[tenebrisalietum]

Popular music started to more or less "split" in the 90's. It was the beginning of the end of a single music as a shared cultural experience I think.

Hip-hop and alt-rock, for example, had massive trends that defined the 90's in their own way, but it's possible one wasn't really following both.

Then you had popular undercurrents in tandem - e.g. in the beginning of the 90's a bit of industrial, rave, and techno and at end electronica and nu-metal.

You did have the top-40 stuff that at least in Chicagoland would play the dance-oriented stuff and pop-R&B in the beginning of the decade.

Looking back it's hard to unify the 90's musically as one popular trend unless you're confining it to specific "super-genres" like rap/hip-hop, alt-rock, or top-40.

[globular-toast]

The article seems to suggest that hip-hop like "No Diggity" should be a defining song, while lots of people here are suggesting bands like Nirvana, or genres like dance/trance (e.g. Robert Miles). The thing is in the 90s all of this music was highly polarising. There were people who would simply not acknowledge any "rap" or "dance" as music at all. There were others who considered "guitar music" to be completely uncool. The most well-known songs in the article like Britney Spears, Spice Girls etc. were by far the most universally appealing songs at the time. Not everyone loved it, but not many people really hated it. It's no surprise that those are the songs that have stood the test of time.