During the 1980s and 1990s, she became one of the first CCM artists to cross over into mainstream pop on the heels of her successful albums Unguarded and Heart in Motion, the latter of which included the No. 1 single " Baby Baby ".

The track " Baby Baby " ( written for Grant's newborn daughter, Millie, whose " six-week-old face was my inspiration ,") became a pop hit ( hitting No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 ), and Grant was established as a name in the mainstream music world.

However, the first major pop rapper from Belgium was Benny B, who had a very mainstream and commercial sound.

While the Super Bowl XX Champion Bears were a fixture of mainstream American pop culture in the 1980s, the Bears made a prior mark with the 1971 American TV movie Brian's Song starring Billy Dee Williams as Gale Sayers and James Caan as Brian Piccolo.

By the 1990s, many of these bands and artists had disbanded, were no longer performing, or were being carried by independent labels because their music tended to be more lyrically complex ( and often more controversial ) than mainstream Christian pop.

In the mid-1970s, the soul-funk blend of dance pop known as disco took off in the mainstream pop charts in the United States and Europe, causing discothèques to experience a rebirth.

With her 1976 album All I Can Do, co-produced by herself with Porter Wagoner, Parton began taking more of an active role in production, and began specifically aiming her music in a more mainstream, pop direction.

Biographer David Buckley writes, " The essence of Bowie's contribution to popular music can be found in his outstanding ability to analyse and select ideas from outside the mainstream — from art, literature, theatre and film — and to bring them inside, so that the currency of pop is constantly being changed.

Freestyle shortly thereafter gave way to mainstream pop artists such as MC Hammer, Paula Abdul, Bobby Brown, New Kids on the Block and Milli Vanilli, who used hip hop beats and electro samples, but in a mainstream form and with slicker production and MTV-friendly videos.

But perhaps the greatest example of graffiti artists infiltrating mainstream pop culture is by the French crew, 123Klan.

This progressive approach allowed him to dominate the country single and album charts while quickly crossing over into the mainstream pop arena, exposing country music to a larger audience.

It was further popularized during the 1990s by Andrew Harvey and others, and entered mainstream pop culture in 2003 with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.

The earliest significant usage of the term ( as applied to music ) was by Joy Division's producer, Tony Wilson on 15 September 1979 in an interview for the BBC TV program's Something Else: Wilson described Joy Division as " Gothic " compared to the pop mainstream, right before a live performance of the band.

Since the early to mid-1990s, house music has been infused in mainstream pop and dance music worldwide.

House music, after enjoying significant underground and club-based success in Chicago from the early 1980s onwards, emerged into the UK mainstream pop market in the mid-to-late 80s.

Today, house music remains popular in both clubs and in the mainstream pop scene.

She was also attracted to the music of more mainstream artists like Olivia Newton-John and The Police, perhaps explaining the contrast in her later music between sweet, melodic " pop " songs and more hard rock oriented material.

Freestyle was primarily popular among Latinos in the New York City and Miami club scenes, but achieved mainstream pop success with hits by The Cover Girls and Exposé, among others.

For most mainstream country stations, the emphasis is generally on current pop country, following the same process as top 40 ; the remaining music in a particular station's library generally uses music from the past fifteen years ( shorter for " hot country " or " new country " stations ), with the exact music used varying depending on the station and the style of music the listener wants to hear.

By the turn of the century, pop punk had been adopted by the mainstream, as bands such as Green Day and The Offspring brought the genre widespread popularity.

As hardcore became the dominant punk rock style, many bands of the older California punk rock movement split up, although X went on to mainstream success and The Go-Go's, part of the Hollywood punk scene when they formed in 1978, adopted a pop sound and became major stars.

As psychedelia emerged as a mainstream and commercial force, particularly through the work of the Beatles, it began to influence pop music, which incorporated hippie fashions, as well as the sounds of sitars, fuzz guitars, and tape effects.

Much like punk, the black metal community generally condemns the seeking of mainstream success or attention, preferring the genre to remain underground.

Asian Dub Foundation are not huge mainstream stars, but their politically charged rap and punk rock influenced sound has a multi-racial audience in their native UK.

Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock.

For the most part, punk took root in local scenes that tended to reject association with the mainstream.

In the early days of punk rock, this ethic stood in marked contrast to what those in the scene regarded as the ostentatious musical effects and technological demands of many mainstream rock bands.

Some of British punk rock's leading figures made a show of rejecting not only contemporary mainstream rock and the broader culture it was associated with, but their own most celebrated predecessors: " No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977 ," declared The Clash song " 1977 ".

Especially in early British punk, a central goal was to outrage and shock the mainstream.

In the December 1970 issue of Creem, Lester Bangs, mocking more mainstream rock musicians, ironically referred to Iggy Pop as " that Stooge punk ".

Alternative rock encompasses a diverse set of styles — including gothic rock and grunge, among others — unified by their debt to punk rock and their origins outside of the musical mainstream.

Other California punk bands on the independent label Epitaph, run by Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz, also began achieving mainstream popularity.

With punk rock's renewed visibility came concerns among some in the punk community that the music was being co-opted by the mainstream.

The Vans Warped Tour and the mall chain store Hot Topic brought punk even further into the U. S. mainstream.

X achieved limited mainstream success but influenced various genres of music, including punk rock and folk rock.

* September 20 – September 21 – The semi-legendary 100 Club Punk Festival ignites the careers of several influential punk and post-punk bands, arguably sparking the Punk Movement's introduction into mainstream culture.

In the mid-1970s, with the end of the draft and the Vietnam War, a renewal of patriotic sentiment associated with the approach of the United States Bicentennial and the emergence of punk in London, Manchester, New York and Los Angeles, the mainstream media lost interest in the hippie counterculture.

Self-image may be directed toward conforming to mainstream values ( military-style crew cuts or current " fad " hairstyles such as the Dido flip ), identifying with distinctively groomed subgroups ( e. g., punk hair ), or obeying religious dictates ( e. g., Orthodox Jewish have payot, Rastafari have Dreadlocks, North India jatas, or the Sikh practice of Kesh ), though this is highly contextual and a " mainstream " look in one setting may be limited to a " subgroup " in another.

In 1982, the demise of disco in the mainstream by the summer of 1982 forced many nightclubs to either close or change entertainment styles, such as by providing MTV-style video dancing or live bands.

After the genre had started to go out of fashion with mainstream audiences in 1981, the mod revival scene went underground and successfully reinvented itself through a series of clubs, bands and fanzines that breathed fresh life into the genre, culminating in another burst of creative acceptance in 1985.

Smoothing the edges of their style in the direction of New Wave, several post-punk bands such as New Order ( descended from Joy Division ), The Cure, and U2 crossed over to a mainstream U. S. audience.

There were occasional mainstream acts that dabbled in neo-psychedelia, including Prince's mid-1980s work and some of Lenny Kravitz's 1990s output, but it has mainly been an influence on alternative and indie-rock bands.

Among the first wave of bands to gain mainstream success were 311, Bloodhound Gang, Limp Bizkit, Steriogram and Suicidal Tendencies.

They are one of only a handful of bands among them the Hoodoo Gurus ( half of the original line-up of the Hoodoo Gurus also came from Perth ) and The Sunnyboys ) that cracked the mainstream charts with an indie approach in the 1980s.

The music industry's focus shifted away from the big bands to the work of solo vocalists such as the young Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and mainstream groups like The Andrews Sisters as World War II drew to a close.

Grunge bands had made inroads to the musical mainstream in the late 1980s.

The punk subculture generally frowns upon major label bands that play punk music that disavows the DIY punk ethic, and views them as synonymous with mainstream music.

The Cure were one of the first alternative bands to have chart and commercial success in an era before alternative rock had broken into the mainstream.

Though progressive metal was, and has remained, primarily an album-oriented genre, this mainstream exposure increased the genre's profile, and opened doors for other bands.

King's X are greatly influenced by softer mainstream rock and, in fact, contributed to the growth of grunge, influencing bands like Pearl Jam, whose bassist Jeff Ament once said, " King's X invented grunge.

Though mainstream audiences in the early sixties preferred a clean-cut style – epitomised by the acts that appeared on the Nine Network pop show Bandstand – there were a number of ' grungier ' guitar-oriented bands in major cities like Sydney and Melbourne, who were inspired by American and British instrumental and surf acts like Britain's The Shadows – who exerted an enormous influence on Australian and New Zealand music prior to the emergence of The Beatles – and American acts like guitar legend Dick Dale and The Surfaris.

As a result of the Internet, music festivals such as Hellfest, and the commercial success of Victory Records and Trustkill Records, various bands such as Refused went on to find success with a larger audience and eventually brought the term " hardcore " into the mainstream.

The music video for " Fast Junkie " was widely ignored by MTV, due to changing mainstream tastes and limited airplay availability for metal bands.

Uncle Tupelo was inspired by bands such as Jason & the Scorchers and The Minutemen, influencing the recording of Wilco's A. M .. Tweedy and O ' Rourke enjoyed free jazz artists such as Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and Derek Bailey ; they also listen to mainstream jazz by artists such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

With their next album, Dookie ( 1994 ), the band broke through into the mainstream, and have remained one of the most popular rock bands of the 1990s and 2000s with over 60 million records sold worldwide.