This story is the second installment of a three-part series discussing major changes in popular music throughout the course of 2024. Today’s story focuses on the current state of rap music. This year ...

When the mainstream popularity of rap music elevated in the late 1980s, it often did so with the help of inventive sampling. While many samples came from the R&B funk world, clever hip-hop artists and ...

The underground has always existed. Wherever there’s a mainstream, there’s a counterculture bubbling underneath it—breaking ...

What a difference a year makes. At the end of 2023, GloRilla, Latto and Doechii had each earned namesake notoriety and steady rotation in playlists. Repping Memphis, Atlanta and Tampa, they stood in ...

Funk allowed Black musicians and their audiences to shapeshift and speak truth to power—even while speaking in tongues. But as Stanley Nelson and Nicole London’s documentary WE WANT THE FUNK! reveals, ...

At various points in my previous articles, I have at least pointed to the fact that I, having been born in the 2000s, had to learn about hip-hop out of order, at least compared to those who had been ...

I dedicate this article to Mark Fisher, whose writing on themes that run close to S.T.A.R.V.E.’s heart serves as another intertextual source of power for the LP. In 2014, Fisher wrote: "The pandemic ...

The removal of Kendrick Lamar and SZA‘s “luther” from the Billboard Hot 100 chart has reignited the heated debate of rap’s decline in 2025. The conversations are unsurprising when this is the first ...