# Waxonia > Hand-curated rankings of the greatest tracks in every genre, with links to Spotify and YouTube Music. No algorithms, no play counts — just the records that matter. 751 tracks · 90 genres · 662 artists · 2 curators · 10 themes Every record here was chosen by a person who can say why, and every entry carries that reason. Nothing on this site is ranked by play count. **Listen:** [a queue of 96 records](https://waxonia.com/play/selection/the-desk-the-hundred/?keep=on), starting on The Waxonia Desk’s selection and going on into the lists it connects to. All 122 lists are at https://waxonia.com/play/. ## The rankings ### [Acid House](https://waxonia.com/genre/acid-house/) *Chicago and London, 1987 · 8 tracks* One discontinued Roland bass synthesiser, misused. Chicago producers found that twisting a TB-303's filter mid-pattern produced a squelch nothing else made, and Britain built two summers of illegal parties on the sound. No. 1: A Guy Called Gerald — Voodoo Ray. ### [Afrobeat](https://waxonia.com/genre/afrobeat/) *Lagos, Nigeria, 1969 · 8 tracks* Highlife and Yoruba percussion welded to James Brown's rhythm section in Lagos from 1969, stretched to twenty minutes and pointed at the government. Not to be confused with the later, unrelated pop genre spelled afrobeats. No. 1: Fela Kuti & Africa 70 — Zombie. ### [Amapiano](https://waxonia.com/genre/amapiano/) *Gauteng, South Africa, 2012 · 7 tracks* Gauteng's deep-house descendant, built on jazzy piano chords, shuffling percussion and a bending synthetic bass note called the log drum. Slow, spacious, endlessly extendable, and by the twenties the most exported South African music ever made. No. 1: Kabza De Small featuring Leehleza — Umshove. ### [Ambient](https://waxonia.com/genre/ambient/) *England, 1978 · 10 tracks* Music designed to reward attention without demanding it. Eno named it in 1978, but the tradition runs from Satie's furniture music to modern drone, and it is the only genre defined by how you are allowed to listen. No. 1: Brian Eno — An Ending (Ascent). ### [Anadolu Rock](https://waxonia.com/genre/anadolu-rock/) *Istanbul, Turkey, 1968 · 7 tracks* Istanbul at the end of the sixties, where a generation set Anatolian folk melodies and aşık poetry against fuzz guitar and Hammond organ — microtonal saz lines arranged for a rock band, and often pointed squarely at the state. No. 1: Erkin Koray — Estarabim. ### [Baile Funk](https://waxonia.com/genre/baile-funk/) *Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1989 · 7 tracks* Rio's favela dance parties from the late eighties, built on two Miami bass breaks looped almost without variation, with shouted Portuguese over the top and a police relationship that has never been anything but hostile. No. 1: Cidinho e Doca — Rap da Felicidade. ### [Balearic](https://waxonia.com/genre/balearic/) *Ibiza, Spain, 1987 · 7 tracks* Not a sound so much as a permission: Alfredo Fiorito's sets at Amnesia in Ibiza put Italo, indie, dub, soft rock and African records in one night, and the British DJs who visited in 1987 took the idea home and started acid house with it. No. 1: Elkin & Nelson — Jibaro. ### [Baroque](https://waxonia.com/genre/baroque/) *Italy, Germany and England, 1600 · 10 tracks* A bass line with numbers under it, a soloist above, and the invention of the idea that a piece should be driven by harmony moving somewhere. Also the invention of opera, the concerto and the fugue, which is a fair century and a half of work. No. 1: Johann Sebastian Bach — Goldberg Variations. ### [Bleep Techno](https://waxonia.com/genre/bleep-techno/) *Sheffield and Leeds, England, 1989 · 6 tracks* Sheffield and Leeds, 1989: Detroit's sequenced tones stripped to a few sine bleeps and dropped over sub-bass borrowed from Jamaican sound systems. The first British techno that sounded like nowhere in America. No. 1: LFO — LFO. ### [Bluegrass](https://waxonia.com/genre/bluegrass/) *Kentucky and Nashville, 1945 · 8 tracks* A named invention rather than a folk drift: the line-up Bill Monroe assembled in 1945 — mandolin, banjo, fiddle, guitar, bass, no drums — playing string-band music at bebop tempo with a solo order borrowed from jazz. No. 1: Bill Monroe — Blue Moon of Kentucky. ### [Blues](https://waxonia.com/genre/blues/) *The Mississippi Delta, 1920 · 10 tracks* Twelve bars, three chords and a form flexible enough to carry a century. First recorded in 1920, moved north to Chicago and plugged in after the war, and the ancestor of very nearly every American music on this map. No. 1: Robert Johnson — Cross Road Blues. ### [Bossa Nova](https://waxonia.com/genre/bossa-nova/) *Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1958 · 8 tracks* Samba reduced almost to nothing in the beach apartments of Rio at the end of the fifties: a whispered vocal, a guitar playing a rhythm that implies the percussion rather than stating it, and jazz harmony underneath. No. 1: João Gilberto — Chega de Saudade. ### [Breakbeat Hardcore](https://waxonia.com/genre/breakbeat-hardcore/) *United Kingdom, 1990 · 9 tracks* Britain's rave music between acid house and jungle: sampled funk breaks sped to breaking point, piano riffs, cartoon samples and a sub-bass borrowed from Kingston. Two frantic years that produced two whole genres. No. 1: Lennie De Ice — We Are I.E.. ### [Britpop](https://waxonia.com/genre/britpop/) *London, England, 1993 · 8 tracks* A mid-nineties British argument that guitar pop should sound English again — Kinks chords, local vocabulary and a self-conscious rejection of American grunge — conducted largely in the London press and briefly in the singles chart. No. 1: Pulp — Common People. ### [Cambodian Rock](https://waxonia.com/genre/cambodian-rock/) *Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 1968 · 6 tracks* Phnom Penh in the years before 1975, where Khmer vocal ornament met surf guitar, garage organ and Latin rhythms heard on American Forces radio. Almost every musician on this list was murdered by the Khmer Rouge. No. 1: Ros Serey Sothea — Chnam Oun Dop-Pram Muy. ### [Celtic Traditional](https://waxonia.com/genre/celtic-traditional/) *Ireland and Scotland, 1750 · 8 tracks* The living dance and song repertoire of Ireland and Scotland — reels, jigs, airs and unaccompanied sean-nós — carried by ear for centuries and still played in pubs by people who never wrote any of it down. No. 1: Traditional — The Blackbird. ### [Chicago House](https://waxonia.com/genre/chicago-house/) *Chicago, Illinois, 1984 · 10 tracks* Where house music was invented: drum machines, disco records cut up on cheap gear, and a gospel sense of release, made on Chicago's South Side after disco was declared dead everywhere else. No. 1: Mr. Fingers — Can You Feel It. ### [City Pop](https://waxonia.com/genre/city-pop/) *Tokyo, Japan, 1976 · 8 tracks* Tokyo in its bubble years: session-perfect studio pop made for people with a new car and a coastal road, borrowing American funk, soft rock and disco and polishing them past anything the originals attempted. No. 1: Mariya Takeuchi — Plastic Love. ### [Classical Period](https://waxonia.com/genre/classical-period/) *Vienna, Austria, 1750 · 9 tracks* Vienna, roughly 1750 to 1820: the continuo dropped, the orchestra standardised, and music organised around a form built on two contrasting keys arguing and resolving. Balance treated as the highest value, and then Beethoven. No. 1: Ludwig van Beethoven — Symphony No. 5 in C minor. ### [Congolese Rumba](https://waxonia.com/genre/congolese-rumba/) *Kinshasa and Brazzaville, 1948 · 7 tracks* Cuban son records reached Kinshasa on 78s in the 1930s and came back transformed: Lingala lyrics, interlocking electric guitars, and the sebene — the long instrumental release the whole song exists to reach. No. 1: Le Grand Kallé et l'African Jazz — Indépendance Cha Cha. ### [Country](https://waxonia.com/genre/country/) *Bristol, Tennessee, 1927 · 9 tracks* The commercial music of the white rural South, from the 1927 Bristol sessions onward: Scots-Irish ballad structure, blues phrasing and a lyric convention that prizes the plain statement over the clever one. No. 1: Hank Williams — I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry. ### [Cumbia](https://waxonia.com/genre/cumbia/) *Colombia's Caribbean coast, 1850 · 7 tracks* Colombia's Caribbean coast: Indigenous gaita flutes over African drums, later scored for big band and exported down the whole continent until Peru, Mexico and Argentina each had a cumbia of their own. No. 1: Wilson Choperena and Juan Madera — La Pollera Colorá. ### [Daggering](https://waxonia.com/genre/daggering/) *Kingston, Jamaica, 2006 · 9 tracks* A dance that took over a stretch of dancehall and then got that stretch banned. From 2006 the riddims ran fast and skeletal, the lyric described the dance instead of boasting around it, and in February 2009 Jamaica's Broadcasting Commission outlawed the whole subject on air. No. 1: Vybz Kartel & Spice — Romping Shop. ### [Dancehall](https://waxonia.com/genre/dancehall/) *Kingston, Jamaica, 1979 · 9 tracks* Reggae with the band replaced by a riddim and the singer replaced by a deejay. From 1979 the rhythm track became a shared public asset that dozens of records were built on, which is a distribution model as much as a sound. No. 1: Sister Nancy — Bam Bam. ### [Detroit Techno](https://waxonia.com/genre/detroit-techno/) *Detroit, Michigan, 1985 · 11 tracks* The original techno: machine funk made in Detroit from the mid-eighties on, where Kraftwerk's precision met Motown's sense of melody and a post-industrial city imagined its own future in drum machines. No. 1: Rhythim Is Rhythim — Strings of Life. ### [Disco](https://waxonia.com/genre/disco/) *New York City, 1974 · 10 tracks* Funk rebuilt for a room where the record never stops. A four-on-the-floor kick, strings, and an extended arrangement designed for a DJ rather than for radio — the first popular music written for the mix. No. 1: Donna Summer — I Feel Love. ### [Dream Pop](https://waxonia.com/genre/dream-pop/) *London and Grangemouth, 1983 · 8 tracks* Post-punk's guitar textures turned towards beauty rather than tension, with the voice mixed as another instrument and the reverb doing the emotional work. The step between Joy Division and My Bloody Valentine. No. 1: This Mortal Coil — Song to the Siren. ### [Drum and Bass](https://waxonia.com/genre/drum-and-bass/) *United Kingdom, 1992 · 15 tracks* Breakbeat-driven dance music built on chopped Amen breaks at 160-180 BPM over sub-bass, born from UK hardcore and jungle in the early nineties and still the most rhythmically inventive music the country has produced. No. 1: Goldie — Inner City Life. ### [Dub](https://waxonia.com/genre/dub/) *Kingston, Jamaica, 1973 · 8 tracks* Jamaican engineers in the early seventies discover that the mixing desk is an instrument. Vocals drop out, the drum and bass are pushed to the front, and reverb becomes the room the record is played in. No. 1: Augustus Pablo — King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown. ### [Dub Techno](https://waxonia.com/genre/dub-techno/) *Berlin, Germany, 1993 · 8 tracks* Detroit techno played through a Kingston mixing desk in a Berlin basement. From 1993 a handful of producers reduced the music to a chord stab, a delay and an enormous amount of tape hiss, and found that almost nothing was enough. No. 1: Basic Channel — Phylyps Trak. ### [Dubstep](https://waxonia.com/genre/dubstep/) *Croydon, South London, 2002 · 9 tracks* UK garage stripped of its vocals, its swing and its optimism, rebuilt around a half-time beat and a sub-bass you feel before you hear. Made in South London from around 2002 for rooms with the right sound system. No. 1: Skream — Midnight Request Line. ### [Electro](https://waxonia.com/genre/electro/) *New York City, 1982 · 9 tracks* Funk played by a Roland TR-808 instead of a band, invented in New York in 1982 when Kraftwerk records reached Bronx block parties. Robotic, hard-panned and built for cardboard on pavement. No. 1: Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force — Planet Rock. ### [Ethio-Jazz](https://waxonia.com/genre/ethio-jazz/) *Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1969 · 7 tracks* Mulatu Astatke's invention: Ethiopian pentatonic modes and Amharic song set against soul-jazz arrangements, made in Addis Ababa in the years before the 1974 revolution closed the clubs and the studios. No. 1: Mulatu Astatke — Yèkèrmo Sèw. ### [Fado](https://waxonia.com/genre/fado/) *Lisbon, Portugal, 1820 · 7 tracks* Portuguese urban song, born in the taverns and back streets of Lisbon, built on a voice, a Spanish guitar and the pear-shaped Portuguese guitarra. Its subject is saudade — longing for something that may never have existed. No. 1: Amália Rodrigues — Barco Negro. ### [Flamenco](https://waxonia.com/genre/flamenco/) *Andalusia, Spain, 1800 · 7 tracks* Andalusian song, guitar and dance built by Roma and rural poor communities in the nineteenth century, organised into palos — forms with their own metre and mood, from the near-unaccompanied grief of siguiriyas to the party of bulerías. No. 1: Paco de Lucía — Entre Dos Aguas. ### [French House](https://waxonia.com/genre/french-house/) *Paris, France, 1995 · 9 tracks* Paris in the late nineties, looping four bars of a forgotten disco record and sweeping a filter across it until the loop becomes a song. Compressed, warm and unapologetically nostalgic — house music made by people who loved the samples more than the scene. No. 1: Stardust — Music Sounds Better with You. ### [Funk](https://waxonia.com/genre/funk/) *Cincinnati, Ohio, 1967 · 10 tracks* The rhythmic reorganisation of American popular music around the first beat of the bar. From 1967 onward, melody and harmony give way to interlocking parts, and the groove itself becomes the subject of the song. No. 1: James Brown — Cold Sweat. ### [G-Funk](https://waxonia.com/genre/g-funk/) *Los Angeles, California, 1992 · 8 tracks* Los Angeles hip-hop rebuilt around slow tempos, a whining Moog lead and Parliament basslines played live rather than sampled. From 1992 it was the commercial centre of rap and the most sonically relaxed music ever made about violence. No. 1: Dr. Dre featuring Snoop Doggy Dogg — Nuthin' but a "G" Thang. ### [Gnawa](https://waxonia.com/genre/gnawa/) *Essaouira and Marrakech, Morocco, 1600 · 5 tracks* Moroccan trance music carried north by enslaved West Africans and played through the night at healing ceremonies: a three-string bass lute, iron castanets, and one pattern held until something gives. No. 1: Maalem Mahmoud Guinia — Colours of the Night. ### [Golden Age Hip-Hop](https://waxonia.com/genre/golden-age-hip-hop/) *New York City, 1986 · 12 tracks* The stretch from roughly 1986 to 1996 when sampling law was loose, technique advanced every month, and hip-hop produced more permanently important records than any comparable decade in popular music. No. 1: Public Enemy — Fight the Power. ### [Gospel](https://waxonia.com/genre/gospel/) *Chicago and the American South, 1932 · 8 tracks* Blues technique applied to sacred words, codified in Chicago churches from the early thirties. The training ground for almost every great American voice of the next fifty years, and the source of the vocabulary soul secularised. No. 1: Mahalia Jackson — Move On Up a Little Higher. ### [Gqom](https://waxonia.com/genre/gqom/) *Durban, South Africa, 2011 · 7 tracks* Durban's answer to kwaito: a broken, off-grid drum pattern with no four-to-the-floor kick at all, built on cracked software and traded by WhatsApp. Raw, minor-key and physically overwhelming on a big system. No. 1: DJ Lag — Ice Drop. ### [Grime](https://waxonia.com/genre/grime/) *East London, 2002 · 9 tracks* London MC music built on cheap software at 140 BPM, born on pirate radio in the east of the city around 2002. Square-wave basslines, no swing, and a vocal delivery that treats the beat as something to fight. No. 1: Musical Mob — Pulse X. ### [Grunge](https://waxonia.com/genre/grunge/) *Seattle, Washington, 1988 · 8 tracks* Seattle from 1988: hardcore's volume and independence welded to Black Sabbath riffs and pop melodies, on a local label with a deliberate house aesthetic, three years before the whole thing was sold to the world as a youth movement. No. 1: Nirvana — Smells Like Teen Spirit. ### [Hardcore Punk](https://waxonia.com/genre/hardcore-punk/) *Washington DC and Los Angeles, 1980 · 8 tracks* American punk taken to its logical end from 1980: faster, shorter, shouted, and run entirely on self-released records, borrowed halls and a touring network the bands built themselves because nobody else would have them. No. 1: Black Flag — Rise Above. ### [Highlife](https://waxonia.com/genre/highlife/) *Ghana and coastal West Africa, 1928 · 7 tracks* West Africa's first great popular music: Akan rhythms and palm-wine guitar meeting brass-band and swing arrangements in coastal Ghana, recorded from 1928 and named for the clubs ordinary people were not admitted to. No. 1: Kwame Asare — Yaa Amponsah. ### [IDM](https://waxonia.com/genre/idm/) *Sheffield and Cornwall, England, 1992 · 8 tracks* Techno rebuilt for headphones. British producers in the early nineties kept the machines and abandoned the dancefloor's obligations, treating rhythm as a place to put ideas rather than as a service to a room. No. 1: Aphex Twin — Didgeridoo. ### [Impressionism](https://waxonia.com/genre/impressionism/) *Paris, France, 1888 · 8 tracks* Paris around 1900, where French composers stopped treating a chord as a step towards somewhere else and started treating it as a colour worth sitting in. The most direct ancestor ambient music has. No. 1: Claude Debussy — Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. ### [Italo Disco](https://waxonia.com/genre/italo-disco/) *Italy, 1980 · 8 tracks* Disco rebuilt in Italian studios once America had declared disco dead, using cheap synthesisers instead of orchestras and English written by people who did not speak it. Melodramatic, synthetic, and enormously consequential in Chicago. No. 1: Klein + M.B.O. — Dirty Talk. ### [Jazz](https://waxonia.com/genre/jazz/) *New Orleans, Louisiana, 1917 · 12 tracks* A century of American improvised music, from New Orleans marching bands to modal abstraction, compressed here into one doorway rather than a survey. Every genre on this map that values a soloist owes it something. No. 1: Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five — West End Blues. ### [Juke and Footwork](https://waxonia.com/genre/juke-and-footwork/) *Chicago, Illinois, 1992 · 8 tracks* Chicago house accelerated past the point of comfort and handed to dancers. Ghetto house became juke became footwork: 160 BPM, chopped vocal fragments, and triplet kick patterns written to answer a dancer's feet in real time. No. 1: Cajmere — Percolator. ### [Krautrock](https://waxonia.com/genre/krautrock/) *West Germany, 1970 · 9 tracks* West German bands from around 1970 who declined to inherit the blues. In its place: a steady unaccented pulse, tape editing treated as composition, and synthesisers used for texture rather than for showmanship. No. 1: Neu! — Hallogallo. ### [Kwaito](https://waxonia.com/genre/kwaito/) *Johannesburg, South Africa, 1993 · 8 tracks* House music slowed to a walking pace in Johannesburg townships in the first years after apartheid, with the vocal shifted from singing to a half-spoken chant in tsotsitaal. The sound of a generation that had just been given a country. No. 1: Arthur Mafokate — Kaffir. ### [Madchester](https://waxonia.com/genre/madchester/) *Manchester, England, 1988 · 8 tracks* What happened when a guitar city discovered ecstasy and a drum machine. From 1988 Manchester bands stopped separating the band from the DJ, and British indie spent five years trying to be a dance record. No. 1: The Stone Roses — Fools Gold. ### [Mariachi](https://waxonia.com/genre/mariachi/) *Jalisco, Mexico, 1900 · 8 tracks* Western Mexico's string band tradition, from the Jalisco countryside to the plazas of Mexico City, formalised in the twentieth century around violins, trumpets, vihuela and the great bellied guitarrón. No. 1: Quirino Mendoza y Cortés — Cielito Lindo. ### [Memphis Rap](https://waxonia.com/genre/memphis-rap/) *Memphis, Tennessee, 1993 · 7 tracks* Memphis in the early nineties, on cassettes sold hand to hand: murky four-track tapes, horror-film samples, triplet hi-hats and a chanted hook — the blueprint for trap, made a decade before anyone in Atlanta used the word. No. 1: Tear Da Club Up Thugs — Slob on My Knob. ### [Merseybeat](https://waxonia.com/genre/merseybeat/) *Liverpool, England, 1962 · 7 tracks* Liverpool, 1962: dockside kids who had heard American records first because the ships brought them, playing rhythm and blues faster and tighter than the originals, in a city with three hundred working beat groups. No. 1: The Beatles — She Loves You. ### [Miami Bass](https://waxonia.com/genre/miami-bass/) *Miami, Florida, 1985 · 7 tracks* Miami in the mid-eighties, where electro was rebuilt around one thing: the 808 kick, tuned low and long enough to move air in a car boot. Fast, filthy, and engineered for a sound system rather than a radio. No. 1: 2 Live Crew — Throw the D. ### [Minimalism](https://waxonia.com/genre/minimalism/) *New York and San Francisco, 1964 · 9 tracks* American composers from the mid-sixties who replaced development with repetition and let a simple process run until it produced something nobody wrote. The idea underneath every loop-based record this site publishes. No. 1: Terry Riley — In C. ### [Modernism](https://waxonia.com/genre/modernism/) *Vienna, Paris and New York, 1908 · 10 tracks* Western art music after tonality stopped being compulsory. Atonality, serial method, noise admitted as material, and eventually silence — a century of composers deciding which inherited rule to stop obeying next. No. 1: Igor Stravinsky — The Rite of Spring. ### [Musique Concrète](https://waxonia.com/genre/musique-concrete/) *Paris, France, 1948 · 8 tracks* Paris, 1948: a radio engineer decides that a recording of a train is material for a composition. The moment recorded sound stops documenting music and starts being it, which is the premise every sampler on this map depends on. No. 1: Pierre Schaeffer — Étude aux chemins de fer. ### [Neo-Soul](https://waxonia.com/genre/neo-soul/) *Philadelphia and New York City, 1995 · 9 tracks* Nineties soul rebuilt by musicians raised on hip-hop. Live bands playing deliberately behind the beat, seventies chord voicings, and an insistence on album-length statements at the height of the singles era. No. 1: D'Angelo — Brown Sugar. ### [Northern Soul](https://waxonia.com/genre/northern-soul/) *Wigan and Manchester, England, 1970 · 7 tracks* Not a style anyone recorded — a style of listening. Northern English all-nighters from 1970 built a canon out of failed American soul 45s, prizing a fast four-four stomp and obscurity itself as a value. No. 1: Dobie Gray — Out on the Floor. ### [Post-Punk](https://waxonia.com/genre/post-punk/) *United Kingdom, 1978 · 10 tracks* What British and American bands did with punk's permission once its three chords ran out. Bass leads, guitars scrape rather than strum, and the rhythm section quietly imports funk, dub and German rock. No. 1: Joy Division — Love Will Tear Us Apart. ### [Psychedelic Rock](https://waxonia.com/genre/psychedelic-rock/) *San Francisco and London, 1966 · 9 tracks* Rock reorganised around the studio and the drug, from 1966: backwards tape, modal drones, guitars through everything available, and songs allowed to run as long as they liked. The permission slip krautrock and shoegaze both cashed. No. 1: The Beatles — Tomorrow Never Knows. ### [Punk](https://waxonia.com/genre/punk/) *New York and London, 1976 · 9 tracks* Two years in which rock was stripped back to speed, volume and refusal, and the barrier to making a record collapsed. Musically narrow on purpose; its consequences are the widest of anything on this map. No. 1: Sex Pistols — Anarchy in the U.K.. ### [Qawwali](https://waxonia.com/genre/qawwali/) *Delhi and the Punjab, 1300 · 6 tracks* Sufi devotional singing from the shrines of Delhi and the Punjab, seven centuries old and still performed as a party of voices, harmonium and clapping hands driving a listener towards ecstasy rather than towards a chorus. No. 1: Amir Khusrau — Chhaap Tilak Sab Chheeni. ### [Rebetiko](https://waxonia.com/genre/rebetiko/) *Piraeus and Smyrna, 1922 · 7 tracks* The urban song of Greece's dispossessed, made in Piraeus by refugees expelled from Asia Minor after 1922. Bouzouki and baglamas, Ottoman modes, and lyrics about hashish, prison and exile that the state repeatedly banned. No. 1: Markos Vamvakaris — Frangosyriani. ### [Reggae](https://waxonia.com/genre/reggae/) *Kingston, Jamaica, 1968 · 9 tracks* Ska slowed twice over, until the emphasis landed on the third beat and the bass became the lead voice. Jamaica's national music from 1968, and the direct ancestor of everything this site publishes about low frequencies. No. 1: Bob Marley & The Wailers — No Woman, No Cry. ### [Reggaeton](https://waxonia.com/genre/reggaeton/) *San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1994 · 8 tracks* Panamanian reggae en español and Jamaican dancehall recut in San Juan's housing projects over one riddim — the dembow — until it became the default pulse of Latin pop and, eventually, of global pop. No. 1: Daddy Yankee — Gasolina. ### [Renaissance](https://waxonia.com/genre/renaissance/) *Flanders, Italy and England, 1400 · 8 tracks* Two centuries of writing for voices moving independently and imitating each other, sacred and secular. No conductor, no soloist, no harmony in the later sense — just lines, and the rules governing how they may collide. No. 1: Thomas Tallis — Spem in alium. ### [Rhythm and Blues](https://waxonia.com/genre/rhythm-and-blues/) *Los Angeles and Chicago, 1945 · 9 tracks* Blues played by a small band with a shuffle, a honking saxophone and somewhere to be. The post-war music that turned twelve bars into a dance floor, and the common ancestor of rock and roll, soul and Jamaican ska. No. 1: Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats — Rocket 88. ### [Riot Grrrl](https://waxonia.com/genre/riot-grrrl/) *Olympia, Washington, 1991 · 7 tracks* Olympia and Washington DC, 1991: hardcore's tools handed to women who were tired of being crushed at the front of the room, distributed through photocopied zines as much as through records. No. 1: Bikini Kill — Rebel Girl. ### [Rock and Roll](https://waxonia.com/genre/rock-and-roll/) *Memphis and Chicago, 1954 · 9 tracks* Rhythm and blues played faster, sold to teenagers, and briefly the most disruptive thing in America. A five-year window in which the record industry discovered a market it did not understand and never fully regained control of. No. 1: Chuck Berry — Johnny B. Goode. ### [Romantic](https://waxonia.com/genre/romantic/) *Vienna, Paris and Leipzig, 1820 · 9 tracks* The nineteenth century, in which the orchestra tripled in size, the composer became an individual with feelings to report, and harmony was stretched until it stopped resolving. Music as autobiography, at enormous volume. No. 1: Ludwig van Beethoven — Symphony No. 9 in D minor. ### [Salsa](https://waxonia.com/genre/salsa/) *New York City, 1967 · 8 tracks* Cuban son rebuilt in New York by Puerto Rican musicians in the sixties and seventies, harder and brassier than its parent, with jazz voicings on top and a political charge the original never carried. No. 1: Rubén Blades — Pedro Navaja. ### [Samba](https://waxonia.com/genre/samba/) *Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1917 · 8 tracks* Rio de Janeiro's national music, out of the Bahian communities of the Praça Onze district and onto record in 1917. Built from interlocking percussion and a syncopation that lands everywhere except where a European ear expects it. No. 1: Ary Barroso — Aquarela do Brasil. ### [Shibuya-kei](https://waxonia.com/genre/shibuya-kei/) *Shibuya, Tokyo, 1993 · 7 tracks* A Tokyo record-shop aesthetic rather than a sound: early-nineties Japanese bands raiding sixties French pop, bossa nova, film scores and library music from the import bins of Shibuya, and reassembling them with total precision. No. 1: Pizzicato Five — Twiggy Twiggy. ### [Shoegaze](https://waxonia.com/genre/shoegaze/) *England, 1988 · 10 tracks* Guitar bands who buried the song under effects pedals and sang like they were in the next room. Named as an insult by the British music press in 1990, and reclaimed by roughly every guitar band since. No. 1: My Bloody Valentine — Only Shallow. ### [Ska](https://waxonia.com/genre/ska/) *Kingston, Jamaica, 1962 · 8 tracks* Jamaican musicians in 1962 taking American rhythm and blues off the radio, flipping the emphasis onto the offbeat, and adding a horn section trained in jazz. Independence music, and the first link in the chain that ends in dubstep. No. 1: The Wailers — Simmer Down. ### [Son Cubano](https://waxonia.com/genre/son-cubano/) *Oriente and Havana, Cuba, 1900 · 8 tracks* Cuba's foundational popular form, out of the eastern hills and into Havana by the 1920s: Spanish song over African percussion, organised around the clave and the montuno — the call-and-response vamp everything else is built to arrive at. No. 1: Compay Segundo — Chan Chan. ### [Soul](https://waxonia.com/genre/soul/) *Detroit and Memphis, 1961 · 10 tracks* Gospel technique moved to secular subject matter, recorded in Detroit and Memphis from the early sixties by house bands who played together every day. The root system almost everything else on this map grew out of. No. 1: Marvin Gaye — What's Going On. ### [Tango](https://waxonia.com/genre/tango/) *Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1880 · 8 tracks* The music of the Río de la Plata, assembled in the port districts of Buenos Aires and Montevideo from habanera, milonga and immigrant song. Defined by the bandoneón — a German church instrument that ended up in Argentina by accident. No. 1: Gerardo Matos Rodríguez — La Cumparsita. ### [Trap](https://waxonia.com/genre/trap/) *Atlanta, Georgia, 2003 · 8 tracks* Atlanta from 2003: 808 sub-bass tuned to a note, hi-hats rolled into triplets and thirty-second-note bursts, and a sparse, ominous synth line. Within a decade it was the default rhythmic grammar of pop worldwide. No. 1: T.I. — Trap Muzik. ### [Trip-Hop](https://waxonia.com/genre/trip-hop/) *Bristol, England, 1991 · 12 tracks* Slowed hip-hop breaks, dub bass and film-score melancholy, made largely in Bristol in the early nineties. Nobody who made it liked the name, and all of them made records nothing else sounds like. No. 1: Massive Attack — Unfinished Sympathy. ### [Tropicália](https://waxonia.com/genre/tropicalia/) *Bahia and São Paulo, Brazil, 1967 · 8 tracks* A twelve-month Brazilian insurrection in 1967 and 1968: bossa harmony, samba, psychedelic guitars, concrete poetry and deliberate bad taste, aimed at a military dictatorship that responded by jailing and exiling its leaders. No. 1: Caetano Veloso — Tropicália. ### [Two-Tone](https://waxonia.com/genre/two-tone/) *Coventry, England, 1979 · 7 tracks* Coventry, 1979: Jamaican ska played at punk speed by deliberately mixed-race bands on a label with a black-and-white chequerboard logo, at a moment when the National Front was recruiting outside British venues. No. 1: The Specials — Ghost Town. ### [UK Drill](https://waxonia.com/genre/uk-drill/) *South London, England, 2015 · 7 tracks* South London from 2015, taking Chicago drill's subject matter and rebuilding it on a sliding 808 and a skipping, off-grid hi-hat pattern that owes more to grime than to Atlanta. Heavily policed, and legally suppressed more than any music since. No. 1: Headie One — Next Up?. ### [UK Garage](https://waxonia.com/genre/uk-garage/) *London, 1995 · 10 tracks* Skippy, syncopated dance music built from chopped R&B vocals and shuffled hi-hats, made in London in the late nineties. The missing link between house and everything British dance music did afterwards. No. 1: MJ Cole — Sincere. ### [Zamrock](https://waxonia.com/genre/zamrock/) *Lusaka and Kitwe, Zambia, 1972 · 6 tracks* Zambia in the seventies, a few years after independence and briefly rich on copper: heavy psychedelic rock played on cheap equipment, sung in English and Bemba, with a broadcasting quota that required Zambian records on the radio. No. 1: WITCH — Introduction. ## Elsewhere on the site - [The map](https://waxonia.com/map.md) — every genre, what it came out of, and what came out of it. - [Artists](https://waxonia.com/artists.md) — everyone we rank. - [Curators](https://waxonia.com/curators.md) — everyone whose ear we publish. - [Themes](https://waxonia.com/themes.md) — our own cuts across the rankings. - [Curate a list](https://waxonia.com/curate.md) — how an artist or DJ adds one. ## For agents - [llms.txt](https://waxonia.com/llms.txt) — the full map of this site, and the conventions it follows. - Every page has a Markdown twin at its own address with the trailing slash replaced by `.md`, and answers `Accept: text/markdown` at the page address. - JSON for everything: the genre index at https://waxonia.com/api/genres.json. --- Hand-curated by Waxonia. We host no audio; all links point to streaming platforms.