1994
Twelve records, ten of our rankings, one year. Jungle, trip-hop, Memphis, kwaito, dub techno and Britpop all arriving at once, none of them aware of the others.
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Goldie / Inner City Life
The record that proved a breakbeat could carry a song rather than just a dancefloor, and the reason drum and bass got taken seriously by people who had ignored it. Everything the genre did for the next decade is a response to this.
Shy FX & UK Apache / Original Nuttah
The other direction jungle took in the same twelve months, and the more influential one on the street. Thirty years later it is still the record a British MC has to know, which is the only test of load-bearing that matters.
Portishead / Glory Box
Trip-hop had existed for a couple of years and had no centre until Dummy. This is the track that fixed what the genre sounded like — the Isaac Hayes loop, the slowed drums, a voice singing over both as if it were a torch song.
Nas / N.Y. State of Mind
Illmatic reset what a rap album was allowed to be, and this is the track people quote when they explain why. Every East Coast record for five years afterwards is measured against it, usually by its own maker.
The Notorious B.I.G. / Juicy
Released within months of the entry above, arguing the opposite case: that a hard record could be a pop record without giving anything up. Both were right, and hip-hop spent the rest of the decade splitting the difference.
Warren G & Nate Dogg / Regulate
G-funk's crossover moment, and the template for the sung-hook rap single that has never gone away since. It is on this list because of what came after it rather than what it took from before.
Basic Channel / Quadrant Dub
Two Berliners running techno through dub's mixing desk and inventing a genre almost as a side effect. Nothing about it sounds like a founding document, which is usually how founding documents sound at the time.
DJ Deeon / Freak Like Me
Chicago ghetto house at the point where it starts to become the thing that becomes footwork. It is here because a whole subsequent genre is recognisably downstream of records like this one, made on almost nothing.
DJ Paul / North Memphis Area
A tape sold out of a car boot that turns out to contain most of what trap would sound like fifteen years later — the tempo, the hi-hats, the atmosphere. The clearest case on this list of a record nobody heard being load-bearing anyway.
M'du Masilela / Tsiki Tsiki
Made in the year South Africa first voted, by slowing house music down to a walking pace and making it local. A genre and a country changing at the same moment, and one of the few records on this list where the two are obviously connected.
Oasis / Live Forever
The least fashionable inclusion here and the hardest to argue away. It turned a scene of art-school records into something a stadium would sing, which is a change of kind rather than of scale, and Britpop dates from it.