Curated playlist
2020s in music
- 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.
- DigicoreDigicore is music that teenagers built in bedrooms and traded through Discord and SoundCloud.
- DiscoA loud drum sound in disco began as a recording mistake. Earl Young's hi-hat was pressed too loud on a 1975 song.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.