clinton. Chocolate City; Mothership Connection in December. The tax demand reported at around four and a half million dollars arrives.
1975DISCO
  • January. Gloria Gaynor’s album with the first continuous disco mix side; the trade’s first club chart crowns it.
  • June, the New York Record Pool is organised in Mancuso’s loft: free promos in, feedback sheets out.
  • Summer, The Hustle at number one; partner dancing returns to America.
  • The twelve-inch accident at the cutting lathe; promotional twelve-inches circulate by year’s end. November, the seventeen-minute Love to Love You Baby arrives from Munich via Casablanca.
1975PUNK
  • Rocket from the Tombs split in Cleveland; the pieces become Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys. Pere Ubu self-release a single on their own label, Hearthan.
  • June. Talking Heads play their first CBGB show.
  • August. John Lydon auditions in a shop at 430 King’s Road.
  • 6 November, the Sex Pistols play their first show, at Saint Martins School of Art. Somebody pulls the power.
  • December, Horses is released. The first album by a CBGB band.
1975HIP-HOP
  • Grandmaster Flash builds a cue circuit because no mixer has one. Grand Wizzard Theodore, holding a record still, discovers the scratch.
1976SOUL
  • 12 January, seventeen years to the day after the eight-hundred-dollar loan, Stax is padlocked by court order; Al Bell is acquitted of all charges in August; Florence Ballard dies in February, aged thirty-two.
1976FOLK REVIVAL
  • April. Phil Ochs takes his own life.
1976REGGAE
  • Police and Thieves; the Notting Hill Carnival clashes. 3 December: gunmen shoot Bob Marley, Rita Marley and Don Taylor at Hope Road; the Smile Jamaica concert happens anyway; Marley leaves for London.
1976HEAVY METAL
  • March, Sad Wings of Destiny. The RIAA introduces platinum certification. The Who take the Guinness loudness listing at a south London football ground.
1976PROGRESSIVE ROCK
  • A Trick of the Tail out-charts every Gabriel-era Genesis album in America. Rush’s 2112 establishes the idiom’s North American inheritance. The British weeklies pivot to punk; the press war opens.
1976FUNK
  • Give Up the Funk goes gold; the Mothership flies nightly; Bootsy’s Rubber Band tours as a second P-Funk franchise.
1976DISCO
  • May. Salsoul puts Ten Percent on public sale: the first commercial twelve-inch single, in Walter Gibbons’s ten-minute reconstruction.
  • June, the New York magazine article that will become the film is published. Its author confesses two decades later that its protagonist was invented.
  • Autumn, a novelty duck record reaches number one: the rack is open for business. The Trammps release Disco Inferno.
1976PUNK
  • January, the first issue of Punk magazine names the thing.
  • February. Geoff Travis opens Rough Trade at 202 Kensington Park Road, London.
  • April, the first Ramones album. Fourteen songs, twenty-nine minutes.
  • 4 June and 20 July, the Sex Pistols play the Lesser Free Trade Hall, Manchester, both shows organised by Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto.
  • July. Mark Perry photocopies the first issue of Sniffin’ Glue. Stiff Records is founded on a loan from the singer of a pub-rock band.
  • September, the Saints self-release a single in Brisbane, weeks before Britain’s first. Sounds in London makes it single of the week.
  • 20–21 September, the 100 Club punk festival. Siouxsie and the Banshees perform for the first time. The club stops booking punk shows.
  • 22 October, New Rose, on Stiff. The first British punk single.
  • 26 November, Anarchy in the U.K., on EMI.
  • 1 December, the Sex Pistols swear at Bill Grundy on early-evening television. Bookings collapse across the country.
  • Late December, the Roxy opens in Covent Garden. It has about a hundred days.
  • 28 December. Buzzcocks record four songs in Manchester for about five hundred pounds.
1977REGGAE
  • Exodus, recorded in exile, stays on the British album chart for over a year. Two Sevens Clash subdues Kingston on the seventh of July. Heart of the Congos at the Black Ark.
1977PROGRESSIVE ROCK
  • January, Animals: number two in Britain, top three in America; stadiums all year, under a pig.
  • March, Works Volume 1; the orchestra goes on the road in the summer and is sent home within weeks; the members’ loss figures run to seven digits and vary by telling.
  • July, Going for the One: number one in Britain; its ballad single reaches the top ten in September, sharing the chart with the Sex Pistols. Lydon praises Peter Hammill on London radio. The Damned record under Nick Mason’s production. The Mellotron’s parent company fails; the Bradleys’ machine becomes the Novatron.
  • November. Genesis’s Seconds Out; the year’s progressive ledger closes at the genre’s commercial peak, in the year of its supposed execution.
  • 1978–1981, the administration
  • Love Beach discharges a contract from Nassau exile. AOR consultants complete the formatting of American FM; the new-band pipeline is closed. The Wall, recorded in French tax exile after the Norton Warburg collapse, becomes one of the biggest albums ever made. Yes absorb the Buggles for Drama; Norton Warburg fails, with the band’s losses reported in seven figures and the founder later convicted of fraud.
  • 1982–1983, the verdicts
  • Asia’s four-minute songs make the biggest-selling American album of 1982. Marillion sign to EMI and take the old vocabulary into the British top ten. 90125, produced by Trevor Horn, gives Yes an American number one single. Nobody calls any of it progressive rock on the sleeve.
1977GLAM
  • Summer. Bolan’s afternoon television series books the new punk bands; its final edition ends with Bolan and Bowie performing together.
  • 16 September. Marc Bolan dies in a car crash in south-west London, aged twenty-nine.
1977FUNK
  • Brick House: six names on the groove, one on the ballads. Flash Light cut: the bass line is three stacked Minimoogs.
1977DISCO
  • 26 April. Studio 54 opens. Exclusion becomes spectacle.
  • July, I Feel Love: the sequencer record. Producers on two continents reorganise their understanding of the future.
  • This year, in Chicago, the Warehouse opens with Frankie Knuckles resident, the job having first been offered, by the founder’s account, to Larry Levan; in New York, the Paradise Garage begins its parties on King Street.
  • December, Saturday Night Fever opens; its soundtrack will hold number one for twenty-four weeks and become the best-selling album to that date.
1977PUNK
  • January, Spiral Scratch is released on New Hormones, with the label’s address on the sleeve. EMI drop the Sex Pistols. Sideburns prints Tony Moon’s three-chord diagram.
  • February, Damned Damned Damned, the first British punk album. Marquee Moon, which is not one. The Saints’ first album.
  • March, the Sex Pistols sign to A&M outside Buckingham Palace and are dropped within about a week.
  • April, the Roxy’s original management loses the lease. The Clash is released; CBS in America decline to release it.
  • May, the Sex Pistols sign to Virgin. God Save the Queen reaches number two in Jubilee week.
  • 7 June, the boat on the Thames. Arrests at the pier.
  • July. Elvis Costello’s first album, on Stiff.
  • September, Oh Bondage Up Yours!
  • 28 October, Never Mind the Bollocks enters at number one.
  • November, Rocket to Russia. The Nottingham prosecution over the album title is dismissed.
  • December, Pink Flag: twenty-one songs in thirty-five minutes.
13 July 1977HIP-HOP
  • the New York blackout. The number of active crews rises sharply the following year.
1977–79HIP-HOP
  • the crews are the draw; the cassette is the distribution; no records exist.
1977SYNTH-POP
  • Trans-Europe Express. In Munich, Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s I Feel Love puts an all-synthesiser backing at the top of the charts. Roland’s MC-8 MicroComposer brings computer sequencing to the studio.
1977HOUSE & TECHNO
  • a members’ club opens on King Street in New York with Larry Levan resident. In Chicago, a members’ club opens on the near west side with Frankie Knuckles resident, newly arrived from New York.
1978REGGAE
  • January: the Green Bay ambush. February: Uptown Top Ranking, two Kingston teenagers over a 1967 riddim, at number one in Britain. 22 April: the One Love Peace Concert, the handshake on stage; Peter Tosh’s address from the same stage, and his beating in custody months later. The truce collapses; the dance turns toward dancehall. This book’s span ends.
1978HEAVY METAL
  • January. The American statutory mechanical royalty rises for the first time since 1909. February. Van Halen.
1978FUNK
  • 1 January, the statutory mechanical rate rises for the first time since 1909: two cents becomes two and three-quarters.
  • Flash Light number one rhythm and blues; One Nation Under a Groove number one for six weeks; a Minneapolis teenager’s debut carries four jobs and one name.
1978DISCO
  • January onwards, the majors flood the format; conversions and novelty product saturate radio and retail.
  • July, a New York FM station flips to all-disco and becomes the highest-rated station in America; roughly two hundred stations follow within a year.
  • Autumn–winter, Le Freak, three separate runs at number one; You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real); Y.M.C.A.; the statutory mechanical royalty rises for the first time in living memory, effective January.
  • 24 December, a Chicago rock station flips to disco and fires its airstaff, including Steve Dahl.
1978PUNK
  • 14 January, the Sex Pistols’ last show, in San Francisco. Lydon walks.
  • February. Howard Devoto has already left Buzzcocks; Magazine’s first single appears.
  • 30 April, the Rock Against Racism carnival in Victoria Park.
  • Summer. Rough Trade begins releasing records. Factory Records is founded in Manchester.
  • August. Siouxsie and the Banshees, unsigned for two years, reach the British top ten with their first single.
  • September. Wire’s Chairs Missing: keyboards, effects, longer songs, nine months after Pink Flag.
  • October. Nancy Spungen is found dead in New York.
  • November, Germfree Adolescents.
1978POST-PUNK & NEW WAVE
  • January, the Sex Pistols end in San Francisco. Within months, Public Image Ltd forms around John Lydon, Keith Levene and Jah Wobble.
  • Early in the year. Daniel Miller records and self-releases the Normal’s only single, founding Mute in the process. The Human League’s first single, their demo in effect, appears on Fast Product in June.
  • May, the Factory club nights begin at the Russell Club, Hulme; Peter Saville’s poster is famously late.
  • October, the Public Image single reaches the British top ten. Gang of Four’s Damaged Goods EP appears on Fast Product. Scritti Politti’s itemised-sleeve debut follows on St Pancras/Rough Trade.
  • December. Factory’s first record, a double seven-inch sampler, with Martin Hannett producing Joy Division’s contributions.
1978SYNTH-POP
  • The Prophet-5: programmable memory arrives. Korg’s MS-10 and MS-20 put patchable synthesis under two hundred pounds. Being Boiled, the Human League’s first single, from Sheffield, on Fast Product. Daniel Miller self-releases as the Normal and founds Mute. Yellow Magic Orchestra form in Tokyo. Bowie nights begin at Billy’s in Soho.
1979–1981REGGAE
  • 2 Tone revives ska in the British Midlands. The 1980 Jamaican election kills hundreds. Bob Marley dies in May 1981, aged thirty-six, leaving no will.
1979HEAVY METAL
  • May. Sounds prints the banner New Wave of British Heavy Metal. July. Highway to Hell. November. Iron Maiden self-release The Soundhouse Tapes. 3 December. Eleven die outside a Who concert in Cincinnati.
1979FUNK
  • June, Good Times number one.
  • 12 July, the Comiskey Park demolition; the format purge follows.
  • August, a funk band’s B-side carries the first commercially released rap; the purpose-built hit overtakes it within weeks.
  • Autumn, Ladies’ Night: the conversion executed. The span closes with the language everywhere and the format finished.
  • After the span, compressed because endings have paperwork.
1979DISCO
  • Spring, the format’s chart share peaks; I Will Survive, flipped from a B-side by club DJs, reaches number one.
  • 6 July. Van McCoy, whose instrumental took the Hustle to number one, dies at thirty-nine.
  • 12 July. Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park: 47,795 officially inside, thousands more out; the crate detonated; the field stormed; the second game forfeited.
  • August, Good Times at number one; a skinny-tie guitar single replaces it. One major dismisses over a hundred staff on a single Friday. Off the Wall is released and sells in millions with the word disco appearing nowhere near it.
  • Autumn, Rapper’s Delight, built on a re-performed Chic bassline; the writers’ credits change after lawyers engage. Radio’s retreat from the format is general by year’s end.
1979PUNK
  • February. Sid Vicious dies, aged twenty-one. Inflammable Material reaches number fourteen: the first independent album to chart that high in Britain.
  • September, Cut.
  • Coventry, 2 Tone begins releasing records.
1979POST-PUNK & NEW WAVE
  • June, Unknown Pleasures, recorded in April at Strawberry Studios for a sum Wilson always gave as around eight and a half thousand pounds.
  • August, Bela Lugosi’s Dead, on Small Wonder: nine and a half minutes, recorded in one session by the band’s account.
  • September, Entertainment!, on EMI, by explicit argument. Cut, carried over from the previous volume, is in the shops.
  • November, Metal Box, three twelve-inch discs in a film canister. The Raincoats and Delta 5’s Mind Your Own Business on Rough Trade.
Autumn 1979HIP-HOP
  • Rapper’s Delight. A New Jersey label, a house band, three men from outside the scene, and a bassline re-performed from that summer’s biggest disco record. The writers of that record are added to the credits after their side acts.
1979SYNTH-POP
  • The Blitz opens its Tuesday club. Tubeway Army’s Are 'Friends’ Electric? and Gary Numan’s Cars are both British number ones. OMD’s Electricity appears on Factory. The Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star is number one in Britain. The Tascam Portastudio puts four-track recording on cassette. The Fairlight CMI introduces sampling at the price of a house.
12 July 1979HOUSE & TECHNO
  • a crate of disco records is detonated between games of a baseball doubleheader at Comiskey Park, Chicago. The second game is forfeited. Within about a year American radio has abandoned the format.

1980s

1980HEAVY METAL
  • 19 February. Bon Scott dies in London; the inquest records misadventure. April. British Steel. July. Back in Black. 16 August. The first Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington. 25 September. John Bonham dies; on 4 December Led Zeppelin announce in four sentences that they cannot continue. Diamond Head self-release Lightning to the Nations.
1980FUNK
  • Zapp’s talk-box debut; the one-man era opens in earnest.
1980DISCO
  • February. Casablanca’s founder is removed as the label’s European buyer completes its purchase; Studio 54’s owners enter prison after a farewell party; the only Grammy for best disco recording is presented, and the category is abolished.
  • Spring–autumn, a pure disco record under a pop flag spends a month at number one; the costume act’s film wins the first-ever Worst Picture award of a new ceremony; a Chic-produced Motown album and a disco-bassed rock single top the charts while the word itself disappears from marketing copy industry-wide.
  • American record shipments post their second consecutive annual decline; full return privilege is capped across the industry.
1980PUNK
  • January, the trade press begins publishing a separate independent chart.
  • April, Los Angeles.
  • Washington DC. Dischord Records is founded.
1980POST-PUNK & NEW WAVE
  • January, the trade press begins publishing a weekly independent chart; the first number one is usually given as Spizzenergi’s science-fiction novelty.
  • February, Colossal Youth, Young Marble Giants, on Rough Trade. Postcard Records begins in a Glasgow flat with Orange Juice’s first single.
  • 18 May. Ian Curtis takes his own life, aged twenty-three, on the eve of Joy Division’s American tour.
  • July, Closer reaches the British top ten. The surviving members will become New Order.
  • October, Remain in Light. The Human League split; the founders leave to form Heaven 17, and the remade band recruits two teenagers from a Sheffield disco.
1980HIP-HOP
  • The Breaks becomes the first gold rap single. A Roland drum machine is released, sells badly, and is discontinued.
1980SYNTH-POP
  • The Linn LM-1 (sampled drums, about five thousand dollars) and the Roland TR-808 (synthesised drums, about twelve hundred) both ship. At the Townhouse in London, the gated-reverb drum sound is discovered by accident during Peter Gabriel’s third album. Vienna is recorded. Zapp’s More Bounce to the Ounce. Phil Oakey recruits Susan Ann Sulley and Joanne Catherall from a Sheffield nightclub; Ware and Marsh leave to found Heaven 17.
1980HOUSE & TECHNO
  • a Roland drum machine is released. It does not sound like drums and does not sell.
1980NEW JACK SWING
  • The Linn LM-1 ships with its shuffle control, swing quantise’s ancestor, per the synth-pop volume. Black Entertainment Television founded.
1980–1983TRAP
  • Roland manufactures the TR-808. It sells poorly and is discontinued, with the commonly-reported reason being the loss of a supply of the faulty transistors that produced its noise circuit. Fewer than fifteen thousand are made.
Mid-1980sTRAP
  • Second-hand units are cheap. Musicians in New York, Chicago and Miami find uses for them that the design never anticipated.
1981DOO-WOP
  • Diana Ross’s cover returns Why Do Fools Fall in Love to the top ten, and the authorship wars begin in earnest.
1981–1987FOLK REVIVAL
  • Dylan’s litigation with Grossman over the publishing arrangements runs from filing to confidential settlement with the estate.
1981HEAVY METAL
  • 1 August. MTV begins broadcasting. Girlschool’s Hit and Run reaches the British top five; Mötley Crüe self-release their debut.
1981DISCO
  • TK Records goes bankrupt. The first reports of the epidemic that will devastate this book’s communities are published in June.
1981PUNK
  • December, Damaged, on SST, after a major distributor withdraws.
1981POST-PUNK & NEW WAVE
  • June, Ghost Town reaches number one as English cities burn; the Specials split at their peak within weeks.
  • August. MTV launches in America with a library disproportionately full of British videos. ESG’s Hannett-recorded EP moves between 99 Records and Factory’s orbit.
  • September, Just Can’t Get Enough and then Speak & Spell go top ten on Mute, on a handshake. Soft Cell’s northern-soul cover reaches number one. Dare follows in October and wins Christmas.
1981HIP-HOP
  • The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel: seven minutes, one DJ, live.
1981SYNTH-POP
  • Vienna holds at number two for a month. MTV launches on 1 August, playing the Buggles first; its library is a few hundred clips, disproportionately British. Tainted Love is the year’s best-selling British single. Computer World. O Superman reaches number two in Britain from a self-pressed loft edition. Speak & Spell; Vince Clarke leaves Depeche Mode weeks later. Dare; Don’t You Want Me is Christmas number one. Dave Smith proposes a universal instrument interface in an engineering-society paper.
1981HOUSE & TECHNO
  • a Roland bass accompaniment unit is released. It does not sound like a bass guitar. In Chicago, WBMX puts five mixing DJs on its Saturday nights. In Detroit, Juan Atkins makes his first record as half of Cybotron.
1981GRUNGE & ALTERNATIVE
  • Mark Arm, in a letter to the Seattle fanzine Desperate Times, mockingly describes his band of the time, Mr. Epp and the Calculations, as pure grunge. The word is a joke for another six years.
1982HEAVY METAL
  • March. The Number of the Beast; American church groups burn it. 19 March. Randy Rhoads dies in the Leesburg air crash. A California legislative hearing plays rock records backwards, listening for messages.
1982DISCO
  • May. Neil Bogart dies at thirty-nine. November. Patrick Cowley dies at thirty-two.
1982POST-PUNK & NEW WAVE
  • May, the Haçienda, FAC 51, opens in Manchester, funded by Factory and New Order’s royalties, and begins losing money with historic consistency.
  • Through the year. Rough Trade hits its cash crisis: layoffs, the shop separated, the collective structure giving way to management. Postcard Records closes; Orange Juice are already on Polydor.
1982HIP-HOP
  • Planet Rock invents electro from a German electronic group’s records and a cheap drum machine; there is a settlement. The Message proves rap can be social description. The New York City Rap Tour reaches Paris and London. Malcolm McLaren releases a record built on New York scratching.
1982SYNTH-POP
  • Don’t You Want Me is number one in America; the Second British Invasion begins. Roland’s Juno-6 puts polyphony under a thousand pounds. Yazoo’s Upstairs at Eric’s. Sexual Healing puts the TR-808 under a soul standard. The Musicians’ Union campaigns against machine replacement of players. The compact disc launches in Japan.
1982HOUSE & TECHNO
  • Cybotron’s Cosmic Cars. In Manchester, Factory Records and New Order open the Haçienda; it will stand mostly empty for years.
1982NEW JACK SWING
  • Maurice Starr auditions five Roxbury teenagers at his Hollywood Talent Night showcase in Boston. New Edition is formed.
1983SOUL
  • James Jamerson dies at forty-seven.
1983HEAVY METAL
  • January. Pyromania. 29 May. The US Festival’s heavy metal day draws the event’s biggest reported crowd. July. Metallica’s Kill 'Em All, on an independent label, by mail order and van. 26 November. Quiet Riot’s Metal Health reaches number one in America, by the trade’s usual accounting the first metal album to do so. The fragmentation this book ends on is complete.
  • After
  • 1985. Willie Dixon sues over Whole Lotta Love; the settlement amends the credits. 1998. Rob Halford speaks publicly about his sexuality, and the genre’s most-copied image acquires its author’s own account. 2025. Black Sabbath’s original line-up play a farewell concert in Aston, two miles from where this book began; Ozzy Osbourne dies seventeen days later.
1983POST-PUNK & NEW WAVE
  • March, Blue Monday, FAC 73, in the die-cut sleeve; it stays on the chart most of the year and becomes, by the industry’s unaudited custom, the best-selling twelve-inch of all time.
  • April. R.E.M.'s Murmur: college radio’s economy has its flagship. The Enterprise Allowance Scheme goes national at forty pounds a week and begins quietly funding British bands and labels.
  • May, the Smiths’ first single on Rough Trade; a written contract, the handshake era closing as the sums grow.
  • November, This Charming Man and the gladioli on television.
1983HIP-HOP
  • Sucker M.C.'s: a drum machine and two voices, and the end of the house-band era. The Bronx drama and the subway documentary appear.
1983SYNTH-POP
  • January: at the NAMM show, MIDI connects a Sequential Circuits Prophet-600 to a Roland JP-6, and the standard is public. The Yamaha DX7 ships and conquers the professional market. Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) is number one in America. Blue Monday, the best-selling twelve-inch. March: Billie Jean enters MTV rotation and the channel’s colour line breaks, the competing accounts are printed in Movement Three. July: by one widely repeated count, British acts hold about a third of the American Hot 100. December: the Thriller film premieres. ZTT is founded; Relax is released in October.
1983HOUSE & TECHNO
  • the MIDI standard is agreed, and one person can run a studio. A second Roland drum machine is released and is discontinued within about a year. Ron Hardy begins at the Music Box. Cybotron release Clear.
1983NEW JACK SWING
  • Candy Girl tops the R&B chart and reaches number one in Britain. A snowstorm strands Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis at an S.O.S. Band session; they miss a Time show and are dismissed. Their production of Just Be Good to Me charts the same year.
1984DISCO
  • In Chicago, the first pressed house record is cut by young men who grew up inside the rooms this book described. This series’ house-and-techno volume begins.
1984POST-PUNK & NEW WAVE
  • January. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s banned debut single reaches number one for ZTT: the anti-rockist argument, now a marketing campaign, owns the year.
  • February, The Smiths reaches number two: the network’s chart high-water mark, and the season the word indie completes its drift from plumbing to sound.
  • Summer. Pinnacle, the network’s biggest commercial distributor, goes into receivership; its labels learn what unsecured credit means. The absorption is general: the trade press is full of British synthesiser pop conquering America by video.
  • By year’s end, in Chicago, the first house records are being pressed on labels that did not exist a year earlier. The machine is about to get its second life.
1984HIP-HOP
  • the first arena package tour grosses in the millions. A studio film exports the four elements worldwide. A fourteen-year-old answers a Brooklyn group’s single and starts an argument that produces dozens of records.
1984SYNTH-POP
  • The BBC declines to play Relax; it spends five weeks at number one. Two Tribes spends nine, with Relax beside it at two. Smalltown Boy reaches number three. MTV begins paying the majors for exclusive video windows and holds its first Video Music Awards.
1984HOUSE & TECHNO
  • the bass box is discontinued and dumped on the second-hand market. On and On is pressed in Chicago. Chicago’s principal house label is founded by a man who owns a pressing plant.
1984GRUNGE & ALTERNATIVE
  • Black Flag release an album whose second side is deliberately, provocatively slow, and tour the Pacific Northwest. Musicians across the region later cite the shows as permission to stop playing fast.
1985HIP-HOP
  • a dorm-room label signs a distribution deal with a major, reported at around six hundred thousand dollars. Radio.
1985SYNTH-POP
  • The rotoscoped video for Take On Me takes an already twice-failed single to number one in America. Live Aid plays to a claimed audience in the billions. The Atari ST ships with MIDI ports built in. Akai’s affordable samplers begin shipping.
1985HOUSE & TECHNO
  • Juan Atkins founds his own label in Detroit and releases No UFO’s on it. Affordable samplers reach small studios.
1985GANGSTA RAP
  • the PMRC forms; the Senate holds its September hearing; in November the industry agrees a voluntary explicit-lyrics warning. In Los Angeles, the LAPD’s battering ram makes national news, and Toddy Tee’s Batterram cassette answers it from the swap meets. In Philadelphia, Schoolly D presses the record generally counted as the style’s first.
1985NEW JACK SWING
  • Loose Ends become the first British act to top the American R&B chart. December. New Edition vote Bobby Brown out of the group.
1985GRUNGE & ALTERNATIVE
  • Chris Hanzsek and Tina Casale record six Seattle bands at their own expense.
1985EMO & NU-METAL
  • In Washington DC, a season of shows by bands including Rites of Spring and Embrace introduces a personal emotional register into hardcore. Somebody coins a word as an insult.
1986FUNK
  • A film-soundtrack single returns Brown to the top five.
1986PUNK
  • The Sex Pistols litigation concludes, substantially in the band’s favour, eight years after it began.
May 1986HIP-HOP
  • Raising Hell: several million copies, a scale no rap record had reached. A song about trainers leads to an endorsement deal reported at over a million dollars, the first of its kind in the genre.
November 1986HIP-HOP
  • Licensed to Ill becomes the first rap album to top the American chart.
December 1986HIP-HOP
  • Salt-N-Pepa’s first album; the first female rap act to go platinum.
1986SYNTH-POP
  • American networks report on independent radio promotion; the majors suspend the practice. Guitar revivals crest on both sides of the Atlantic. Used analogue machines reach pawn-shop prices; Chicago house records begin charting in Britain.
1986HOUSE & TECHNO
  • Your Love, No Way Back, Move Your Body and Can You Feel It. Derrick May founds his own label. In September, Love Can’t Turn Around reaches the British top ten.
1986RAVE & JUNGLE
  • October, the M25 orbital motorway is completed. Its promoters intend it for freight.
1986GANGSTA RAP
  • Ice-T’s 6 in the Mornin'; Eazy-E founds Ruthless with, by his own account, drug money; James Prince founds Rap-A-Lot in Houston.
1986NEW JACK SWING
  • February, Control is released; five of its singles will reach the American top ten. Andre Harrell founds Uptown Records. Teddy Riley’s early production credits appear on Harlem rap records.
1986GRUNGE & ALTERNATIVE
  • March, the Deep Six compilation is released on C/Z: Green River, Malfunkshun, the Melvins, Skin Yard, Soundgarden, the U-Men.
March 1987HIP-HOP
  • Criminal Minded.
August 1987HIP-HOP
  • Scott La Rock is shot and killed, aged twenty-five.
1987HIP-HOP
  • a twelve-bit sampler with about ten seconds of memory becomes the defining production tool of the era. Paid in Full changes how rapping is done.
1987SYNTH-POP
  • Never Gonna Give You Up is the year’s best-selling British single; the Hit Factory era peaks. MTV Europe launches.
1987HOUSE & TECHNO
  • Acid Tracks, made on the discontinued bass box by people who could not program it conventionally, and played repeatedly at the Music Box. Strings of Life and Nude Photo in Detroit. Kevin Saunderson founds his label and makes the bass sound that will underpin an entire British genre. The Paradise Garage closes in September. In Britain, Jack Your Body is number one in January; four London DJs holiday in Ibiza in August.
1987GANGSTA RAP
  • Boyz-n-the-Hood; Ice-T’s Rhyme Pays wears the new sticker as, he says, free advertising; the Ruthless–Priority arrangement forms.
1987NEW JACK SWING
  • The E-mu SP-1200 ships. Autumn. Barry Michael Cooper’s Village Voice writing on Riley coins the phrase new jack swing. November. Keith Sweat’s Make It Last Forever, with I Want Her, built by Riley.
1987GRUNGE & ALTERNATIVE
  • Jonathan Poneman funds Soundgarden’s Screaming Life EP. Green River’s Dry as a Bone appears on Sub Pop with catalogue copy that turns the word grunge into a brand.
  • 31 October. Green River play their last show, opening for Jane’s Addiction, and split over the question this book is about.
1988RHYTHM & BLUES
  • Following Ruth Brown’s campaign with the lawyer Howell Begle, Atlantic waives its 1950s artists’ unrecouped balances and helps fund the Rhythm & Blues Foundation, the industry’s first real accounting for the contracts described in Movement Four, thirty-three years after this book ends.
1988DOO-WOP
  • Atlantic settles with its pioneer artists; the Rhythm & Blues Foundation is founded; Morris Levy is convicted.
1988SOUL
  • Motown Records is sold for sixty-one million dollars; Jobete is retained, and sold separately a decade later at a valuation in the hundreds of millions.
June 1988HIP-HOP
  • It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back: dozens of uncleared samples per track, which is possible only because nobody has yet established what a sample costs.
August 1988HIP-HOP
  • Straight Outta Compton sells in the millions with no radio and no television. The map splits.
1988SYNTH-POP
  • The Korg M1 workstation ships. I Should Be So Lucky spends five weeks at number one. Depeche Mode play to a stadium crowd of tens of thousands in California. Yo! MTV Raps launches in August. The High Court finds ZTT’s contract with Holly Johnson an unreasonable restraint of trade.
1988HOUSE & TECHNO
  • Big Fun and Good Life reach the British charts. A British compilation of Detroit records is released; its working title calls the music house, and at the artists’ insistence the sleeve says techno instead. Voodoo Ray is made in Manchester. Acid house fills the Haçienda and the new London clubs; Britain’s warehouse scene begins, and by the autumn the tabloids have turned.
1988RAVE & JUNGLE
  • Akai’s affordable samplers reach the British second-hand market within reach of teenagers. Acid house fills the clubs of the house-and-techno volume’s last British chapter; the new pirate wave goes up across London. In Bradford, Unique 3 cut the first bleep track.
April 1988GANGSTA RAP
  • Operation Hammer sweeps South Central: more than fourteen hundred arrests in a weekend, most released without charge.
August 1988GANGSTA RAP
  • The album from Compton, where the previous volume ends and this one begins; the Dalton Avenue raid wrecks two apartment buildings.
September 1988GANGSTA RAP
  • a fatal stabbing at a Nassau Coliseum rap show hardens venues and insurers; Yo! MTV Raps goes national.
1988NEW JACK SWING
  • The Akai MPC60, designed with Roger Linn, ships with swing quantise behind a numeric display. June, Guy and Bobby Brown’s Don’t Be Cruel released within weeks of each other. Take 6’s unaccompanied debut becomes the era’s harmony textbook.
1988GRUNGE & ALTERNATIVE
  • 1 April. Pavitt and Poneman take Sub Pop full-time.
  • September, Billboard launches its Modern Rock chart.
  • During the year. R.E.M. sign with Warner Bros. for a reported ten million dollars; Mother Love Bone sign with PolyGram.
  • October, Daydream Nation; Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff.
  • November, the Sub Pop Singles Club launches with Nirvana’s first single, about a thousand hand-numbered copies.
1989SOUL
  • The McLemore Avenue building is demolished.
1989REGGAE
  • King Tubby is shot dead outside his home. Island Records is sold. The machine this book described is, by now, everywhere.
1989HIP-HOP
  • an assistant director of the FBI writes to the album’s distributor. The letter has no legal force and is the best publicity the group ever gets. New York’s subway runs clean of graffiti for the first time in twenty years.
1989SYNTH-POP
  • Cubase ships for the Atari ST. The appeal in the ZTT case is dismissed. Depeche Mode release a guitar riff as a single and nobody calls it a betrayal. The chart machinery of Britain fills with house records made on this book’s second-hand machines, and the word synth-pop begins its retirement into history.
1989HOUSE & TECHNO
  • Pacific State and French Kiss. Underground Resistance is founded in Detroit. The orbital raves circle London on the new motorway, and a police unit is formed against them. In July, about a hundred and fifty people dance through West Berlin behind a truck, registered as a political demonstration; in November, the Wall opens.
1989RAVE & JUNGLE
  • The orbital rave summer: Sunrise at White Waltham in June, convoys, phone lines, the tabloid front pages. The Pay Party Unit is formed in the autumn. Warp Records is founded in Sheffield; The Theme and Track With No Name are released. Rage begins its Thursday residency at Heaven.
1989GANGSTA RAP
  • the FBI letter; the Detroit stage incident; Ice Cube leaves over accounting.
1989NEW JACK SWING
  • LaFace Records founded in Atlanta by L.A. Reid and Babyface in a joint venture with Arista. 2300 Jackson Street fails; the Jacksons’ Epic era ends. New Kids on the Block, Starr’s white replica of New Edition, become the highest-grossing act in America. September, Rhythm Nation 1814. Soul II Soul’s London swing reaches the American top five.
1989GRUNGE & ALTERNATIVE
  • March, Melody Maker publishes the Seattle story its writer was flown in, at the label’s expense, to find.
  • April, Doolittle.
  • June, Bleach, recorded for $606.17. Lamefest at the Moore Theatre.
  • September. Soundgarden’s Louder Than Love on A&M, the first Seattle album of its cohort on a major.
  • December. Lame Fest UK at the London Astoria: Mudhoney, TAD, Nirvana.
1989TEEN POP
  • The Disney Channel’s revived children’s variety series begins production in Orlando. It runs until 1994.
1989–1990GLOBAL POP
  • In Jamaica, the production duo Steely and Clevie build the rhythm tracks from which the dembow pattern derives. The Shabba Ranks record that gives the pattern its name is released.

1990s

1990–92HOUSE & TECHNO
  • Chicago’s scene collapses commercially. American producers earn their living almost entirely from European bookings. In Britain, 1990 legislation prices the field rave out of existence. Underground Resistance’s records reach Berlin. Detroit establishes its own distribution. Larry Levan dies in 1992, aged thirty-eight; Ron Hardy dies the same year, aged thirty-three.
1990RAVE & JUNGLE
  • July, the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act prices the unlicensed pay-party out of existence; the big promoters go licensed. The Eclipse opens in Coventry. Kiss FM goes legal. LFO reaches number twelve. 4hero’s Mr Kirk’s Nightmare is released on Reinforced; Moving Shadow is founded.
1990GANGSTA RAP
  • the sticker is standardised in black and white; a federal judge in Broward County rules an album obscene for the first time; a shopkeeper is convicted for selling it and the performers are acquitted; Geffen refuses the Geto Boys album; AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted.
1990NEW JACK SWING
  • March. Bell Biv DeVoe’s Poison, carrying the group’s printed hip-hop-smoothed-out manifesto. June. Mariah Carey’s debut single Vision of Love resets the melisma benchmark.
1990GRUNGE & ALTERNATIVE
  • 19 March. Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone dies of a heroin overdose, at twenty-four.
  • April. Fugazi’s Repeater.
  • June. Sonic Youth’s first DGC album.
  • July, Apple is released.
  • September. Dave Grohl joins Nirvana.
  • Autumn, a demo tape from Seattle returns from San Diego with Eddie Vedder’s voice on it.
1990EMO & NU-METAL
  • A seven-string electric guitar with an added low B enters mass production.
Early 1990sINDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • The MPEG-1 Audio Layer III standard is finalised, following work at the Fraunhofer Institute and elsewhere. A minute of music becomes roughly a megabyte.
1990–1991GLOBAL POP
  • In Panama, El General, Nando Boom and others record Spanish-language dancehall over Jamaican rhythms. The cassettes travel north.
Late 1990sGLOBAL POP
  • The Nigerian recorded-music business, having largely collapsed, is rebuilt around Lagos radio, independent labels and the Alaba market.
1991FUNK
  • The Manhattan sampling ruling: the market for this book’s grooves becomes compulsory.
1991HIP-HOP
  • a federal court in Manhattan rules on an uncleared sample, opens the judgment with a commandment about theft, and refers the matter for possible criminal prosecution. Clearance becomes compulsory overnight, and the records audibly change.
1991RAVE & JUNGLE
  • August, Charly reaches number three; the toytown wave follows. Bombscare and Mentasm circulate. Kool FM goes on air from Hackney in the autumn. Fabio and Grooverider’s Rage room splits hardcore from house.
March 1991GANGSTA RAP
  • The King beating is filmed.
May 1991GANGSTA RAP
  • Billboard adopts SoundScan; the chart lurches towards the counted country.
June 1991GANGSTA RAP
  • Efil4zaggin, refused by chains and absent from radio, is the measured number-one album in America.
July 1991GANGSTA RAP
  • We Can’t Be Stopped.
October 1991GANGSTA RAP
  • Death Certificate draws Billboard’s only editorial against a record.
December 1991GANGSTA RAP
  • The sampling judgment described in the previous volume makes clearance compulsory; the replayed-funk era begins.
1991NEW JACK SWING
  • Jodeci’s Forever My Lady. Boyz II Men’s Motownphilly and Cooleyhighharmony. Perspective Records launches with Sounds of Blackness. November. Dangerous, with Riley, twenty-four, producing the biggest star alive. 30 November. The Hot 100 converts to scanned sales and monitored airplay; the sibling volume’s machine.
1991GRUNGE & ALTERNATIVE
  • Early. TAD’s 8-Way Santa; the cover photograph brings a lawsuit and a recall.
  • March. R.E.M.'s Out of Time goes to number one.
  • April. Nirvana sign with DGC; Sub Pop’s contract is bought out for a reported $70,000 plus a royalty override that will save the label.
  • May, Billboard switches to SoundScan: the chart stops lying. The Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish.
  • August, the International Pop Underground convention in Olympia; Ten.
  • 24 September, Nevermind, initial shipment about 46,000 copies.
  • October, Badmotorfinger. The first Lollapalooza has toured all summer.
1991BRITPOP
  • Spring, Sounds and Record Mirror close within weeks of each other. Two of punk’s four weeklies remain.
  • May, challenged over his band’s authenticity after a show in Norwich, Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers cuts 4 REAL into his forearm. The NME publishes the photograph.
  • Autumn. Nirvana’s second album detonates in Britain; American bands begin two years of dominance over the weeklies’ covers.
1992/1996DOO-WOP
  • The Teenagers’ authorship verdict, won and reversed.
1992RAVE & JUNGLE
  • May, Raving I’m Raving enters the chart at number two and is withdrawn by agreement within weeks. The same month, the convoys settle on Castlemorton Common: a week, tens of thousands, national news. The licensed mega-raves peak, Fantazia at Castle Donington, Vision at Popham. Terminator makes the time-stretch artefact an instrument; Here Come the Drumz names the darkside. Andy C co-founds Ram, aged sixteen.
29 April 1992GANGSTA RAP
  • The Simi Valley acquittals; Los Angeles burns for six days; the records are consulted as prophecy.
Summer 1992GANGSTA RAP
  • The Body Count boycott and withdrawal; Death Row forms out of Ruthless’s contested releases, the bats-and-pipes account is alleged in a federal filing, denied, and settled.
November 1992GANGSTA RAP
  • The Predator enters at number one on both charts.
December 1992GANGSTA RAP
  • The Chronic.
1992NEW JACK SWING
  • En Vogue’s Funky Divas. July, Mary J. Blige’s What’s the 411? names hip-hop soul. Summer, End of the Road begins thirteen weeks at number one, breaking a record standing since 1956. November, The Bodyguard soundtrack; I Will Always Love You begins fourteen weeks, its publishing flowing to Dolly Parton. Bobby Brown’s Bobby sells a fraction of its predecessor.
1992GRUNGE & ALTERNATIVE
  • 11 January, Nevermind reaches number one, displacing Michael Jackson.
  • Spring. Hole sign with DGC on terms reported around a million dollars. The Seattle sweep is general.
  • April. L7’s Bricks Are Heavy.
  • 27 June. Stefanie Sargent of 7 Year Bitch dies, at twenty-four.
  • August, Fontanelle.
  • September, Singles, Core, Sweet Oblivion, Dirt.
  • November, the New York Times prints an invented grunge lexicon; Marc Jacobs shows a grunge collection for Perry Ellis, a show ever since linked in the reporting to his departure from the house the following year.
1992BRITPOP
  • April, Melody Maker puts Suede on its front cover as the best new band in Britain, before their first single. The single, The Drowners, follows in May.
  • November. Factory Records enters receivership. The Madchester era ends in paperwork.
  • Also this year. Creation Records sells a 49 per cent stake to Sony; Blur return from a miserable American tour and begin writing English.
1992TEEN POP
  • A studio is established in an industrial district of Stockholm by a former club DJ and a partner. Trans Continental begins assembling a group in Orlando.
1992EMO & NU-METAL
  • Rage Against the Machine’s first album: a rock band with a rapper at the front and a guitarist producing turntable sounds by hand.
April 1992GLOBAL POP
  • Seo Taiji and Boys perform on a televised talent competition in Seoul, receive the lowest score from the judging panel, and top the charts within weeks.
1992GLOBAL POP
  • In San Juan, DJ Playero’s numbered cassettes circulate through the housing projects. A teenage Daddy Yankee is on them.
1993RAVE & JUNGLE
  • Darkside’s year: Ghosts of My Life, Valley of the Shadows, Renegade Snares. AWOL is resident at the Paradise Club; the jungle rooms fill. The word jungle settles on the music, against the preference of half its makers.
1993GANGSTA RAP
  • Bad Boy forms under Arista; Snoop surrenders after the television awards and is charged; Doggystyle posts the largest debut-artist opening week yet scanned; Enter the Wu-Tang arrives with the solo-rights clause; the congressional hearings are scheduled.
1993NEW JACK SWING
  • Sean Combs is fired from Uptown and founds Bad Boy in a joint venture with Arista. May, janet., against a Virgin contract briefly the largest ever signed. SWV’s Weak at number one. Toni Braxton’s debut. Zhané’s Pronounced Jah-Nay.
1993GRUNGE & ALTERNATIVE
  • February, In Utero is recorded in two weeks in Minnesota, engineer paid a flat fee, no points.
  • April, the British press turns: a magazine cover tells American rock to go home. Britpop is assembling.
  • Mid-year. Atlantic buys forty-nine per cent of Matador.
  • 7 July. Mia Zapata of the Gits is murdered in Seattle; the scene founds Home Alive. Her killer is convicted a decade later on DNA evidence.
  • September, In Utero enters at number one.
  • October, Vs. sells 950,378 copies in a week, the largest SoundScan total yet measured; Bikini Kill’s Pussy Whipped.
  • The Baffler publishes The Problem with Music.
1993BRITPOP
  • April, Select runs its Union Jack cover package on Suede, Pulp, Saint Etienne, Denim and the Auteurs. The genre is named in print.
  • May. Blur release Modern Life Is Rubbish.
  • 31 May. Alan McGee sees Oasis at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow and signs them to Creation.
  • September. Suede’s debut album wins the Mercury Prize.
  • October. Matthew Bannister takes over Radio 1 and begins rebuilding it around new music.
1993TEEN POP
  • The five members of the first Orlando group are in place. A young former glam-metal singer from a Stockholm suburb begins working at the Swedish studio under the name he still uses.
1993EMO & NU-METAL
  • Korn form in Bakersfield, California.
1994RAVE & JUNGLE
  • Jungle’s public year: Incredible reaches the top ten in September; the boycott meetings follow. Original Nuttah and The Burial are released. Metalheadz is founded; Speed opens. November, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act receives royal assent, defining the music by its repetitive beats; three demonstrations against it end in the Hyde Park riot in October. The Spiral Tribe trial ends in acquittals; the free-party circuit emigrates to the continent.
1994GANGSTA RAP
  • the February hearings on gangsta rap; the Supreme Court’s parody ruling; Illmatic; Above the Rim; Ready to Die; in November, Shakur is shot and robbed at Quad Studios and survives.
1994NEW JACK SWING
  • June. Lisa Lopes pleads guilty to arson after the fire at Andre Rison’s house; probation and a fine. August. R. Kelly, twenty-seven, marries the fifteen-year-old Aaliyah with falsified documents; Vibe later publishes the certificate; the marriage is annulled. Autumn. Boyz II Men’s II: I’ll Make Love to You holds number one for fourteen weeks and is succeeded there by the group’s own On Bended Knee, Babyface handing the top spot to Jam and Lewis, the act unchanged. November, CrazySexyCool.
1994GRUNGE & ALTERNATIVE
  • January. Cobain tells Rolling Stone the biggest hit of the era was his attempt to write a Pixies song.
  • March, Superunknown enters at number one.
  • 5 April. Kurt Cobain dies in Seattle of a self-inflicted gunshot wound; his body is found on 8 April; the King County medical examiner rules the death a suicide. He was twenty-seven.
  • 8 April, the Offspring’s Smash is released on Epitaph; it becomes the best-selling independent-label album to date.
  • 12 April, Live Through This.
  • May. Pearl Jam file their memorandum with the Justice Department over ticketing fees.
  • 16 June. Kristen Pfaff of Hole dies, at twenty-seven.
  • 30 June. Gossard and Ament testify before a congressional subcommittee.
  • November, MTV Unplugged in New York; Vitalogy, on vinyl first.
  • December. Bush’s Sixteen Stone: the specification learns to write itself.
1994BRITPOP
  • April, Parklife enters at number one; Pulp release His 'n’ Hers. Kurt Cobain dies the same month; the American counter-narrative ends.
  • May, Loaded launches.
  • August, Definitely Maybe enters at number one, reported as the fastest-selling British debut to date.
  • October. Suede release Dog Man Star; Bernard Butler has already left.
  • December, the Stone Roses return with Second Coming, giving their comeback interview to The Big Issue rather than the music press.
1994EMO & NU-METAL
  • Korn’s debut album is produced by Ross Robinson. Sunny Day Real Estate release Diary on Sub Pop. A Californian punk label begins its long-running cheap sampler series.
1995RAVE & JUNGLE
  • Timeless enters the album chart top ten. The Blue Note Sunday sessions begin. Pulp Fiction previews the two-step future. The rename to drum and bass spreads through the trade. Radio 1 launches a jungle programme. Happy hardcore completes its departure. November, the death of Leah Betts puts the ecstasy panic on every high street.
1995GANGSTA RAP
  • Shakur is sentenced in February and imprisoned; Eazy-E dies of AIDS complications in March at thirty; Me Against the World is number one from a cell; Dole names Time Warner in May; E. 1999 Eternal; the August Source Awards; Time Warner sells its Interscope stake in September; in October Knight and Kenner post the bond and Shakur signs the handwritten contract; Dogg Food arrives through the side door in November.
1995NEW JACK SWING
  • July. TLC file for bankruptcy, listing debts of about three and a half million dollars, while CrazySexyCool sells towards its eventual ten million American copies; Waterfalls holds number one for seven weeks. D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar opens the rebellion. Montell Jordan’s This Is How We Do It gives Def Jam its first R&B number one. Method Man and Mary J. Blige’s duet weds the two systems over a Motown copyright. Andre Harrell is named chief executive of Motown. December, One Sweet Day begins sixteen weeks at number one.
1995GRUNGE & ALTERNATIVE
  • July, the Foo Fighters’ debut. The Justice Department closes the Ticketmaster inquiry without action; Pearl Jam’s self-ticketed tour buckles.
  • September. Jawbreaker’s Dear You.
  • 21 October. Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon dies, at twenty-eight.
  • Warner Music buys forty-nine per cent of Sub Pop for a price reported around twenty million dollars.
1995BRITPOP
  • February. Blur take four Brit awards.
  • 1 February. Richey Edwards disappears. His car is later found near the Severn Bridge.
  • March. Elastica’s debut enters at number one, reported as the fastest-selling British debut yet; Radiohead release The Bends.
  • April. Tony McCarroll leaves Oasis; litigation follows.
  • May, Common People enters at number two, behind Robson and Jerome.
  • 14 August, Country House and Roll With It are released head to head. ITN reports the chart result as national news. Blur win the week, 274,000 to 216,000 by the figures usually given.
  • September, The Great Escape; Noel Gallagher’s remark about Albarn and James is published in the Observer and retracted in a written apology. Portishead’s Dummy wins the Mercury Prize, beating Definitely Maybe.
  • October, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? and Different Class released three weeks apart. Wonderwall is held at number two by Robson and Jerome.
1995TEEN POP
  • The second Orlando group is assembled. The first Backstreet Boys single is released, written and produced in Stockholm: a substantial hit in Germany and much of Europe, commercially negligible in the United States.
1995EMO & NU-METAL
  • The Warped Tour runs for the first time: all ages, car parks, a ticket priced at roughly what a compact disc costs.
1995TRAP
  • Three 6 Mafia’s Mystic Stylez. Every sonic component of trap is in place in Memphis, eight years before the word.
1995GLOBAL POP
  • SM Entertainment is founded in Seoul. In February, Puerto Rican police seize underground cassettes from San Juan record shops.
1996RAVE & JUNGLE
  • Techstep arrives via the No U-Turn school and the Mutant Jazz remix. Logical Progression sells the atmospheric wing to the album market. Shadow Boxing rules the dubplate winter.
1996GANGSTA RAP
  • Snoop is acquitted of murder in February; MCA buys half of Interscope, with a refusal clause, for a reported two hundred million dollars; All Eyez on Me; Dre walks away from Death Row in the spring; Smokin’ Grooves makes rap tourable again; the attack single of the summer; on 7 September Shakur is shot in Las Vegas after the Tyson fight and dies on 13 September, at twenty-five; the Makaveli album, posthumous, is number one in November.
1996NEW JACK SWING
  • No Diggity reaches number one; Riley’s second act. August. Aaliyah’s One in a Million, built by Timbaland and Missy Elliott, moves the pocket beyond the swing knob. New Edition’s Home Again reunion tops the chart; the tour collapses. Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite.
1996GRUNGE & ALTERNATIVE
  • January, Hype! premieres.
  • May. Soundgarden’s Down on the Upside.
  • 12 July. Jonathan Melvoin, touring keyboardist for the Smashing Pumpkins, dies of an overdose.
  • Summer. Metallica headline Lollapalooza.
  • August. R.E.M. re-sign with Warner for a reported eighty million dollars, the largest recording contract to date. No Code enters at number one and drops fast. Sloan return on their own label.
1996BRITPOP
  • February, at the Brit Awards, Blair presents an award to Bowie, Noel Gallagher names Blair from the stage, and Jarvis Cocker interrupts Michael Jackson’s performance. He is released without charge.
  • July, the Spice Girls release Wannabe; it reaches number one in dozens of countries.
  • 10–11 August. Oasis play Knebworth to a quarter of a million people; applications are usually given as around two and a half million.
  • September. Suede’s Coming Up and Kula Shaker’s K enter at number one in the same month. Pulp’s Different Class wins the Mercury Prize.
July 1996TEEN POP
  • Wannabe is released in Britain. It reaches number one in a very large number of countries and demonstrates the scale of the audience.
1996–1997TEEN POP
  • Quit Playing Games (With My Heart) is a hit across Europe, then reaches number two in the United States more than a year later, the territory-sequencing strategy working as designed.
1996EMO & NU-METAL
  • American telecommunications legislation relaxes radio ownership limits, and consolidation follows. Sepultura’s Roots, recorded with Ross Robinson, is released. A clothing chain built to sell alternative-music merchandise to suburban teenagers goes public.
1996TRAP
  • UGK’s Ridin’ Dirty establishes the conversational Southern writing register that the Atlanta records inherit.
1996GLOBAL POP
  • H.O.T. debut: the first fully manufactured Korean group, and the proof of the system. YG is founded; JYP follows in 1997.
1997GLAM
  • Bowie securitises his catalogue (fifty-five million dollars of bonds against his own royalties) having spent two decades buying back what the seventies had taken.
1997RAVE & JUNGLE
  • Ni Ten Ichi Ryu; Circles on daytime radio; speed garage’s first chart records inherit the Sunday rooms. July. The Prodigy’s third album enters at number one in Britain and America. September. Roni Size and Reprazent’s New Forms wins the Mercury Music Prize. The span closes with the underground institutionalised and the aerial still up.
1997GANGSTA RAP
  • Knight is sentenced to nine years in February; on 9 March Christopher Wallace is shot dead in Los Angeles at twenty-four, sixteen days before Life After Death, which enters at number one; the Chicago summit convenes; the estates begin their litigation and their stewardship; No Way Out and the tribute single hold the top of the charts through the summer; Ghetto D opens at number one on a distribution deal that keeps the masters in New Orleans.
1997NEW JACK SWING
  • February (Erykah Badu’s Baduizm. July. Missy Elliott’s Supa Dupa Fly: the era’s apparatus owned end to end by a woman. September. Usher’s My Way, produced by Jermaine Dupri. The Backstreet Boys’ American debut carries the Cheiron studio’s Stockholm-built R&B grammar; Jive, a Zomba company, releases it.
1997GRUNGE & ALTERNATIVE
  • Spring, the trade press announces the majors’ pivot to electronica. The gold rush moves to the next field.
  • April. Soundgarden dissolve.
1997BRITPOP
  • February. Blur release Blur and renounce the genre at number one.
  • March, Vanity Fair declares that London swings again.
  • 1 May. Labour wins the general election by a landslide.
  • June. Radiohead release OK Computer.
  • 30 July, the Downing Street reception. Noel Gallagher attends; Albarn declines.
  • 21 August, Be Here Now sells over four hundred thousand copies on its first day, by the figures reported at the time.
  • 31 August. Diana, Princess of Wales, dies in Paris. The national mood inverts.
  • September, the Verve release Urban Hymns; Roni Size/Reprazent’s drum-and-bass album New Forms wins the Mercury Prize.
April 1997TEEN POP
  • MMMBop reaches number one in the United States: three brothers from Oklahoma, writing their own material, with none of the apparatus.
1997TEEN POP
  • Show Me Love gives a Swedish teenager an American top-ten hit, eighteen months before the genre is usually said to begin. A pitch-correction plug-in becomes commercially available.
1997EMO & NU-METAL
  • Deftones’ Around the Fur. The Promise Ring’s Nothing Feels Good. American recorded-music revenue is near its peak.
1997TRAP
  • A Belgian company releases the pattern-based sequencer that becomes the genre’s dominant production tool, cheap and with lifetime updates.
1997GLOBAL POP
  • The Asian financial crisis. Korean cultural export becomes strategic policy, and the wave that follows acquires a name.
Coda, 1998 and afterGANGSTA RAP
  • Cash Money signs its reported thirty-million-dollar distribution deal with Universal months after the span closes; the business press ranks Master P among America’s highest-paid entertainers; within two years the scanner ranks rap the country’s best-selling genre; the Las Vegas case produces its first indictment in 2023, untried as this book went to press; and in 2022 Snoop Dogg buys Death Row.
1998NEW JACK SWING
  • January. Toni Braxton files for bankruptcy and itemises the arithmetic on national television. The Boy Is Mine holds number one for thirteen weeks; Rodney Jerkins’s signature. August. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
1998–2001BRITPOP
  • Vox closes; the drop lists clear the mid-table; This Is Hardcore examines the hangover. In December 2000 Melody Maker is folded into the NME; Select closes soon after.
October 1998TEEN POP
  • ...Baby One More Time is released. It goes to number one in the United States and in more than twenty other countries.
September 1998TEEN POP
  • An American music channel launches a daily afternoon countdown programme driven by viewer requests.
1998EMO & NU-METAL
  • Korn’s Follow the Leader enters at number one. An American music channel launches a daily afternoon request countdown.
1998INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • An American statute establishes the notice-and-takedown regime that will govern how hosts respond to infringement claims, the legal frame inside which every MP3 blog later operates. Cut-down digital audio workstations begin shipping with cheap interface hardware.
1999DOO-WOP
  • The first PBS doo-wop reunion special.
1999–2000FOLK REVIVAL
  • The Volkswagen advertisement lifts Pink Moon out of oblivion; the Malan investigation reopens the Mbube file.
1999–2024GLAM
  • The Gadd convictions: Bristol Crown Court, 1999; Vietnam, 2006; Southwark Crown Court, 2015, for offences committed 1975–1980; recall to prison, 2023; civil damages, 2024.
1999NEW JACK SWING
  • February. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill wins Album of the Year, the first hip-hop album to do so, among five Grammys in one night. No Scrubs and Bills, Bills, Bills, written with Kandi Burruss and Tameka Cottle, produced by She’kspere, hold number one in succession, the era’s grammar; the Jive teen-pop records built on the same grammar surround them. December. Billboard retitles its R&B singles chart to carry both nouns: R&B/Hip-Hop. The wall’s masthead comes down.
April 1999TEEN POP
  • I Want It That Way. A more logically coherent version of the lyric had been written and was declined on the grounds that it sang worse.
June 1999TEEN POP
  • Genie in a Bottle reaches number one, written and produced outside Sweden, demonstrating that the method had become general practice. In the same month, a file-sharing program is released by a nineteen-year-old student.
June 1999EMO & NU-METAL
  • A file-sharing program is released by a nineteen-year-old student.
July 1999EMO & NU-METAL
  • Limp Bizkit’s Significant Other. Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity is released and largely ignored; the band are subsequently dropped.
Summer 1999EMO & NU-METAL
  • A festival weekend at which serious assaults on women in the crowd are reported and later investigated, and at which the site is extensively damaged. The genre’s public reputation never recovers from it.
1999EMO & NU-METAL
  • The Get Up Kids’ Something to Write Home About sells in numbers no independent emo record had reached, and every major-label A&R department sees it.
June 1999INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • Napster is released.
December 1999INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • The American recording industry’s trade body sues Napster. Global recorded-music revenue is at what turns out to be its peak.

2000s

2000NEW JACK SWING
  • January, Voodoo, past this book’s boundary on purpose: the machine’s feel, returned to human hands, played later than any knob can reach.
January 2000TEEN POP
  • Bye Bye Bye.
March–May 2000TEEN POP
  • Oops!... I Did It Again and It’s Gonna Be Me.
2000TEEN POP
  • The Stockholm studio closes, at the height of its success, by the decision of the people running it. Its writers set up separately and carry on.
2000EMO & NU-METAL
  • Deftones’ White Pony. Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory. At the Drive-In’s Relationship of Command. Metallica sue Napster, and the band’s drummer testifies before an American Senate committee. The Federal Trade Commission acts against the major labels over minimum advertised pricing.
April 2000INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • Metallica sues Napster, turning a legal dispute into a cultural one.
Late 2000sTRAP
  • An audio hosting service launches with no gatekeeper of any kind. Online beat marketplaces establish the lease-and-exclusive model.
2001FUNK
  • The Bridgeport campaign: hundreds of actions on the P-Funk copyrights.
2001TEEN POP
  • Pop answers the manufactured charge directly. I’m a Slave 4 U moves its performer away from the Swedish writing team. The file-sharing service is enjoined and shut down; successors appear immediately.
2001EMO & NU-METAL
  • Slipknot’s Iowa. Jimmy Eat World’s self-financed Bleed American. Dashboard Confessional’s The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most. Napster is enjoined. A British television channel dedicated to heavy music launches.
2001INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • Napster is enjoined and its original service ends. Kazaa, LimeWire and the wider Gnutella network absorb the demand. Bram Cohen releases BitTorrent. Michael Azerrad publishes Our Band Could Be Your Life.
July–August 2001INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • Is This It and White Blood Cells. The last unambiguous triumph of the old machinery.
October 2001INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • A hard-disk portable player goes on sale.
2002–2004SOUL
  • The Funk Brothers documentary, the Grammy awards, and the lifetime-achievement recognition, thirty years after the vans left.
2002NEW JACK SWING
  • Clive Calder’s option obliges his major-label partner to buy Zomba outright, at roughly two point seven billion dollars, the biggest cheque in this book, written to the man who owned the paper.
2002TEEN POP
  • Complicated, Cry Me a River and Beautiful, three exits from the format by three different routes.
2002EMO & NU-METAL
  • Taking Back Sunday’s Tell All Your Friends. Killswitch Engage’s Alive or Just Breathing. A multi-state settlement over minimum advertised pricing is reported at around a hundred and forty million dollars.
2002INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is released by one division of a major after being declined by another, having already been streamed free from the band’s own site. Losing My Edge appears on DFA. Fluxblog and Stereogum begin. EMI’s multiple-rights deal with Robbie Williams is reported.
2002GLOBAL POP
  • A Puerto Rican senator leads a public campaign against reggaeton’s videos and lyrics, with hearings and proposed restrictions.
2003SOUL
  • the Stax Museum of American Soul Music opens in a replica of the studio, with a music academy attached.
April 2003TEEN POP
  • A computer company opens a download store selling individual tracks at ninety-nine cents, restoring a legal market for the single as a file rather than as an object.
2003EMO & NU-METAL
  • Brand New’s Deja Entendu. Fall Out Boy’s Take This to Your Grave. Cursive’s The Ugly Organ. A download store opens selling individual tracks at ninety-nine cents. Myspace launches. A dedicated British heavy-music festival is established. The recording industry begins suing individual users.
2003INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • A download store opens selling individual tracks at ninety-nine cents. Myspace launches. Dizzee Rascal’s Boy in da Corner wins the Mercury Prize. Pitchfork introduces Best New Music. Kelefa Sanneh’s essay on rockism appears in the New York Times.
2003TRAP
  • T.I.'s Trap Muzik gives the genre its name, and the argument about whether it is a warning or an advertisement begins immediately.
2004–2006FOLK REVIVAL
  • The Linda daughters sue over The Lion Sleeps Tonight; settlement restores the name and pays the family, sixty-seven years after the session.
2004 · 2011PSYCHEDELIA
  • Brian Wilson completes and tours Smile; the original sessions are finally released. The era’s most famous unfinished object gets an ending, thirty-seven years late.
2004EMO & NU-METAL
  • My Chemical Romance’s Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. Tower Records files for bankruptcy protection. The major-label signing wave through the scene is at its height.
2004INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • Funeral is released by Merge in September and the machinery in Movement Two demonstrates its full power. Franz Ferdinand win the Mercury Prize. Chris Anderson publishes the long-tail argument. A computer manufacturer begins shipping free multitrack recording software with every machine. Tower Records files for bankruptcy protection.
2004GLOBAL POP
  • 2Face Idibia’s African Queen. Daddy Yankee’s Gasolina, produced by Luny Tunes, takes reggaeton international.
2005FUNK
  • The appeals court’s licence-or-do-not ruling over a two-second Funkadelic chord.
2005EMO & NU-METAL
  • Fall Out Boy’s From Under the Cork Tree. Thrice’s Vheissu. A major takes a majority stake in a Florida scene independent. A video-sharing site launches.
2005INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • Clap Your Hands Say Yeah sell a self-released album out of a flat. Illinois, Arular, Silent Alarm. The Hype Machine launches. YouTube launches. News Corporation buys Myspace. EMI’s deal with Korn is reported. Live Nation is spun out as a separate company.
2005TRAP
  • Gucci Mane’s Trap House and Young Jeezy’s Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101. The free mixtape Trap or Die outperforms a major-label album as a career event. The dedicated mixtape hosting sites launch. A rap video aggregator launches and becomes the scene’s dominant visual channel.
2005–2010GLOBAL POP
  • Reggaeton’s first mainstream phase runs through Miami. Korean groups expand across Japan and East Asia. Caller ringback tones become the largest source of recorded-music income in Nigeria and several neighbouring markets.
2006DOO-WOP
  • The Linda estate settles with Disney.
2006FUNK
  • 25 December, James Brown dies, aged seventy-three.
2006RAVE & JUNGLE
  • Gregory Coleman, whose 1969 drum break underlies most of this book, dies homeless in Atlanta. The public appeal that put about twenty-four thousand pounds in Richard Spencer’s hands follows in 2015; Spencer dies in 2020.
2006–2008TEEN POP
  • The Trans Continental businesses collapse. Pearlman is arrested abroad in 2007 and pleads guilty in 2008 to conspiracy, money laundering and making false statements. He is sentenced to twenty-five years.
2006EMO & NU-METAL
  • My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade. Hawthorne Heights sue Victory Records; the label counter-sues. Tower Records is liquidated; the operator of the mall record-store brands goes through bankruptcy. An unsigned British band sell out a two-thousand-capacity London venue.
January 2006INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not becomes the fastest-selling debut album in British chart history.
2006INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • Crazy reaches number one in Britain on downloads alone. OK Go post the treadmill video. Google buys YouTube. Tower Records is liquidated. The Pitchfork Music Festival is held for the first time. Silent Shout, Return to Cookie Mountain, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood.
2006TRAP
  • Dedication 2: a free mixtape over borrowed beats demonstrates that an artist can sustain a mass audience entirely outside the industry.
2007EMO & NU-METAL
  • Fall Out Boy’s Infinity on High enters at number one. Paramore’s Riot!. EMI is taken private by a firm with no music-industry background. The mall’s music floor is gone across most of America.
2007INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • Oink’s Pink Palace is shut down by police action. In Rainbows is announced ten days before release at a price the customer chooses. The Feist placement in a portable-player campaign. The phrase landfill indie enters circulation in Britain. For Emma, Forever Ago is self-released.
January 2007TRAP
  • An Atlanta studio is raided by county sheriff’s deputies with the recording industry’s trade body involved. Two prominent mixtape DJs are arrested on state racketeering charges. The charges are later dropped.
2007TRAP
  • Da Drought 3, released free, in the same season.
2008EMO & NU-METAL
  • The recording industry ends its campaign of suits against individual users. A British tabloid runs a campaign connecting a teenager’s death to a band and its fans; the reporting is widely criticised and fans demonstrate outside the paper’s offices. A very loud metal album makes the loudness war a mainstream argument.
2008INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • Nine Inch Nails release music free and under a sharing licence. Vampire Weekend, Santogold. Anita Elberse’s rebuttal of the long-tail thesis is published. Live Nation signs Madonna; Jay-Z follows. Spotify launches in Sweden in October. A very loud metal album makes the loudness war a mainstream argument.
2009PROGRESSIVE ROCK
  • The House of Lords declares Matthew Fisher co-author of the 1967 organ line, forty-two years on: the arrangement, the law concedes, was the composition.
January 2009INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • Merriweather Post Pavilion is released, several months after leaking, into a verdict already reached.
2009INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • Veckatimest, xx. Legal free advance streaming of full albums becomes standard practice.
2009GLOBAL POP
  • Girls’ Generation’s Gee. The Korea Fair Trade Commission acts on unfair contract terms; a standard model contract capping exclusive terms at seven years follows.

2010s

2010INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • LimeWire loses a decisive American judgement and shuts down. Live Nation completes its merger with the dominant ticketing company. OK Go leave EMI. The Suburbs is released by Merge. Global recorded-music revenue is roughly half its 1999 level.
2010TRAP
  • Flockaveli. The production template that the following decade of global pop is built on is finished.
2011–2016GLAM
  • Savile dies celebrated; the documentary, the joint police–NSPCC report and the Dame Janet Smith Review then document the abuse, including on the programme’s premises. Repeat runs of the programme now skip the editions he presented.
February 2011INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • The Suburbs wins the Grammy for Album of the Year, and a large part of the television audience asks in public who Arcade Fire are.
July 2011INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • Spotify launches in the United States. The economics this book describes are replaced by another set.
2011GLOBAL POP
  • The English umbrella term Afrobeats enters circulation on London radio, over the objections of several of the artists it is applied to.
2012DOO-WOP
  • Herb Reed’s rights to the Platters name are affirmed, weeks before his death.
2012FOLK REVIVAL
  • Searching for Sugar Man releases; the Rodriguez royalty question is asked on camera and not answered.
2012TRAP
  • Rich Forever and Based on a T.R.U. Story: the free mixtape is now a standing part of an established artist’s schedule, and an unreconstructed Atlanta trap record enters the American chart at number one.
2012GLOBAL POP
  • D’banj’s Oliver Twist reaches the upper reaches of the British chart. Gangnam Style becomes the first video on the dominant video platform to pass a billion views. The American singles chart begins incorporating on-demand streaming.
2013EMO & NU-METAL
  • Ian Watkins pleads guilty in a British court to a series of extremely serious sexual offences against children and is sentenced to a lengthy custodial term.
2013TRAP
  • 1017 Thug. The genre’s vocal conventions come apart and it becomes a sound rather than a style.
2014–2016TRAP
  • The upload generation emerges with no label, no management and no adults, and takes trap production toward the melodic, the abrasive and the openly emo-indebted.
2014GLOBAL POP
  • Wizkid’s Ojuelegba. The British singles chart incorporates streaming; the American album chart adopts a streaming-equivalent measure. A lip-syncing short-video app launches.
2015FUNK
  • A jury awards Sly Stone five million dollars over diverted royalties; another prices a 1977 groove’s feel.
2015INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • The industry agrees a single global release day, closing the territory gap that had been leaking records for a decade. The review site at the centre of Movement Two is bought by a magazine publisher.
2015TRAP
  • If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, Rodeo, SremmLife. Atlanta’s production becomes the default of North American pop. A flagship rap playlist launches on a major streaming service.
2015GLOBAL POP
  • J Balvin’s Ginza opens reggaeton’s second phase and moves its centre of gravity to Colombia.
2016FUNK
  • A different circuit rejects the 2005 rule; Bernie Worrell dies.
2016TEEN POP
  • Pearlman dies in custody.
  • Since
  • Both Orlando groups tour at arena scale. The Swedish writers and their protégés remain among the most commercially successful songwriters in the world, across genres their acts in this book never worked in.
2016TRAP
  • Savage Mode. A single from the previous year returns to number one, eighteen months after release, driven entirely by a user-generated video craze.
2016GLOBAL POP
  • BTS’s Blood Sweat & Tears. The major labels begin establishing and expanding African divisions in earnest.
2017FUNK
  • Clyde Stubblefield dies at seventy-three, the most-heard drummer in the world.
2017EMO & NU-METAL
  • Allegations of sexual misconduct involving minors are made publicly against Jesse Lacey of Brand New; he responds with a public statement and the band’s activity ends. Chester Bennington of Linkin Park dies.
2017TRAP
  • Culture enters at number one and the triplet flow becomes the default rhythmic vocabulary of popular music. Bodak Yellow reaches number one, the first by a solo female rapper in nearly two decades. Industry consumption reporting has hip-hop as the most-consumed genre in the United States.
January and April 2017GLOBAL POP
  • Despacito, and then its remix. It becomes one of the most-streamed recordings in history and the first predominantly Spanish-language song to top the American singles chart in over two decades.
2018FOLK REVIVAL
  • The We Shall Overcome litigation ends with the publisher surrendering the claim; the anthem reaches the public domain it was always said to belong to.
2018FUNK
  • federal law finally reaches the pre-1972 masters.
2018BRITPOP
  • The NME prints its final paper edition.
2018TRAP
  • Astroworld.
2018GLOBAL POP
  • The short-video app merges into a larger platform and becomes, within two years, the most powerful discovery mechanism in popular music.
2019BRITPOP
  • Jagger and Richards sign the Bitter Sweet Symphony credit and income over to Richard Ashcroft.
2019INDIE & THE BLOG YEARS
  • Myspace acknowledges the loss of the great majority of the audio uploaded to it over roughly twelve years.
2019TRAP
  • Old Town Road (a beat bought online for a small sum from a producer in another country) is removed from a country chart on a genre judgement and then spends nineteen weeks at number one, the longest run in the American singles chart’s history.
2019GLOBAL POP
  • Burna Boy’s African Giant. Mass protests in Puerto Rico end with the governor’s resignation, with the island’s musicians visibly and audibly part of them.

2020s

2020–2022FOLK REVIVAL
  • The catalogue sell-off: Dylan’s songs to Universal at a reported three hundred million dollars or more; Young’s half-share, Simon’s catalogue and others follow. The counter-revolution of 1965–72 is priced, at last, in public.
2020TRAP
  • Eternal Atake and Whole Lotta Red. The reduction reaches its endpoint.
2020GLOBAL POP
  • Wizkid’s Essence, an album track, begins a year-long growth on streaming and short-form video. Korean agencies build paid livestream concert products at scale.
November 2021TRAP
  • A crowd crush at the Astroworld Festival in Houston results in ten deaths. Civil litigation follows; a grand jury declines to indict in 2023.
2021GLOBAL POP
  • Proceedings are commenced in the United States over the ownership of the rhythm underlying much of reggaeton. They have not been finally resolved.
2022EMO & NU-METAL
  • A Las Vegas festival built entirely on this scene is announced, sells out at a speed that startles the industry, and requires additional dates.
2022TRAP
  • California enacts a statute restricting the admissibility of creative expression in criminal proceedings. A federal bill on the same question is introduced and is not enacted. A racketeering prosecution in Georgia, citing lyrics in the indictment, is brought against a group of defendants including well-known artists.
2022GLOBAL POP
  • Un Verano Sin Ti becomes the most-streamed record of its year worldwide and is nominated for the largest prize in the American industry, in Spanish, with no crossover single, no English version and no remix.
2023GLOBAL POP
  • Following a public governance dispute, the founder of the oldest of the three Korean agencies sells his controlling stake and leaves the company.
  • Since
  • Amapiano spreads from South Africa across the continent and beyond. Regional Mexican music reaches global charts on its own terms. Drill circulates in every direction at once. None of it is waiting to be discovered.
2024TRAP
  • That prosecution, the longest criminal trial in the state’s history, concludes with the remaining defendants resolving their cases by plea agreement.

Questions about this table

Where does this timeline come from?

The back of each of the thirty-one volumes. Every Origin Story book ends with a dated timeline of the events it describes; this page is all thirty-one of them merged and sorted, with each entry still attributed to the volume it came from and linked back to it. Nothing here was written for the web.

How many entries are there?

926, from 1900 to the 2020s, across 31 volumes.

Why does the same year appear several times?

Because genres overlap, and each volume dates its own events. 1980 appears in the hip-hop, synth-pop, house and new jack swing timelines, each describing the same drum machine from a different room. That repetition is the argument of the series, not a defect in the table.

Are the dates certain?

These are the ones that are not in serious dispute. Where a date is contested, the volume says so at the point it appears and gives the competing versions rather than choosing one — and those disputed dates are deliberately not promoted into this table. A timeline that flattens a disagreement into a number is worse than one with a gap in it.

Can I quote it?

Yes. This page is published to be quoted. Attribute it to Origin Story, name the volume the entry came from, and link the page. There is a plain Markdown copy of this table at timeline.md for anything that would rather read that.

Why is the first entry 1907 when the series starts in 1917?

The volumes are numbered by the year a genre ignited, but each volume's timeline may reach back before that to the events its first chapter depends on. The jazz volume opens on Buddy Bolden being committed in 1907, ten years before the first jazz record.

Every entry here is from the volume named beside it, where the same event is set out at length with its sources. The thirty-one volumes · how the record business pays.