When you think about love in rap, Common's "The Light" is an essential example. From his album "Like Water for Chocolate", Common raps heartfelt lines of devotion over a mesmerizing J Dilla beat, ...

For the first time, Billboard's Hot 100 Top 40 doesn't feature a single rap song. Is this due to changing listener ...

Music nostalgia tends to move in 20-year cycles, so it’s no surprise that — following the ’90s-rap revivalism of the 2010s — we’re already seeing some early 2000s rap trends resurfacing in today’s rap ...

With roots in African-American and Latino communities, hip-hop music has been a cultural phenomenon for decades. It has been one of the most influential music genres in the world since its inception ...

The decade of the 2000s was an incredibly important one for rap music. In these 10 years, hip-hop legends either launched their careers with iconic debuts, or continued their already-dominant runs ...

The emergence of significant DSPs like Spotify and Apple Music may have effectively ended the mixtape era. Before these streaming giants existed, music fans would head to sites like My Mixtapez, ...

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 ...

No matter how rap has evolved, high-profile guest verses have remained a snapshot of either dominance or ascendancy in the hip-hop food chain. When Lil Wayne was transitioning from up-and-coming rap ...