The result was a chart filled with deeply conservative records, a situation compounded by the fact that dance music - which provided the two most experimental and sonically extreme hit singles of the 90s in Underworld's Born Slippy (Nuxx) and The Chemical Brothers Setting Sunn - appeared to have run out of puff.
After the boom the Jamaican charts filled up with old-fashioned roots-reggae songs, which weren't quite as compatible with American hip-hop.
Such charts are filled with exceptions to the rule.
The charts were filled with bands aping their punky, politicised take on ska, the long-forgotten precursor to reggae which had been popular in Jamaica during the 1960s.
In the 1960s, when the charts were filled with group singers, pop bands and Beatles wannabes with bright, sweet voices, he sang solo, belting out hits such as Delilah and What's New Pussycat?
Meanwhile, the charts were filled with the perfect Swedish pop of Abba – "Dancing Queen", "Money Money Money", "Fernando" – with Elton John and Kiki Dee's anodyne but catchy "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" the highest selling UK single of the year.
Expressed in thickly impastoed, concentric circle charts partly filled with graded colors, they bear titles like "Mild and Moderately Toxic," "Mildly, Moderately and Severely Toxic," etc. Their echoes of unorthodox "system" painters like Al Jensen are apparent.
The top of the charts is filled with high-yield, or junk, bond funds, but such funds move more in tandem with the equity markets than with the bond markets and will be particularly vulnerable if there is a prolonged economic downturn with many corporate defaults.
The charts are filled with posthumous releases by Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran, and tracks that seem so redolent of the previous decade that you mentally file them away as being products of the 50s, rather than the 60s: Susan Maughan's Bobby's Girl, Brenda Lee's Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree, Elvis Presley's Return to Sender.
For patients who stayed for more than three to four days, the charts were filled with volumes of information with no standard note taking.
