Curated category
American styles of music
- Punk rapPunk rap arrives with a simple, confrontational mission. As one artist put it: "It's what the game needs now; someone who doesn't give a fuck about the rules…
- Rage (music genre)The word rage first appeared in hip-hop through Kid Cudi's Mr. Rager alter ego during the 2010s. Travis Scott later adopted this term and made it a core part…
- House musicHouse music was born in the dark of Chicago's underground club scene, somewhere between a disco record and a drum machine.
- 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.
- 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…
- 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…
- Cloud rapIn 2010, music blogger Walker Chambliss wrote a blog post that introduced the phrase cloud rap to describe the work of Squadda B.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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…
- VaporwaveIn August 2010, a cassette tape titled Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 appeared on the internet under the name Daniel Lopatin.
- 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.
- Heavy metal musicHeavy metal began with three British bands founded in 1968: Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple. Critics often derided them, even as wide audiences…
- Industrial musicIn 1913, Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo published The Art of Noises. This manifesto argued that the sounds of a modern industrial society should become music.
- 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.
- 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…
- Tin Pan AlleyTin Pan Alley was a stretch of West 28th Street in Manhattan, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and for decades it was the beating heart of American popular…