I know it’s an exercise in futility to send out a bleg on dusty, disused blog such as this one, but I was hoping enough people might be following to make it worthwhile. As some of you reading may know, my father teaches a course where he surveys American popular music, going through recordings of the 20th century of the songs that most everyone in a given decade would have heard. (I suspect what he most enjoys about this is introducing students to the big names of the 30s and 40s and informing the class that, yes, at one time this was popular, but never mind that now.) I was discussing this with him the other day, and as he went over what he covers by time period, he got up to the late 80s and then said that at that point he puts it to the class to tell him about recent trends in popular music.

You may well be thinking exactly what I thought then: why would someone who is college age today know what was popular in, say, the early 1990s? They might have heard some of the popular songs of 15 years ago that still get radio play here and there, but there are plenty of groups, albums, and so forth that at one point you couldn’t avoid hearing but now are just a memory. As I pointed out to my father, this stuff is as much history to them as the music from the 70s and 80s was to people my age. You have to have lived it to know what was popular.

That’s why I had the idea of putting it out to the internets. What are the songs someone must hear to understand popular music from the late-1980s to the present? Single tracks that could be played in-class are great, but feel free to identify what movement this typifies and give other representative examples. Also, be as specific in terms of sub-genre as you want – for example, the course currently covers “the birth of rap” but I don’t think it covers later developments in the genre in any detail. Please pass this on to all your music-snob friends!