With Rhapsody turning 10 years old next month, let's flash back exactly a decade to salute the class of 2001 — the generation that brought us, for better or for worse, the hipster.Now, "hipster," that most desiccated of straw men, is an oft-abused term, and it's also a cipher of sorts: if no one hip enough to be a hipster cops to being one, then who's left to populate the demographic? Nevertheless, their habits are well documented. (Like dark matter, theory confirms their existence even when their actual capture eludes us.) And nowhere is that truer than in their musical tastes.
To understand why the hipster emerged when it did — the literary journal n+1 locates the contemporary hipster's emergence in 1999, which is good enough for our armchair sociology session — just look at the musical landscape of the turn of the millennium. Consider a few touchstones from that year: The Strokes' Is This It, Daft Punk's Discovery, Jay-Z's The Blueprint. Epochal albums all, and all from radically different corners of the musical universe, but all contributing, in their way, to the development of what we might call the hipster sensibility.
We're generalizing here, but I think you can describe the hipster's approach to taste as a voracious connoisseurship, a kind of competitive curiosity — the desire to know more about more different kinds of music before anyone else. The hipster sensibility is a constellation of tastes; rooted in self-aware styles of indie rock and hip-hop, it quickly grew to encompass New Wave, Krautrock, funk carioca, Baltimore club, Chicago house and countless other niche sounds. (In this sense, the contemporary hipster is a walking, talking incarnation of The Rock Snob's Dictionary.)
That sensibility is everywhere in the music of 2001, a pivotal year for many reasons — from The Avalanches' post-everything sampledelia to Miss Kittin's arch electro, from Yeah Yeah Yeahs' sardonic downtown chronicles to Radiohead's new sincerity. It's a complicated nexus of cool, sincerity, irony, pose, distance, guilty pleasures and unabashed enthusiasms. Untangle its DNA and get in touch with your own inner hipster with our playlist.
Click here to listen to the entire playlist:
Senior Year, 2001: The Proto-Hipster
Motown's indelible impact on pop-music history is a direct result of the talent on the Detroit-born label's roster. Berry Gordy and his team sussed out the most skilled and (equally as important) the most likable kids they could find, often plucking actual kids out of obscurity (and high school), turning them into polished, professional pop stars. But Motown's success was also undoubtedly due to the well-oiled, machine-like way the studio ran, taking ridiculously young diamonds in the rough and putting them through the label's "factory" system, which included training in everything from music and dance to, yes, fashion and manners. 
In the early 1970s, decades before sexuality and gender in high school life became a CNN news bite, a music trend came along that slyly packaged these issues inside a lot of killer rock 'n' roll. I'm talking about glam — or, as that legendary arbiter of pop fad Dick Clark disturbingly called it back in 1973, the "fag-drag crazy transsexual rock scene."
With this installment of Rhapsody's 
A massive prog fan (and once a teenage nerd himself), 
Back in 1997, the coffeehouse music scene managed to thrive despite the incessant barrage of grunge that was still going strong some six years after the release of 
A pair of Technics turntable decks will cost you around $800 — maybe cheaper if you can get them used (or if you opt for a lesser brand like Numark). A DJ mixer will set you back another $300. A copy of the Turntablist's Super Duck Breaks costs around $10, and you'll need two copies. But the ability to scratch like 
When you listen to jazz sessions from 1967, the genre's wild transformation is immediately evident. Jazz heads at the time had their work cut out for them trying to keep up: 
It's a bit late to celebrate Juneteenth. After all, the annual holiday commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States doesn't take place in the middle of September, but at the beginning of summer, on June 19. Perhaps it's the onset of fall, though, that makes our thoughts turn to warmer months and memories of park jams, barbecue and family reunions.
In the immortal words of 
Life seemed so much simpler in the '80s, and for me at least, our music and how we listened to it reflected that. The day after my senior prom, my friends and I gathered at a local beach and cranked up our boom boxes. Let me be clear: the music that came flooding out of those speakers is nothing I'm proud of. I know some of my teen counterparts were exploring edgy underground bands, but my suburban friends and I were happy not to stray too far beyond the constraints of straight-up pop and rock. We listened to what was on the radio and what the local DJs spun at school dances. We didn't know any different, and now those songs are part of our collective memories, like it or not.
So first off, welcome to the '90s! Even if it still kind of feels more like the last gasp of the '80s: hair metal is almost over but doesn't know it yet, so it's still all over MTV, with songs about cherry pie (RIP 
Dance variety shows that targeted younger fans had long been a staple of pop music by the time Chicago DJ and concert promoter Don Cornelius premiered Soul Train in 1970. But with the first howl of "Soooooul Train!" the beloved result irrevocably transformed the heavily whitewashed model of such earlier programs as American Bandstand. The focus on African-American artists and, well, soul music -- Motown, funk, classic R&B, Philly soul, and, later, disco and hip-hop -- made the show a cultural hub for African-American audiences, and brought that culture to the white mainstream, introducing viewers across the United States to new fashions, dances and music. 
Some high school memories aren't so good.
Click here to listen to the entire playlist: 
The year 1983 must have been a crazy time to be a black teenager. 
Before the 
If you grew up in the Midwest, you know what the 4-H Club stands for. I mean, what it really stands for — not just the "head, heart, hands and health" motto that makes up the four H's. The idea is simple: teach young people and their families the skills they need to be proactive forces in their communities, and develop ideas for a more innovative economy. The program revolutionized the way science was taught outside the classroom; in 100+ years of active service, more than 60 million youth have used the program, from elementary school kids to high school seniors.
The 1995 film 
Earnest high school Anglophiles prefer to keep a low profile, ya know, because they're just a little cooler than you are, and also usually just a bit down and out. (It is always cold and rainy in their world.) But in reality, they're quite an easy lot to spot. They'll likely be decked out in a pair of skinny jeans, Doc Martens and a 
Do a little dance y'all! (Like this y'all, like that y'all!) Feel the groove! (I feel it, I feel it now!) Make a little love now! (Ooh, aah, ooh ooh, aah!) This party's at the funhouse, we're rocking high-top fades, Cross Colours tees and high-top Jordans, and the sound is the New Jack Swing.
A bunch of punk kids form their own adult-scaring, mainstream-baiting subculture with a unique style, slang and sound. Sound familiar? That's the recipe for basically every pop music style ever, but the particular concoction we're talking about here resulted in the Latin-laden R&B and swing genre known as pachuco boogie, which came to life in the '40s and '50s.
Ready? OK! Picture it: it's 2002-ish. You're a senior and totally, like, the hottest girl in school. Oh, and you're a cheerleader. Duh! Life is pretty sweet: you get to wear super-short skirts to school, you're dating the point guard, and Bring It On (and the sequel!) just came out, so everyone is, like, totally into cheerleaders right now. (As if they weren't already!) And? Bonus! The pop music of the day is totally awesome for killer floor routines: big, dance-pop beats (perfect for pom ripples!), and sexy (but not too sexy) lyrics performed by hot boys and girls who look like (or at least as good as) cheerleaders. (
You had a job waitin' after your graduation — 50 thou a year would buy a lot of beer. You were doin' all right, gettin' good grades; future was so bright, you had to wear shades! A growing economy, inflation down, employment up, Reagan midway through his second term, Top Gun in theaters — triumphalism all around! The music biz's future looked slightly less certain, but there was hope in new technology: "Annual record sales continue to fall," noted a 1986 Detroit Free Press piece, "while CD sales climb faster than the industry expected." The future wasn't punk kids buying Metallica/
The phrase "DEAD FREAKS UNITE" appeared in the liner notes to the 1971 live album 
While there probably weren't too many high school seniors that made it past the velvet ropes, in 1978, Studio 54 shone like a beacon to kids dreaming of bright lights in the big city. Just a few years before, disco had been a resolutely underground thing, but by 1978 and 
London truly was swinging back in 1991. With a little help (read: hype) from music weeklies such as NME, Melody Maker and Sounds, new stars were being made at clubs such as Syndrome and Blow Up, while Camden-area pubs such as The Good Mixer overflowed with young Brit-pop stars nightly. It didn't take long before the music — and the legendary, drunken stories of those of those who made it — made its way to America. And although the release of 
Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell smoke in the auditorium. You know the culprit: Put a tack on teacher's chair, tied a knot in Susie's hair. Always writing on the wall, always goofing in the halls, always throwing spitballs. Walks into the classroom cool and slow, calls the English teacher Daddy-O. And being such a funny fellow (destined to be inducted into the Animal House upon soon entering college no doubt), we can assume that our jokemeister loved plenty of funny songs, right? (National Lampoon High School Yearbook parody writeup on Herbert Leonard "Wing-Ding" Weisenheimer: "knows the real lyrics to '
Things ain't what they used to be, and this ain't the Summer of Love. By 1968, the drugs were getting uglier, the draft was still in full swing, bikes were getting badder, and music was growing heavier by the minute.
Today, when people talk about pop music they usually mean diva dance pop or that special mix the 
Here at Rhapsody, none of us were high school age back in 1965, so we can only imagine what a genuine go-go was like. Our thoughts turn to the scene in Malcolm X when his assassins tour the Audubon Ballroom during a youth dance the night before he was killed, casing the joint while kids shuffle and stomp to 
Talk about "Hands on a Hard Body": for a certain species of auto-shop student, back in 1995, tricked-out rides were raised to the level of an art form. And while all kinds of hip-hop fueled their subwoofers, surely the most potent strain was G-funk, with its slinky leads and suggestive bounce, rolling and purring like an El Dorado.
The American mod was very real, but he was a vastly different creature from those that spawned him. In 1965 and '66, after 
Ah, the Grunge Jock. He was an odd fellow.
The "Girls" in question refer to both the fans and the artists they loved. These are the girls who, depending on your sex (and sexual orientation), you either secretly drooled over or secretly wanted to be (or maybe both). A little (Emily the) strange, a lot artistic (or at least artsy), kind of aloof in an incredibly enticing way. Favorite activities included reading Sassy, doodling neo-feminist comic book characters, slathering on eyeliner, cutting bangs, seeing shows by quirky girl performers who looked a lot like them, and generally being cooler than you. Favorite bands encompassed the full range of indie girldom at the time — and it was quite a range in the early '90s, from twee pop to riot grrrl, from breathy hipster ingenues to screaming rockers, from 
Despite San Diego's reputation as a breeding ground for svelte, blond surfer types, it's also been home to plenty of musical misfits over the years — among them 
It would take record companies a few more years to take the phenomenon into account in their marketing endeavors, but one neat thing about New Wave at the dawn of the '80s was that if you didn't consider yourself one of the popular kids in your class — and were too much a square peg to identify with your older brother's hard rock and disco — it suddenly felt like there was music for you out there. 
Relive glory days and yesteryears with the debut of a new weekly Rhapsody series titled Senior Year. We've handpicked tracks from specific years and put together playlists dedicated to everyone from goths to bathroom smokers to urban cowboys to Catholic school dance attendees. Dig into our first installment of Senior Year, spotlighting the classes of 1963, 1974, 1980, 1984 and 1988. Stay tuned for more high school nostalgia with a new playlist each week.
Rap videos were mad fun in 1988. Remember all the crazy cameos in 
For folks who were, uh, lucky enough to go to Catholic school, the memories of dances put on by brothers or nuns are undoubtedly cherished. Who can forget the air of tension and forced smiles on the faces of those in charge when were forced to begrudgingly allow members of the opposite sex to come in physical contact with one another? For anyone not blessed with these images, or who was not yet a teenager in 1984, please know that that year was a particularly strong one for power ballads, dance pop and New Wave. 
Back in high school in the mid-'80s, I did drama: not in the sense of throwing hissy fits (though I probably threw my fair share) — I acted in school plays. The Man Who Came to Dinner, Brighton Beach Memoirs, that kind of thing. Backstage, in the dressing room, the cast would listen to music in the hours before the performance began. When my turn came to commandeer the boombox, I put in a tape of 
Back in 1980, you saw Urban Cowboy in the theater and it changed your life. You bought the boots. And a hat. Months later, The Dukes of Hazzard debuted on television, and you subsequently tuned in religiously each week. Let's be honest: you tried to do that Bo Duke slide about a thousand times and still couldn't git 'er done, right? Travolta's Bud may not have resonated with the high school crowd the way that Bo and Luke did, but the trendy fashions of the day yielded the same results: boots, prairie blouses/dresses, big ol' belt buckles — and the infamous Daisy Duke shorts and tied shirts, of course.
If you want to get more specific, the boys' room we're talking about here probably would have been somewhere in the upper Midwest, out in the suburbs. And the boys smoking in the stalls at the moment (after "checkin' out the halls, makin' sure the coast is clear," as 
The Prom, 1963, a high school south of the Mason-Dixon Line: Memphis, Nashville, Charlotte or maybe even Jacksonville. That Irishman Jack Kennedy is still alive. 
Portions of album content provided by All Music Guide © 2011 All Media Guide, LLC ® 1999-2011 Rhapsody International Inc.