Hip-Hop & R&B Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which 1982 single, credited to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five though largely the work of Melle Mel, swapped party boasts for a grim first-person account of ghetto poverty, with the refrain about being close to the edge, and is seen as the birth of conscious hip-hop?

Question 2

Which laid-back Long Beach rapper was introduced on Dr. Dre's The Chronic, released the chart-topping debut Doggystyle in 1993, and was tried for and acquitted of murder in connection with a 1993 shooting?

Question 3

Which 1998 solo album, the only one its artist has released, blended rap, reggae and soul, sold in huge numbers, and became the first hip-hop record to win the Grammy for Album of the Year?

Question 4

Which singer rose to fame fronting the group Destiny's Child, then released solo albums including the surprise 2013 self-titled record, the 2016 visual album Lemonade and the 2022 dance record Renaissance, and holds the record for the most Grammy wins by any artist?

Question 5

Which singer led the most commercially successful Motown act of the 1960s, which scored a dozen American number ones including Where Did Our Love Go and Stop! In the Name of Love, before she left in 1970 for a solo career and an Oscar-nominated film role?

Question 6

What is the name for the culture and musical movement that grew out of block parties in the Bronx in the early 1970s, usually said to rest on four elements: rapping, turntable DJing, breakdancing and spray-can art?

Question 7

Which Detroit producer, born James Yancey and also known as Jay Dee, was revered by fellow musicians for a loose, deliberately unquantised drum feel, worked with the Soulquarians collective, and completed the instrumental album Donuts in hospital days before his death from a blood disease in 2006?

📚 All Quizzes

Browse every category and see the full list of quizzes on BriskQuiz

→

About Hip-Hop & R&B

Hip-hop and rhythm and blues run from a 1973 block party in the Bronx to the top of the global charts, and this quiz covers that arc in eighty questions. Each describes an act, a producer, a label, a genre, one of hip-hop's elements, a landmark record, a piece of jargon or a famous event, and asks you to name it from four options, then explains what it is and the story or the fight attached to it.

The first pack is the foundation: the culture itself and its supposed birthplace; the pioneer DJs Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash; rapping, the breakbeat and sampling; Rapper's Delight; Run-DMC, Public Enemy and N.W.A; Tupac and Biggie; Jay-Z, Eminem, Dr. Dre, Wu-Tang and Kendrick Lamar; and the soul cornerstones Marvin Gaye, James Brown and the idea of soul music itself.

The second pack widens out. More MCs and crews, from Afrika Bambaataa, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys through Nas, OutKast, the Fugees, Missy Elliott and A Tribe Called Quest to 50 Cent, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Drake, Nicki Minaj and Cardi B. The producers J Dilla and Timbaland. The soul and R&B lineage, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Curtis Mayfield, Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, Diana Ross, Isaac Hayes, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Usher, Beyonce and Alicia Keys, plus neo-soul. And the machinery: Def Jam, the diss track and the mixtape.

The third pack is history and controversy: 1520 Sedgwick Avenue and the 1995 Source Awards; the East-West feud; the Grand Upright sampling ruling; the Amen break; the Cop Killer and 2 Live Crew cases and the Parental Advisory label; Vanilla Ice; the Sugar Hill house band; Soul Train and the Funk Brothers; The Message; the Roland 808 and the rise of trap; The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill; the R. Kelly convictions; the 1989 rap Grammy boycott; the FBI letter to N.W.A; and the 2024 Kendrick Lamar and Drake feud.

The wrong answers are always the same kind of thing as the right one, an act beside acts, a genre beside genres, a label beside labels, so a shaky guess is easily caught. Where a picture appears it is deliberately neutral, a pair of turntables, a sampler, a crate of records, a cassette, a microphone, and never a portrait or an album cover, and each has been checked against its own four options so it cannot point to the answer.

Nothing here assumes prior knowledge of the music. Facts, dates and chart claims have been checked against reference sources, and a few things are set straight: Rapper's Delight was built on a re-played Chic groove rather than a sample because sampling did not yet exist, Vanilla Ice's tough street backstory was invented for publicity, and the Funk Brothers who played on the Motown hits went uncredited for decades. Coverage runs from 1970s block parties to the streaming era and tries to give the soul and R&B lineage its due alongside hip-hop.