From the history of tracker music on Wikipedia:
Most early tracker musicians were from the United Kingdom and Scandinavia. This may be attributable to the close relationship of the tracker to the demoscene, which grew rapidly in Scandinavian countries, and the relative affordability in the UK of computers able to run tracker software. Tracker music became something of an underground phenomenon, especially as so much contemporary chart music was then sample-based dance music (a genre relatively simple to produce with step-based sequencing). In fact, several chart-topping 1989/1990-era dance singles strongly foreshadow compositional trends in tracker music which would remain popular for many years to come; in particular, 808 State's "Pacific" and Octave One's "I Believe." Both tracks rely heavily on muted, detuned saw-wave background pads which play four-tone augmented major seventh chords in chord patterns which fit the pentatonic scale; an unsyncopated 4/4 drum beat runs underneath. Though this particular musical arrangement was scarcely heard earlier, an overwhelming number of tracker compositions in following years used the exact same pattern.
Love this kind of music nerd analysis of pop music and wish I could write it better. The bolded passage led to a night of brushing up on my college music appreciation by researching chord families and scales and listening to sound clips (Wikipedia seems to be undergoing a transition between midi files and an open source Flash type player for clips, by the way.) Have a nascent speculation/beef about the absurdity of naming and nailing chord properties vis a vis painting, where no one gives a shit about quantifying different clusters of pigments vibrating at certain wavelengths, but should probably see what Goethe has to say about this before taking it further.