Hip-Hop & R&B Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which Compton group, whose members included Ice Cube, Dr. Dre and Eazy-E, brought unfiltered, first-person street violence to record on the 1988 album Straight Outta Compton, drawing a warning letter from an FBI official over one of its tracks?

Question 2

Which pioneering hip-hop DJ, born Joseph Saddler, worked out the science of beat-matching, back-spinning and using the mixer's crossfader to cut cleanly between records, and led a group, the Furious Five, that recorded the bleak 1982 single The Message?

Question 3

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 4

Which nationally syndicated American television dance show, created and long hosted by Don Cornelius from 1971, showcased Black music and dancers, coined the phrase the hippest trip in America, and featured a line dance down a corridor of clapping participants?

Question 5

Which blind pianist and singer, nicknamed the Genius, fused gospel phrasing with blues and jazz on What'd I Say, then shocked his label by recording a hit album of country songs in 1962?

Question 6

Which 1992 uproar centred on a song by Ice-T's thrash-metal band Body Count, written from the perspective of a man driven to shoot police, which drew condemnation from the US President downward and boycotts of the parent company Time Warner?

Question 7

Which Long Island group, fronted by the booming Chuck D with the comic foil Flavor Flav and backed by the dense, siren-filled production of the Bomb Squad, made confrontational, politically charged albums including It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and recorded Fight the Power for a Spike Lee film?

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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.