I’m sitting in the basement of a low-rise corner building in Bushwick with 23-year-old rapper/producer Cash Cobain, and it’s finally time to throw on the Spice Girls. The basement is a converted ...

When Angel Reyes helped a friend record his first rap song using a microphone in a cardboard Timberland shoebox, he was just having fun. “We just were in here playing beats,” he recalled. “Like, it ...

This article has been handpicked from the Okayplayer editorial archives and included in our Hip Hop 50 collection as a noteworthy inclusion to the genre's rich and diverse narrative. The article has ...

The sound of drill is the brazen brrrrrap of street-level rap over the past decade. It’s the unsettling, aestheticized sound of gunplay evoked by spraying hi-hats, double-tapped rhyme blasts, and a ...

Marked by no-frills rapping and nightmarish production, Chicago drill music traveled around the globe at the speed of the internet throughout the last decade. Eventually, Brooklyn rappers tried on the ...

From block parties to Billboard charts, hip hop has never been one thing. This guide breaks down the major styles from old school pioneers and G-Funk grooves to modern-day drill, trap, and grime. A ...

Sincere Jazmin was only 16 years old when he was shot and killed by another teen at a bus stop in Queens, N.Y. on March 26. The young man was an aspiring rap artist who went by the name, “Sdot Blokka.

To everyone worried that UChicago will remain a nerd school until the end of time, fear not—Forrest Stuart, a UChicago professor in the Sociology Department, was recently interviewed by music media ...

He’s only been making music for seven months, but SK-47 is on the cusp of something big. The masked musician keeps his identity anonymous, like many artists in the U.K. drill world, to protect his ...

Rap music started off as a genre made by Black people, for Black people, meant to serve as an outlet to express struggles surrounding race in America. White people refused to listen to it for that ...

On his debut album, the Brooklyn rapper hopes to smooth a path forward for the city’s ascendant hip-hop scene, even as it draws criticism amid a rise in gun violence. Fivio Foreign hopes to become ...