Curated playlist
2010s in music
- Jerk (music genre)Jerk is a hip-hop microgenre that grew up on the internet and took shape in New York City in the early 2020s. Writing for the British magazine The Face, music journalist Kieran Press-Reynolds described its sound as "fidgety rhythms,…
- HexDHexD is a style of electronic music built on one blunt idea: take a song and damage it on purpose until it sounds like a corrupted file. The name comes from a collective called Hexcastcrew, whose members described their work as casting…
- Rage (music genre)The song "Miss the Rage" turned a word for moshing into a genre name. Trippie Redd longed for mosh pits in lockdown.
- Internet rapInternet rap, also called online rap, began as hip-hop that traveled through the blogosphere in the late 2000s. The British magazine Dazed once said of Lil B, "he's the father of 'Internet rap' and probably follows you on Twitter". The…
- House musicFrankie Knuckles began splicing records because the music ran out before dancers wanted to stop.
- DigicoreDigicore is music that teenagers built in bedrooms and traded through Discord and SoundCloud.
- Cloud rapCloud rap got its name from a castle in the clouds. Lil B described the image in a 2009 interview.
- CrunkcoreCrunkcore mixed screaming, Southern hip-hop beats and dance music. Critics scorned it, yet it fed hyperpop.
- Jerkin'Jerkin' dance, by one founder's account, began as the anti-dance.
- Gangsta rapGangsta rap first went by a different name: reality rap. Schoolly D and Ice-T said they described a world they knew.
- EmoAt Rites of Spring shows in the mid-1980s, audience members sometimes wept.
- VaporwaveVaporwave took its name from software that was announced and never shipped.
- Contemporary R&BIn 2004, all twelve Billboard Hot 100 number-one songs came from African-American artists.
- HyperpopHyperpop began as a metadata tag added by a Spotify data analyst in 2018. Glenn McDonald's label later named a playlist.
- Indie rockIndie rock began as a bookkeeping label, not a sound. A Billboard writer coined the phrase in January 1983.
- Mashup (music)Harry Nilsson's 1967 Beatles "cover" was not a cover at all. One guitar chord fit many Beatles songs.
- Electronic dance musicGhost production means a hired producer makes a track that a DJ releases under their own name.
- Country musicThe steel guitar in country music traces back to Hawaii, not Appalachia. Country's sound was a braid of many traditions.
- J-popJapan once argued over whether rock music could be sung in Japanese. The band Happy End proved it could.