Hip-Hop & R&B Quiz — 10 Free Questions

Question 1

Which Atlanta singer and dancer released the diamond-selling album Confessions in 2004, with the hits Yeah! and Burn, mentored a young Justin Bieber, and headlined the Super Bowl half-time show in 2024?

Question 2

What is the name for the release format, originally a DJ's cassette of blends and exclusives sold on the street, that evolved into the free promotional album, often built on borrowed beats, that rappers used to build a following outside the record industry?

Question 3

Which classically trained pianist and singer from New York released the debut album Songs in A Minor in 2001, led by the hit Fallin', and won five Grammys that year?

Question 4

What is the name for the mid-1990s rivalry, played out in the press and on record between a New York camp centred on Bad Boy Records and a Los Angeles camp centred on Death Row, that formed the backdrop to the unsolved murders of two of the music's biggest stars?

Question 5

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 6

What is the name for the style pioneered by the producer Teddy Riley in the late 1980s, welding the hard, swung drum-machine beats of hip-hop to smooth rhythm-and-blues singing and melody, and heard on records by Bobby Brown, Guy, Keith Sweat and Janet Jackson?

Question 7

Which Brooklyn rapper, born Christopher Wallace and also known as Biggie Smalls, released the album Ready to Die in 1994, signed to Sean Combs's Bad Boy label, and was shot dead in a car in Los Angeles in March 1997, six months after his West Coast rival?

Question 8

Which Queens rapper survived being shot nine times, then released the Dr. Dre and Eminem-backed album Get Rich or Die Tryin' in 2003 with the hit In da Club, and made a fortune from an early stake in a flavoured-water company?

Question 9

Which Trinidad-born, Queens-raised rapper signed to Lil Wayne's Young Money label, used a gallery of cartoonish alter egos and a wildly elastic flow, and had a breakout pop hit with Super Bass in 2011?

Question 10

Which 1990 single by the white rapper Vanilla Ice was the first hip-hop song to reach number one on the American pop chart, but was widely derided for a fabricated street backstory and for lifting its bassline, at first without credit, from a Queen and David Bowie collaboration?

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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.