By that point, however, the group had started to disintegrate. The album moved way beyond its urban heartland and into the bedrooms of suburban youth, becoming the first album by a hip-hop group to hit No.1 on the Billboard 200. NWA’s 1991 follow-up, Efil4zaggin, showed the tables were beginning to turn commercially. The first few years of the decade saw 90s hip-hop classics from the likes of Public Enemy ( Fear Of A Black Planet), A Tribe Called Quest ( Peoples Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm, The Low End Theory), De La Soul ( De La Soul Is Dead) and Main Source ( Breaking Atoms). On the plus side, artistically, hip-hop was in rude health. To make matters worse, Gilbert O’Sullivan’s successful court case against Biz Markie, in 1991 (he’d used a sample of O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally)” without consent), threatened to change the very way the art form was constructed no longer could producers use multiple samples, for fear of litigation. The success of gangsta rap groups such as Los Angeles natives NWA, whose 1988 debut album, Straight Outta Compton, detailed street violence in an uncompromising and explicit style, led to many radio stations pulling effective boycotts against hip-hop’s more aggressive artists. Yet, at the dawn of the 90s, hip-hop faced something of a crisis.
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