1998 in Music

Ten nominations, five wins, and a new category demolished A former member of a hip-hop group records her solo debut at a studio in Kingston, Jamaica, working with a band of young New Jersey musicians she recruited herself. The album moves between rapped verses and sung choruses with no seams, backed by live bass, drums, and strings arranged in the room. It debuts at number one on the Billboard 200, selling 423,000 copies in its first week, a record for a female artist. At the Grammys, she receives ten nominations, the most any woman has ever received in a single year, and wins five, including Album of the Year. It is the first time a hip-hop album takes that prize.

Two number ones in seven months A rapper from Yonkers, New York, releases his debut album in May. It enters the Billboard 200 at number one. Seven months later, in December, he releases a second album. It also enters at number one, selling 670,000 copies in its first week. No rapper has ever put two number-one albums into the same calendar year before. The label offered a million-dollar bonus to finish the second record in thirty days. He delivered.

A chorus from a Broadway musical A Brooklyn rapper samples the children's chorus from a 1977 Broadway show for the title track of his third album. The interpolation is so unexpected, so immediately catchy, that it becomes the hook of the year. The album debuts at number one and stays there for five consecutive weeks, selling over five million copies. It wins the Grammy for Best Rap Album and transforms its creator from a respected lyricist into a pop-culture figure.

The voice that cannot slide A producer in a London studio applies a pitch-correction plug-in to a vocal track at its most extreme setting, removing all natural portamento, the glide a human voice makes between two notes. The result is an audible digital stutter, a robotic snap from note to note that sounds like nothing any singer has ever done. Label executives want it removed. The singer, who is 52 years old and has been recording for three decades, insists it stays. The single tops charts in 23 countries. Within two years, the effect is everywhere, reshaping pop and hip-hop vocal production for the next decade.

5,500 CDs and a diary A singer-songwriter from Louisiana, living in Athens, Georgia, becomes consumed by the diary of a teenage girl who died in a concentration camp. He writes an album of songs about her, about two-headed boys and ghost children and Holland in 1945, recording at a studio in Denver with his childhood friend as producer. The label presses 5,500 CDs and 1,600 vinyl copies, expecting modest sales. The album sells slowly for years, then accelerates, eventually becoming one of the most mythologized records of the decade. The songwriter retreats from public life almost immediately, not performing again for ten years.

Nearly destroyed in Bristol A trip-hop collective spends over a year making their third album in a Bristol studio, the sessions so contentious that band members write parts separately to avoid being in the same room. One member texts the engineer to check if the coast is clear before coming in. The original deadline passes by four months. The finished album is darker and heavier than anything they have made before, with distorted guitars grinding under breakbeats and guest vocals from a Scottish singer whose own band is falling apart. One founding member leaves the group permanently after the record is done.

The first MP3 player, and the lawsuit that followed In September, the first commercially successful portable MP3 player goes on sale for two hundred dollars. It holds 32 megabytes, enough for roughly ten songs. Three weeks later, the recording industry files suit to block its sale, arguing it violates copyright law because it lacks copy-protection technology. The court denies the injunction. The appeals court agrees: the device merely shifts files the user already owns from one location to another. The ruling effectively legalizes portable digital music players. The device sells 400,000 units. At the same time, a nineteen-year-old college freshman in Boston, frustrated by broken MP3 links, starts coding a peer-to-peer file-sharing program that will launch the following summer and break the industry wide open.

The South keeps talking A duo from Atlanta releases their third album, a sprawling, self-produced record that stretches from funk and psychedelia to spoken-word interludes and harmonica solos. The title is a made-up word combining their zodiac signs. One of the duo's members begins writing and producing most of his own tracks, pulling the sound away from sample-based production toward live instrumentation. A single named after a civil rights icon becomes a cultural flashpoint; the icon herself later files suit. The album goes double platinum and cements the group as the most adventurous act in hip-hop.

A white suit at the Oscars On March 23, a singer-songwriter from Portland, Oregon, performs a song from a film soundtrack at the 70th Academy Awards ceremony. He stands alone in a white suit while a broadcast orchestra plays behind him. He had to be talked into performing; the producers told him the song would be played that night whether he agreed or not. The song loses Best Original Song to a power ballad from a shipwreck movie. Five months later, his fourth album comes out on a major label, his most layered and orchestrated work. It trades the intimacy of his earlier records for ambition.

Thirteen weeks at number one, two teenagers Two R&B singers, both teenagers, record a duet that enters the Hot 100 and climbs to number one, where it stays for thirteen consecutive weeks, the longest run of the year. It is the best-selling single of 1998 in the United States. Their rivalry, partly manufactured by their labels, drives constant media coverage. One of the two will have a second number-one single of her own before the year is out, becoming the youngest artist to achieve two number ones in the same year.

Downtempo from Versailles Two French musicians release their debut album in January, a set of analog-synthesizer instrumentals and vocoder-processed pop songs recorded in a Paris studio with strings overdubbed at Abbey Road. The sound is warm, weightless, and retro-futuristic, closer to a 1960s film score than to any dance music of the moment. It becomes an international hit and establishes a template for a wave of French electronic pop. The follow-up sessions will move them into a different studio and toward a much more ambitious, cinematic scale.