Music family
Hip-Hop & Urban Music Genres
Discover hip-hop and urban music traditions, from foundational local scenes to styles shaped by rhythm, sampling, flow, and social expression.
44 genre guides
1900Spoken Word
A broad, voice-led category that sits between poetry and music, with its modern recorded history especially visible in Beat-era performance poetry, jazz-inflected recitation, and socially charged Black spoken performance.
1970Hip-Hop
A Bronx-born culture turned global music language, hip-hop fused DJ craft, rhythmic speech, and neighborhood party energy into a form that could carry both celebration and critique.
1970Hip-Hop/Rap
A broad, mainstream umbrella for rap-centered music that began in the Bronx and quickly grew into a global culture. The earliest history is well documented, though the label covers a huge range of sounds and eras.
1970New School Hip Hop
A contemporary catch-all label for modern, internet-era rap rather than a strictly defined historical subgenre.
1970Rap
A concise, evidence-based rap entry that keeps the focus on the Bronx origins, the DJ/MC foundation, and a couple of canonical early recordings.
1977Old School Rap
A first-wave hip-hop tag for the records that turned Bronx block-party culture into a commercial form. The music still feels bright, loose, and social, even when the rhymes are simple by later standards.
1980Christian Hip Hop
A faith-driven branch of hip hop that grew out of 1980s U.S. Christian media and church-linked rap experimentation, then expanded into a broad scene with mainstream crossover moments and a deep independent catalog.
1980Fitness & Workout
Fitness & Workout music is characterized by upbeat, high-energy tracks designed to motivate and keep a steady rhythm for exercise routines. It often includes genres like pop, electronic, and hip-hop, with driving beats and motivational lyrics.
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1980Freestyle Rap
A live form of rap built on invention under pressure, freestyle thrives where the room is loud and the clock is short. It’s less a fixed subgenre than a performance practice that helped define hip-hop’s competitive, conversational energy.
1980Reggae Fusion
A crossover label with a real musical center: reggae fusion stretches reggae and dancehall into pop’s larger frame without fully leaving the riddim behind. Its boundaries are loose, but the listening payoff is clear in the way bass, hook, and groove keep negotiating with each other.
1980West Coast Rap
A concise editorial take on a California-born rap tradition that moved from local scene energy to national influence through N.W.A., Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg.
1984Pop rap
A plain-English tag for pop-facing rap, hip pop works best as a descriptive lane rather than a rigid genre box. Its history runs through early crossover rap and later mainstream hits that made melody as important as attitude.
1984Lyrical Hip Hop
Lyrical hip hop is a broad tag for rap that puts the writing front and center: dense wordplay, careful rhyme patterns, and verses built to reward close listening. The music often feels patient and deliberate, with the beat framing the message rather than stealing the spotlight. In practice, it overlaps heavily with conscious rap, underground rap, and other styles that prize craft and narrative voice.
View guide1987Alternative Rap
A broad, useful tag for rap that breaks from standard commercial formulas and leans into eclectic production, especially the playful, jazz-leaning side of late-1980s and early-1990s hip-hop.
1987Christian Rap
A faith-forward branch of hip hop with deep roots in U.S. Christian music scenes, Christian rap has grown from a niche alternative into a recognizable lane with its own stars, labels, and playlists. Its best records do more than preach: they tell stories, carry tension, and still hit hard on the beat.
1987Conscious Hip Hop
A broad political and socially minded rap tag rooted in late-1980s U.S. hip-hop. The term is useful, but elastic: it describes a thread running through the music more than a neatly bounded scene.
1987Contemporary R&B
A sleek, mainstream offshoot of R&B that took shape in the late 20th century, contemporary R&B favors polished production and vocal intimacy while absorbing pop and hip-hop influences.
1987Gangsta rap
A concise, reader-friendly overview of gangsta rap centered on its late-1980s West Coast emergence and its defining artists.
1987Golden Age Hip Hop
A retrospective label for a highly influential late-1980s-to-early-1990s hip-hop stretch, best understood as a loose critical era rather than a formally bounded subgenre.
1987Hardcore Rap
A harder, more confrontational strand of hip-hop that took shape in the late 1980s and grew into one of rap’s most influential modes.
1987Horrorcore
A grim, theatrical corner of hip-hop where horror-movie imagery and rap braggadocio collide. The style never became mainstream-pop dominant, but it left a deep underground footprint and a clear paper trail in early-1990s releases.
1987Jazz Rap
A jazz-and-hip-hop meeting point that came into focus in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially around Native Tongues artists and adjacent East Coast producers. The style’s center of gravity is relaxed, sample-rich, and often thoughtful, with jazz serving less as decoration than as the pulse beneath the verses.
View guide1987New Jack Swing
A late-1980s R&B crossover style that fused hip-hop drum programming with polished vocals and pop structure, New Jack Swing is most clearly documented through Teddy Riley’s productions and the breakthrough records that carried the sound into the mainstream.
1987Pop Rap
A mainstream-facing rap style built on hooks, polish, and easy momentum rather than abrasion.
1990Bounce
A tightly rooted New Orleans rap style built for participation, bounce grew out of local party culture and later travelled outward through artists like DJ Jubilee and Big Freedia.
1990G-Funk
A polished West Coast rap style that made gangsta rap feel wider, smoother, and more melodic without losing its edge.
1990Latin Rap
A broad umbrella term for Latino-rooted hip-hop, with Cypress Hill as the best-documented early touchstone in the available sources.
1990Low Bap
A Greek hip-hop movement that grew around Active Member in the 1990s, Low Bap pairs slower, bass-forward beats with socially engaged writing and a strong sense of scene identity.
1990Motswako
A rooted, language-first South African hip-hop style that turns Setswana and English into a lively, local conversation over rap beats.
1990Turntablism
A Bronx-born DJ art form that treats the turntable as an instrument, turntablism moved from hip-hop party technique into a formalized performance and battle culture in the 1990s.
1994Dirty South
A Southern hip-hop label that emerged in the mid-1990s, Dirty South names a regional sound and a regional self-assertion. Its early history is closely tied to Goodie Mob, OutKast, and the Atlanta scene that helped make Southern rap impossible to ignore.
1994Instrumental Hip Hop
A beat-centered hip-hop lane shaped by sampling culture, turntablism, and landmark producer albums rather than vocal performance.
1997Country Rap
A loose but real crossover lane where country imagery, Southern drawl, and rap cadence meet. The label is fuzzy around the edges, but the trail runs through early 2000s hick-hop releases and into the mainstream surge around 'Old Town Road.'
1997Crunk
A compact, evidence-based update that keeps crunk grounded in Atlanta club culture and early-2000s Southern rap.
1997Cumbia Rap
A useful umbrella term for cumbia-and-rap hybrids, but not a rigid genre with one fixed origin story. The strongest documentation places it in Mexican and Mexican-American crossover scenes, where artists adapted cumbia’s bounce to rap’s cadence.
1997Merenrap
A compact crossover label for Dominican merengue laced with rap, best understood through late-1990s diaspora recordings rather than a single formal origin story.
View guide1997Nerdcore
A DIY hip hop label that grew out of internet culture, nerdcore turns fandom, code, sci-fi, and games into rap material without losing the punch of the beat.
1997Underground Rap
A broad, independence-minded hip-hop tag rather than a tightly bounded sound. The best-known examples lean lyrical, inventive, and a little off-center, but the genre name is really about where the music stands in relation to the mainstream.
2000Grime
A compact, evidence-based portrait of grime as an East London-born genre shaped by pirate radio, UK garage, and a fiercely local MC culture.
2000Hyphy
A Bay Area rap movement that turned volume, attitude, and neighborhood codes into a distinct regional style.
View guide2000Reggaeton y Hip-Hop
A hybrid tag for the intersection of reggaeton and hip-hop, anchored in Puerto Rican reggaeton history and visible in crossover records and collaborations.
2000Trap
A Southern hip-hop offshoot that moved from Atlanta slang into one of the defining rap sounds of the 2000s and beyond.
2007Chap Hop
A playful British offshoot of hip hop, chap hop trades swagger for tweed and wit, with a documented early scene around Mr.B The Gentleman Rhymer and Professor Elemental.
2010Industrial Hip Hop
A useful but porous crossover tag: strongest documentation clusters around abrasive, noise-heavy rap artists rather than a single formal scene or origin point.