1993 in Music

Nine from Staten Island, one sampler Nine MCs crowded into a tiny, dimly lit studio in New York with borrowed gear and a budget so small the equipment was mostly secondhand. The producer punched soul samples into a twelve-bit sampler whose resolution ceiling gave every sound a dusty, degraded texture, then layered dialogue clips from martial arts films over beats that hit like bare knuckles on concrete. The resulting album became the blueprint for an entire hip-hop empire, with each member contractually free to sign solo deals across different labels. That sampler later sold at auction for $70,000.

One hundred guitar overdubs, drawn on maps A band relocated to a studio in rural Georgia specifically to isolate one member from drug connections in their home city. The sessions ran twelve hours a day, six days a week for three months, then fourteen hours a day, seven days a week for two more. One song alone contained forty overdubbed guitar parts, some tracks stacking as many as a hundred. The engineer had to draw diagrams of the overdubs because there were too many parts entering and exiting to track by memory. The budget passed $250,000. The engineer later said the process almost killed him.

Recorded by, not produced by An engineer who refused the title 'producer' booked a remote studio under a fake name so nobody would know who was coming. The band arrived at an isolated property on fifty acres of private forest, thirty-five miles from the nearest city. Basic instrumental tracks were recorded live as a three-piece, most vocals captured on the first take. The studio bill came to $24,000. The engineer charged a flat $100,000 and turned down royalties estimated at half a million dollars, calling them an insult to the artist. The label hated the abrasive result and brought in a second engineer to remix two tracks for radio.

950,378 copies in five days A Seattle band's second album sold nearly a million copies in its first five days, shattering every first-week record that the barcode-scanning system had ever tracked. Weeks later, a West Coast rapper's debut knocked it from the top spot with 806,000 first-week copies. Both numbers were unthinkable two years earlier. The industry had crossed $10 billion in annual revenue for the first time, and the CD was king.

Track-by-track, stone by stone A songwriter in Chicago conceived her debut album as a song-by-song response to one of the most celebrated rock records ever made, matching its eighteen tracks in sequence. She recorded it with a single collaborator using deliberately minimal equipment, her vocals unpolished and conversational, the arrangements stripped to guitar, bass, and drums. The result became a touchstone for a generation of independent musicians and redrew the boundaries of confessional songwriting.

The churches burn In Norway, the black metal scene turned to arson and murder. A musician who had already been linked to the burning of a twelfth-century stave church put a photograph of the ruins on his record sleeve. On an August night in Oslo, he stabbed a fellow musician to death at his apartment. The killer claimed self-defense. The court found premeditated murder and handed down the maximum sentence under Norwegian law. By the time the trials ended, at least fifty churches across the country had been attacked, and in every solved case the perpetrators were identified as fans of the same music.

Forty-five million soundtracks A film soundtrack released late the previous year dominated 1993 as the year's best-selling album, spending twenty weeks at number one on the pop chart. It moved forty-five million copies worldwide, becoming the best-selling soundtrack of all time. Its lead single, a cover of a country songwriter's ballad, spent fourteen weeks at number one and became the best-selling single by a female artist in history.

The television stage An acoustic performance series on cable television had become the most culturally significant music platform in the country. A previous year's episode had swept three categories at the Grammys, proving the format could generate massive commercial success. In November, a band that had spent two years as the loudest act in rock sat down for an acoustic set, played straight through with no retakes, chose mostly covers and deep cuts instead of hits, and invited the members of a desert-rock trio to join them onstage. The footage became the most famous episode in the series' history.

Jazz samples, Borges, and the Grammy A hip-hop trio from Brooklyn named themselves after insects and titled their debut after a Jorge Luis Borges essay. The production leaned on jazz samples pulled from one member's father's record collection. Their single crossed from rap radio to pop radio, peaked at number fifteen on the pop chart, and won the Grammy for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group.

Intelligent dance music gets a name A Sheffield label had coined the phrase 'electronic listening music' on a 1992 compilation that gathered producers from across the UK and Europe. In 1993, an internet mailing list devoted to discussing those artists adopted the term 'intelligent dance music,' giving a name to a sound that had been accumulating for years: intricate, tempo-shifting electronic compositions designed as much for headphones as for dancefloors. The label launched a dedicated album series, and debut albums from its roster topped the UK indie chart.

Sixteen years between sequels A rock singer released the sequel to his 1977 debut, reuniting with the original songwriter and producer after sixteen years. The lead single went to number one in twenty-eight countries and spent seven weeks atop the UK chart, making it the most successful British single of the year. The album sold fourteen million copies. Nobody had expected a comeback of this scale from anyone, let alone from a singer most of the industry had written off a decade earlier.