This was the year they started to not give a fuck because they knew they had won. Hence multiple baseball players hitting 50+ homeruns, 2 different new kids on the block type bands coming out under the same manager, multiple disney trained talents just coming out of nowhere, 2 new madonna's, etc, a white rapper who almost certainly has a team of writers, and suddenly all music starts to sound somewhat the same. Country and rap and metal all start to cross fuse. None of this was organic. Woodstock 99 is a big symbol of the time. Then you get 911, Iraq, the housing crisis, obama, race wars. These were all triggered in about 1998. I remember playing sim city and as soon as I had the money, i stopped caring about harmonic building. I just Starbucked it across the board. Generic patterns guaranteed to work.