Tribal allegiances aside, hip-hop and electronic dance music are deeply, inextricably connected—entwined like the double helix of a strand of DNA.
They emerged in parallel: back in the ’70s, disco DJs like Walter Gibbons were digging into the breaks of funk and disco records as the same time as hip-hop originators like DJ Kool Herc.
Kraftwerk, who laid the foundations of what would become Detroit techno, also sowed their seeds in hip-hop’s soil, thanks to Afrika Bambaataa, who sampled the German techno-pop act for 1982’s ‘Planet Rock’. Electro, freestyle, Miami bass, ghetto tech—all of them are products of a dynamically tangled lineage.
Breakbeat hardcore, drum & bass, and grime never would have existed without the influence of hip-hop. Even Autechre were B-boys before they were programmer boffins, a history that comes through again and again in IDM.
Surely we don’t need to remind you of hip-house—it may have flamed out quickly, but it did give the world ‘I’ll House You’. That’s a more enduring legacy than most flash-in-the-pan genres can claim.
And in the past few years, hip-hop has been learning from dance music again, from crunk’s trance-inspired synthesizer stabs to the Kid Cudi/Crookers connection. Increasingly, big-name, big-budget hip-hop acts are turning to producers like David Guetta, Boys Noize, Switch, and Rusko to provide them with fat beats and club cred.
Inspired by this perennial tug-of-war, we’ve selected 60 of our favorite tracks that illustrate the exchange of ideas between hip-hop, house, electro, jungle, dubstep, and more. No matter what style of music you play, we’re betting you’ll find something here for your sets: we’ve gathered tracks from the past 25 years or more, and from a huge array of labels—from Delicious Vinyl to Desolat, from DJ International to International Deejay Gigolos, Ninja Tune to Crosstown Rebels.
Listen to all 60 tracks in the players below, and explore more by clicking on the section headlines to view the charts on Beatport.com.
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