Curated category
20th-century music genres
- House musicHouse music was born in the dark of Chicago's underground club scene, somewhere between a disco record and a drum machine.
- Nu metalNu metal arrived on the 18th of August 1998, when three albums dropped on the same day: Korn's Follow the Leader, Kid Rock's Devil Without a Cause, and…
- 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…
- Hip houseHip house was born at a crossroads: somewhere between a Chicago warehouse and a London recording studio, two of the most vital youth music movements of the…
- Miami bassMiami bass carries two names: the polished one is "Miami bass," but the streets always called it booty music. Born from the historically Black neighborhoods…
- 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?
- Rock musicIn 1951, a Cleveland, Ohio disc jockey named Alan Freed began spinning rhythm and blues records for a multi-racial audience, and he is credited with first…
- 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…
- DancehallDancehall began not in a recording studio but in the open air of Kingston, Jamaica, where the bass frequencies of a sound system could be felt in the chest…
- FunkJames Brown stood in front of his band and gave a single command: "On the one!" That instruction rewired American music.
- Trap musicTrap music was born out of the Atlanta streets, and its name comes from a specific and brutal place: the trap house, a building where drug deals happen.
- French houseFrench house music arrived in the late 1990s and changed the sound of European dance floors. In July 1987, a photographer named Jean-Claude Lagrèze threw…
- Electronic musicElectronic music is a category so wide it contains multitudes: the eerily bowed theremin of a 1950s science-fiction film, the clicking drum machines behind…
- A cappellaA cappella is the practice of singing without any instrumental accompaniment, and its roots stretch back well before the invention of written music.
- Beat musicThe term beat music emerged from the fading waves of late 1950s rock and roll. Ernest Borneman, a German anthropologist living in England between 1933 and…
- City popA 2015 article in The Japan Times by Ryotaro Aoki described city pop as music made by city people for city people. Yutaka Kimura, an author of numerous books…