I feel like every 3-5 years, there tends to be that one year that shows a major transition in the sound and style of Rap and R&B...going back to the beginning, but particularly since R&B started to feed off of Rap in the mid and late 80's.

I'm making a 93 for 93 mix (same style as my 95 and 96 mixes) and working it is making me realize how much shifted in that one year...almost to where it makes the mix harder because the sounds are all over the place.

1993:

-The Boom Bap East Coast sound was in full swing...I'd say it became dominant in 92, and by 93, it had caught on to where most East Coast artists, and even a few West Coast ones (Liks, Cypress) showed that influence. The darker sound with those sampled rough drums, along with the samples used, was dominant and knocked the more NJS influenced Rap all the way off. The noisy, high energy Bomb Squad type sound, seemed to be all the way gone at this point.

-The G-Funk of the West was still spreading...it didn't become dominant til 94 or even 95, but even outside of Death Row/Dre, you saw it coming in slowly. Most of the West Coast songs that had a Funk feel didn't feel overly synthy, though..."It was a good day" "You know how we do it" "I'm a playa" "VSOP" "Bonnie and clyde thing" etc didn't have as many sines as what Dre was doing.

-New Jack Swing was in it's death bed. A few songs had minor success that still had the NJS sound, but the upbeat R&B songs lost the swing, and some even incorporated the new Boom Bap sound. Tracks like Jade "Don't walk away" and "This is for the cool in you" sounded a bit more evolved from NJS, and this was probably the last year that any hits came from this sound.

-The new "Slow grind" styled slow jams came along, and this seemed to almost be the first year that a large number of these were hits...even more so than regular slow jams/love songs, and for sure more than the non-Whitney ballads. "Knockin da boots" "Anytime (Janet)" "Bump and grind" "Seems like you're ready" "Feenin" "Freak me"....all these came in that same 92-93 year, and it can almost be seen as a sub-genre within R&B because of it's more sexual focus and slower tempo.

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everybody was rhyming over expensive beats cuz of the new year
and when bone thugs in harmony came out

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"and suddenly the ghetto didnt seem so tough u thought u had it rough we always had enough"~tupac

Which I always thought was a weird thing to say. Hip-hop came up using beats from old soul & funk songs. It seemed weird that they would raise such a stink about R&B using hip-hop-flavored beats.

It was definitely the age of R&B groups. Het 4-5 cats (or chicks) together and have them harmonizing or something and you were in. I'm not even going to try to list any because there were tons of them beyond the really big names.

The west coast rise was swift, efficient & powerful.

I'd say that 1993 was immediately before the jiggy/mafioso/shiny suit era. Puffy had his hand in some big acts but they were R&B artists.

CDs were huge and cassettes were starting to fade out. We had no clue what was coming in just a couple years (Napster, online access to music, etc).

1998. the year digging was snuffed out jumping off the worst era on NYC hip hop ever.

98 is was a wide spread problem though