1996: The year the centre could not hold

The year hip-hop claimed the throne, Britpop began its slow fade, and the most important records were being made by people the radio had largely decided to ignore

1996 doesn’t get the credit it deserves. Ask someone to name the great years in 90s music and they will reach instinctively for 1991 — Nevermind, Bandwagonesque, Loveless, Ten, all arriving in the same extraordinary season like a conspiracy — or perhaps 1994, when Kurt Cobain died and Illmatic arrived and the decade seemed to pivot on a single hinge.

Nobody reaches for 1996. And yet, taken as a whole, it may be the most musically eclectic year the decade produced, a 12-month stretch in which hip-hop, Britpop, electronic music, and the American underground all peaked together without any of them quite realising the others were in the room.

There is also another version of 1996 and it needs to be heard alongside the first. It is the version you encounter when you turn on the radio in that year and notice that something has quietly left the building. When Smells Like Teen Spirit arrived in 1991 it felt like a detonation — rock music tearing itself apart and rebuilding from the rubble. By 1996, what had replaced it on those same radio stations was a watery procession of quiet-loud-quiet song structures and sad-bro earnestness that promised depth and delivered damp. Matchbox 20’s Yourself or Someone Like You was the year’s most commercially successful rock album, a record that offered the shape of emotional urgency without its content — the leather jacket without the body inside it. Alternative rock, having conquered the mainstream, had promptly done what all conquering forces eventually do: got comfortable, got polished, and got boring.

Both of these versions of 1996 are true. The trick is holding them at the same time.

Start with hip-hop, because in 1996 hip-hop was doing things that still haven’t been fully absorbed. Jay-Z released Reasonable Doubt, a debut so assured and so complete that it remains, for many, the best record he ever made — a cold, cinematic dispatch from a world polite society preferred not to examine too closely. The Fugees released The Score and changed the conversation about what rap could accommodate, Lauryn Hill’s voice alone worth the price of admission several times over, their version of Killing Me Softly becoming one of the year’s most ubiquitous and somehow still remarkable radio moments. OutKast released ATLiens and confirmed the future of hip-hop was not going to be decided exclusively in New York.

And then there was 2Pac, who managed to release two albums — All Eyez on Me before he was murdered in September and Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory two months after — leaving behind a body of work that the culture has been trying to make sense of ever since.

In Britain, things were both simpler and more complicated. Britpop was still nominally king, Oasis and Blur still commanding the covers of the music weeklies, but the ground was shifting. Don’t Look Back in Anger had given Oasis one of its most enduring singles, a song that managed to be anthemic and elegiac in a way that much of their work only gestured toward. Suede released Coming Up, its most accessible and commercially successful record, and were rewarded with the kind of mainstream embrace that had previously eluded them. Kula Shaker arrived with K, all sitars and lysergic ambition, welcomed by an audience that had briefly convinced itself psychedelia was back.

But the British story of 1996 belongs, more than to anyone else, to the Manic Street Preachers. After Richey Edwards disappeared in early 1995 without a trace, never to be found, many had quietly written the band off — not unkindly, but realistically. What followed instead was Everything Must Go, the remaining three arriving clean-shaven, reflective, and carrying a collection of songs that seemed to have been written from somewhere beyond ordinary grief. It was one of the most unlikely comebacks in British music history and one of the most moving, a band that had every reason to stop finding reasons to continue.

Meanwhile, the Chemical Brothers and Prodigy were having hits large enough that even Oasis were inviting them on tour, and the division between guitar music and electronic music — which had felt absolute only a few years earlier — was dissolving in real time. Jamiroquai’s Travelling Without Moving became one of the year’s biggest albums, Virtual Insanity its centrepiece, a record that suggested funk and technology were not natural enemies. The crowd at festivals didn’t care anymore about which tribe they belonged to, which was either a sign of healthy open-mindedness or the beginning of the end of everything that made subcultures interesting, depending on who you asked.

In America, the most interesting music of 1996 was frequently happening at the edges. Fiona Apple arrived with Tidal, 19 years old and already operating at a level of confessional intelligence that made most of her contemporaries sound like they were still working things out. The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1979 captured something about suburban adolescence — its specific boredom and beauty — that almost nothing else in that year’s rock landscape managed. Beck made Odelay, one of the strangest and most joyful records of the decade, Where It’s At its calling card, a song that wore its eclecticism so lightly it seemed to be having more fun than anyone had a right to. Pearl Jam released No Code, its most experimental and least celebrated record, a band deliberately dismantling its own commercial machinery and making something more interesting in the wreckage.

The Wallflowers’ Bringing Down the Horse was a more mainstream proposition, Jakob Dylan’s voice carrying the weight of an obvious inheritance gracefully enough that One Headlight became one of the year’s most quietly affecting singles. The Eels introduced themselves with Beautiful Freak, E’s damaged wit finding an audience that would follow him faithfully through considerably darker territory in the years to come.

And then there were the artists operating entirely outside the decade’s obsessions. Gillian Welch arrived with Revival, a debut of such austere and genuine beauty that it seemed to come from a different century entirely — which was, in a sense, the point. Johnny Cash released Unchained, the second of his collaborations with Rick Rubin, continuing the late-career reinvention that would eventually produce some of the most devastating recordings of his life. These were not records chasing 1996’s zeitgeist. They were records indifferent to it, and all the stronger for that indifference.

The Spice Girls released Wannabe and the pop landscape lurched sideways in a way that nobody quite anticipated. The song was absurd and irresistible in equal measure, and its arrival announced a shift back toward unabashed, unironic pop pleasure that Britpop’s knowing self-consciousness had largely crowded out. You could sneer at it — many did — but the charts didn’t care, and neither did the 12-year-olds who were right about it in ways the critics weren’t. Their album Spice followed, and the machinery that would dominate pop for the next several years began its slow, unstoppable warm-up.

Weezer released Pinkerton, which their own label considered a failure and which has since become one of the most devotedly loved albums in the alternative canon, its rawness and emotional exposure sounding more necessary with every passing year. Alanis Morissette’s Ironic was everywhere, its famously imprecise deployment of its own title generating more think-pieces than any song probably deserved, which is itself a kind of cultural achievement.

And Los Del Rio’s Macarena spent 14 weeks at №1 in America, which tells you everything you need to know about the gap between what critics celebrate and what people actually do with their bodies when music comes on.

What 1996 actually represents is less a death than a redistribution. The energy, the invention, the sense of genuine cultural urgency that had animated rock music for the preceding decade didn’t evaporate — it migrated. It went into hip-hop’s golden age, into electronic music’s continued expansion, into the quiet corners where Gillian Welch and Belle and Sebastian [If You’re Feeling Sinister] were making work too strange and too honest for mainstream consumption.

The mistake is to mourn what left the radio. The more interesting question is where it went.

In 1996, the answer was increasingly clear. And the music that resulted from that migration has outlasted almost everything that replaced it on those rock radio stations.

Nobody remembers 1996 getting right. It got right anyway.

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