Curated category
African-American music
- House musicHouse music was born in the dark of Chicago's underground club scene, somewhere between a disco record and a drum machine.
- BebopBebop arrived in the early to mid-1940s not as a gentle evolution, but as a deliberate rupture. Charlie Parker, performing "Cherokee" at Clark Monroe's…
- Neo soulNeo soul arrived in the mid-1990s not as a genre anyone planned, but as a name slapped on something that was already happening.
- Soul musicSoul music arrived in America during the late 1950s and early 1960s, born out of African-American communities across the United States.
- Swing musicSwing music seized America by the collar on the 21st of August 1935, when Benny Goodman's orchestra took the stage at the Palomar Ballroom and young white…
- DiscoDisco arrived in America from a French word for a library of phonograph records, yet by the late 1970s it had become the dominant sound pulsing through clubs…
- JazzIn a 1912 article in the Los Angeles Times, a minor league baseball pitcher described a pitch he called a 'jazz ball'. It wobbled, he said, and you simply…
- 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…
- Hip-hopHip-hop began at a back-to-school party in the recreation room of a building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue on the southwest side of the Bronx.
- 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.
- 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.
- Rock and rollRock and roll arrived in the United States not as a sudden invention but as a slow-burning collision of sounds that had been building for decades.
- Rhythm and bluesRhythm and blues began in African American communities in the 1940s, at a moment when record companies needed a new name for music that was changing…
- Hip-hop cultureHip-hop culture was born at a party on the 11th of August 1973, at a high-rise apartment building on Sedgwick Avenue in the South Bronx.