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Riveting Soul of the 90s

Twenty-nine records from a single year — 1999 — when R&B and hip-hop had merged so completely that nobody bothered marking where one ended.

 

90s Music Trivia – Downtown Drafts

 

1999: the year of the crossover

The premise here is the same as the 1979 set elsewhere on this blog: take one year, play everything, and let the pattern emerge. What emerges from 1999 is the completion of a process that had been running for a decade — the total integration of rapping and singing into a single commercial format.

Almost every record on this list has both. The rapper brings the verse, the singer brings the chorus, and by this point neither is the guest; it is simply how records were made.

What to listen for

TLC's "No Scrubs" is the defining single of the year and one of the best-written pop records of the nineties — a Kandi Burruss and She'kspere song whose structure is closer to a rap record than to an R&B one.

"Unpretty" from the same album is the other half of the argument and the more emotionally ambitious song.

Mobb Deep's "Quiet Storm" with Lil' Kim is the hardest record here, and its title is a joke about the radio format — there is nothing quiet about it.

Q-Tip's "Vivrant Thing" is the most joyful, and it marked a real shift for an artist previously associated with a far more austere aesthetic.

Maxwell's "Fortunate" is an R. Kelly composition, which surprises people, and it was one of the biggest R&B singles of the year.

Eric Benét and Faith Evans's "Georgy Porgy" is the Toto cover, which is a stranger lineage than it appears — that song has been a soul standard since the seventies.

Les Nubians' "Makeda" is the French-Cameroonian outlier and the most interesting thing on the list, and Meshell Ndegeocello's "Beautiful" is the most musically adventurous.

K-Ci & JoJo appear three times, Case twice, and Kelly Price's "It's Gonna Rain" is the gospel-trained vocal that outshines everything around it.

Santana's "Maria Maria" closes out the year's biggest comeback story.

Go deeper

TLC's FanMail and Maxwell's Embrya are the two albums most worth revisiting whole.

For the production story: She'kspere, Timbaland, Rodney Jerkins and The Neptunes were all working at once, and between them they built the sound of the following five years.

What the year proves: almost every record here has both a rapped verse and a sung chorus, and by this point neither is the guest. That fusion had taken a decade to complete and became so total that the industry stopped marking it — which is why a single year, played end to end, makes the point better than any retrospective could.

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