Curated category
1980s in music
- House musicHouse music was born in the dark of Chicago's underground club scene, somewhere between a disco record and a drum machine.
- Punk rockPunk rock arrived in the mid-1970s as a deliberate act of refusal. Ramones drummer Tommy Ramone put it plainly: by 1973, he knew that what was needed was…
- Gangsta rapGangsta rap began its life under a different name: reality rap. That original label tells you something honest about what the genre's founders believed they…
- Rap metalRap metal arrived not with a manifesto but with a question nobody had asked yet: what happens when you put a DJ and a shredding guitarist in the same room?
- EmoEmo is a genre of rock music that began as a small, passionate subculture in Washington, D.C., and grew into one of the defining sounds of the early…
- New wave musicNew wave music crept out of the mid-to-late 1970s with a strange and specific energy: twitchy rhythms, high-pitched vocals, choppy guitars, and a humorous…
- Contemporary R&BContemporary R&B has roots in the African-American musical communities of the 1970s, and it has never stopped moving. It began as a fusion of rhythm and…
- FunkJames Brown stood in front of his band and gave a single command: "On the one!" That instruction rewired American music.
- Electronic dance musicElectronic dance music, known the world over simply as EDM, began in the nightclubs and warehouses of the late twentieth century and grew into a global…
- Country musicCountry music got its name in an unlikely way. For decades, the genre was called hillbilly music, and only in the 1940s did the term "country music" catch on.
- Kino (band)Kino, the Leningrad rock band formed in 1981, sold two million copies of an album the band themselves despised. That record, Noch, had been released without…
- J-popJ-pop, the abbreviated form of "Japanese popular music", entered the mainstream of Japan in the 1990s, but the story behind it stretches back more than a…