From the UK's Slowthai to JPEGMAFIA and Rico Nasty in the US, a thrilling hip-hop punk hybrid sound is stirring young people into a frenzy, writes Thomas Hobbs. This manner of reacting to, rethinking, recycling and ultimately rejecting and then reclaiming the music of yesterday is what keeps it so vital and rock music will continue to strengthen and grow as long as people aren't allowed to arbitrarily choose which of those evolutionary steps are included AS rock and which aren't.
The influence of Elvis Presley cannot be underestimated: he introduced national audiences to rockabilly music, white audiences to black rock and roll and his on-stage persona made venues accessible for the even more flamboyant acts like Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis.



Some of the newer artists wield a smaller vocabulary comparatively, but this is not because hip hop has dumbed down.” The genre has evolved; it has moved away from complex lyricism toward elements traditionally associated with pop music: repetitive song structure and singing (Joe Carmanica recently wrote about this trend for the New York Times, arguing that it was led by Drake, who popularized the rapping-and-singing formula over the past decade).
Is when I started to appreciate rap more than ever because I could analyse it in terms of timbre or ‘voice', rhythm or ‘flow' (rap is the ultimate rhythmic art form - atleast Spotify within a bar), use of accentuation or ‘delivery', meaning and lyrical content (rap is the popular music genre where the lyrics are the focal point) - shit like that.

They emerged in the mainstream in 1988, led by a series of multimillion-selling acts: Korn (tormented Bakersfield, California metalheads with a human-beatboxing singer in a kilt), Limp Bizkit (Korn's loose-screw stepbrothers), and Kid Rock (wack MC turned country-rock yahoo).
On songs like Bitch I'm Nasty and Rage, which are both produced by Kenny Beats, who also guided the music on her most recent album Anger Management, Kelly attacks the gnarly guitars and cutting drums with real venom, every word delivered like she's face-to-face with her worst enemy.

While, on the whole, musical taste is determined just as much by nature as it is by specific individual experiences, nature's influence is strongest on appreciation of pop, classical and hip-hop music - indicating some people may be born to love Michael Jackson, Beethoven or Jay-Z.