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, ...

This story is part of our new Hip-Hop: ’73 Till Infinity series, a celebration of the genre’s 50th anniversary. Producers are just as (if not more) important than MCs on a track. As much as fans care ...

Alphonse Pierre’s Off the Dome column covers songs, mixtapes, albums, scenes, snippets, movies, Meek Mill tweets, fashion trends—and anything else that catches his attention. This week, Alphonse ...

The best rap beats are nerdy as hell. Every drum placement, every melody, every chopped-up sample sends me down a YouTube rabbit hole trying to piece together the way a producer contorts and dissects ...

Good music and a good drink often go hand in hand, but do we ever really stop to appreciate the pairing? We do now, because 2025 has been a banner year for rap music, but it’s also quietly been an ...

In the early 1990s, as hip-hop mutated and expanded, most ears were focused on the East and West Coasts. After giving birth to the genre two decades earlier, New York entered the ’90s with an emphasis ...

Week in and week out, there are plenty of brand-new rap songs, no matter the time of year. It can be really difficult to stay aware of what's out and also what's hot, so XXL decided to make things ...

Music has always been a vehicle for better times. A soundtrack to great, memorable moments. There aren't too many seasons directly tied to good times with good people like the summer is; this becomes ...

This month YouTube’s most successful stationary mic platform On The Radar Radio savvily diversified. While the channel started with more boilerplate interview and trending news coverage, the channel’s ...

Despite how they’ve at times been ideologically pitted against one another, country music and hip-hop are often compared as the two forms of pop music that speak most directly to the everyday problems ...