1999’s Top 25 Rock Albums

In some ways, 1999 didn’t make any musical sense.

A peer-to-peer file-sharing web site arrange by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker turned an industry-shifting phenomenon known as Napster. Who may have guessed that we’d cease shopping for albums?

Nicely, truly, David Bowie. He turned the primary business artist to make his new studio undertaking out there for obtain, a full two weeks earlier than it arrived on retailer cabinets.

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It obtained stranger. The 12 months’s final 9 Billboard Prime 100 lists have been capped by Carlos Santana, who discovered himself in a completely unlikely spot performing with an much more unlikely singer. Who may have guessed that each one Santana – who hadn’t reached the Prime 10 since 1970, and had by no means had a No. 1 track – wanted to do was begin working with the man from Matchbox Twenty?

Or that the Flaming Lips would lastly notch their long-awaited breakthrough? Or that Styx’s lengthy tenure with Dennis DeYoung would come to a crashing halt?

Acts like Paul McCartney, Crosby Stills Nash and Younger, and Def Leppard seemed again, whilst new-guard acts together with Blur, Wilco, Sleater-Kinney and Constructed to Spill pushed bravely ahead. (Jeff Beck cut up the distinction, making use of trendy components to his acquainted tricked-out fusion sound.) Maybe unsurprisingly, Sammy Hagar was within the temper to social gathering. So, okay, all the pieces wasn’t unfathomably bizarre.

Nonetheless, this was a 12 months wherein boy teams dominated the charts, and Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera battled in gossip information, whereas 9 Inch Nails was pushing into the mainstream with their first-ever chart-topping album and punk made a (poppier) return with blink-182.

That made it a singular problem to finish this staff-voted countdown of 1999’s Greatest Rock Albums – however some rose to the highest.

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