"Black Alt", Social Media, and Music Sub-Genres
How do new genres emerge in the social media age? In this essay Francesca Sobande explores the Black Alt music scene and the sub-genres that have developed through online communities, from emo rap to baddiecore.
Essay by Francesca Sobande | Cover Illustration by Chris Lau Manson | 22.05.25
I remember the moment when “Novacane” by Frank Ocean dropped in 2011. It was like a breath of fresh air and a tall glass of water on a hot summer’s day. I was just beginning to navigate my twenties and feeling adrift, when the debut single cut through the background sound of life and connected to me. It still does.
Released from his mixtape Nostalgia, Ultra, “Novacane” established Frank Ocean as an artist who expresses a constellation of emotions, a stirring sound, and a striking spirit. The singer-songwriter’s creativity can’t be contained by the music industry’s constraining conventions and constant demand for more and more music. Sparking headlines such as Vibe’s “10 Emo Lines From Frank Ocean’s ‘Channel Orange’ For A Man or Woman”, Ocean is well known for his moving and playful lyrics on themes ranging from love, tragedy, isolation and ambivalence, to regret, the poignancy of memories, and the euphoria of intimacy. His work is powerful (including the breath-taking beat switch in “Nights”). Although Ocean hasn’t officially released new music since 2020, its ongoing ingenuity and impact is clear.
Alt R&B, Indie Rap, and Emo Rap
Frank Ocean has been credited for paving the path for what would become known as “alt R&B” (he received the first Grammy Award for “Best Progressive R&B Album” in 2013). This music sub-genre (“alt R&B” / “progressive R&B”) brings together experimental arrangements, eclectic energies, dreamy deliveries, and subversive themes that move beyond those most associated with mainstream R&B. It also includes the inimitable work of people such as GRAMMY-nominated singer, songwriter, and visionary artist Durand Bernarr, as well as singer-songwriter, guitarist and record producer Steve Lacy.
Among the other artists, musicians, and singers whose work has been referred to as “alt R&B and/or rap” are Tyler, the Creator, the Weeknd, Solange, SZA, and more. While “alt rap” is more commonly used, similar labels such as “hipster rap”, “indie rap”, and “emo rap” have also featured in certain online and media descriptions of their work. These terms tend to be thought of as relatively recent, but the concept of “indie rap” existed before the turn of the 21st century. For example, it cropped up in the music journalism and writing of Dele Fadele on “Curve: Bend Of An Era” for New Musical Express (aka NME) in May 1991. In that piece, Fadele describes Curve’s music as featuring “savage rap over guitars by turns sadistic and muted, they’d created a new genre, ‘indie rap’ (sounds crass, I know)”. So, unlike its contemporary counterparts such as “emo rap”, the term “indie rap” didn’t take root in ways spurred on by social media. Instead, it is an expression that first came to be at a point in time when rap and rock riffing together was still “new”.
During the years after “indie rap” began to be uttered, terms such as “emo rap” eventually followed, which has been used to describe artistic and inventive work by Kid Bookie and KennyHoopla. As discussed by Yasmine Summan in an article for Rock Sound on “Celebrating Emo Rap As Hip Hop Turns 50”, “Emo rap, also known as ‘Soundcloud Rap’ and commonly grouped in with trap metal, is associated with the explosion of artists fusing hip hop or rap with emo and alternative genres, using SoundCloud.com as a home for their work”. As the book Flip the Script: How Women Came to Rule Hip Hop by Arusa Qureshi emphasises, women’s work in hip hop, including as rappers, is key to such music and its impact. Despite this, rarely is the label of “emo rap” used to describe the work of women. Additionally, as the extensive research and writing of Jenessa Williams spotlights, “differing conventions of race, gender and respectability politics” are implicated in distinctly different public perceptions of genres such as emo, rap, hip-hop, and the (imagined) people who are part of them.
Beyond the surface of constructed and often contested sub-genre terms such as “alt R&B” and “emo rap” lie knotted class, gender, racial, and sexual politics. After all, as Tricia Rose notes in the essential book, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, “…popular forms contain significant cultural traditions and cannot be fully severed from the sociohistorical moment in which they take place”. Meaning that who, what, and when, something or someone becomes regarded as “alt” tells us about societal norms, including, what Tricia Rose describes as being “the deeply contradictory and multilayered voices and themes expressed in popular culture”.
“Emo rap” is a term used to describe rap with noticeably emotional messages, and sometimes, accompanying sounds that evoke “emotional/emotive hardcore (aka emocore/emo) music”. Fundamentally, it’s meant to signal the emotional qualities of music dubbed as such, but “emo rap” is a term that can also promote reductive perceptions of rap as normally emotionless and abrasive. This reveals much about what Tricia Rose outlines as being “the social context within which rap music takes place” – a context marked by the fact that much “media attention on rap music has been based on extremist tendencies within rap, rather than the day-to-day cultural forces that enter into hip hop’s vast dialogue”.
Rap, R&B, and hip-hop don’t need to be prefaced with other words to articulate their ability to sensitively convey different emotions. They have always been outlets through which much emotion is expressed, including music and songs such as LEMFRECK’s “A Voice note: Sad Boys Club”, “Free” by Little Simz, “Desoleil (Brilliant Corners)” by Loyle Carner (featuring Sampha), “Heart Status - Freestyle” by Deyah, and SZA’s “Broken Clocks”.
It’s understandable that people distinguish between different types of rap music. Still, in the process of doing so, care must be taken to avoid reinforcing oppressive ideas about Black music, art, creativity, and life. There’s a long history of sub-genres emerging and being (re)named, so it’s no surprise that “new” music categories keep appearing. Then again, as Joy White noted in an illuminating talk on “Saying something? Rap, grime and UK drill as a mode of social commentary”, “artists move in and between genres, and may not see these categories in the same ways that we do”. Mindful of that, when reflecting on (sub-)genre terms used to describe various artists and musicians, how they’re categorised by others shouldn’t be confused with how they define themselves.
In this written piece, I’m interested in the relationship between social media and sub- genre labels concerning Black creativity and “altness”. So, I focus on terms that usually are (e.g., “alt rap”) and aren’t (e.g., “baddiecore”) used to describe Black people’s work.
Digital Culture, Humour, and Sub-genres
Another music sub-genre label that’s circulated amid commentaries about “alt R&B” is “PBR&B” (“PB” jokingly refers to “Pabst Blue Ribbon”, a beer brand associated with hipsters). As Eric Harvey reflected on in a Pitchfork piece titled, “I Started a Joke: ‘PBR&B;’ and What Genres Mean Now”:
I “coined” it for the simple reason that it’s a pun, and I love puns. But I didn't exactly coin it to describe the music itself. (Its grandfather genre, ‘Rhythm and Blues’, is another story. That was coined by Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler in 1949, to replace “Race Records”, the offensive name of a chart used at the time to rank the popularity of music made by African Americans.) Instead, it’s one of those genres that describes an imagined fanbase.
When engaging with these reflections and the fact that it was a Twitter (now known as X) post by Harvey that led to the genre concept of “PBR&B”, comparisons can be made between the creation of this sub-genre term and those of “baddiecore” and “yacht rock”. In various ways, each label and its ambivalent uptake is testament to the relationship between digital culture, internet humour, and music sub-genres. These terms and their use can also be thought of as reflecting what Tricia Rose refers to as being “the hidden politics of popular pleasure” – that is, the impact of how the politics of race, gender, sexuality, class, and technology collide in and through music.
As acknowledged in my co-authored book, Look, Don’t Touch: Reflections on the Freedom to Feel, unlike decades ago when the music industry had a top-down and behind closed doors control over the genre categorising of music, nowadays, what people say, do, and share on social media shapes it. Both the examples of “PBR&B” and “baddiecore” tell us something about the more bottom-up, or at least, side-to-side, ways that sub-genre terms are created and established in our contemporary society.
But as the work of Liz Pelly also reminds us, “[b]y the mid-2010s, digital media platforms more broadly had been conflating themselves with democracy and self-expression for years, disingenuous claims comprising a defining propaganda project of the Web 2.0 era”. So caution must be taken when staking claims that social media can aid more democratic approaches to making, sharing, and experiencing music, including the naming of (sub)genres. As Pelly points out in the pivotal book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist, “platforms are not public squares; they’re corporate digital enclosures where your every move is tracked”.
As mentioned, another example of the ways that digital culture and humour contribute to the construction of sub-genre categories is the case of “yacht rock”– a term that has been used to describe a variety of styles of music linked to soft rock, smooth soul, R&B, disco, and jazz. Having become high-profile and received commercial success from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, the music associated with the expression “yacht rock” only became referred to that way from around 2005 onwards, after a popular online mockumentary style video series, “Yacht Rock” (2005–2010). HBO’s Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary (2024) details some of the defining moments in such music’s history, while also pondering over the part that digital culture has played in it.
The sub-genre descriptions of “PBR&B”, “baddiecore”, and “yacht rock” all differ, but they’re connected by the intensely digitally mediated society that they stem from – a society where jesting online can sometimes contour how music is labelled.
Internet Speak, “Black Altness”, and Moving Beyond Genres
Life today is punctuated by social media’s powerful presence. Words popularised by viral videos, remixed memes, and trending hashtags make it to the pages of updated dictionaries and annual lists of the most searched internet queries. Such activity is often associated with the contentious concept of “internet speak”. While it might initially seem like a straightforward way to describe the internet’s role in contemporary communications, “internet speak” is an ineffective expression. Essentially, it can erase the longer history of words, their meanings, and their shifting cultural significance.
“Internet speak” is a label often applied in ways that gloss over inequalities and the origins of terms that are framed as “newly” popular. Many words and phrases referred to as “internet speak” (e.g., “bet”, “it’s giving…”, “slay”, “woke”) originate from the communication styles and cultural codes of oppressed people (e.g., Black and LGBTQIA+ communities). What tends to be described as “internet speak” are expressions that emerged long before the internet, and, crucially, because of the creativity, work, and care of people on the peripheries of society. When such words (e.g., “baddie”) are reduced to so-called “internet speak”, they’re taken out of context. This overlooks the innovations of people impacted by injustices and history’s whitewashing.
“Black alt” – an abbreviation of “Black alternative(ness)” – is not a phrase that simply grew from the internet. However, it’s gained popularity in ways influenced by digital discourse, social media, and the cultural impact of Black people online (Black Twitter, and beyond). This means that perceptions and (re)presentations of who and what is “Black alt” are entangled with the internet’s intricacies and imaginaries – the ways that blackness is hyper-visible, obscured, and imagined online.
In recent years, “Black alt” has attracted the interest of various brands and the advertisers who market them. It is an expression that often serves as a social media hashtag and description of art, fashion, music, and overall “alt” aesthetics embodied by Black people at the fringes of wider “alt” scenes and subcultures. Undeniably, there is more than one way to embody, embrace, and express a sense of “Black altness”, including in ways that may look and sound very different to what has become most linked to it in marketplace, mass-media, and music industry spheres. That said, staple elements of prominent ideas and images connected to the concept of “Black alt” are: (1) a vivid and eclectic personal sense of style (even if it may sometimes mostly be monochromatic), (2) an experimental approach to music-making that moves across, between and beyond genre categories, and (3) an attitude that surpasses stifling assumptions and expectations related to Black art, creativity, and life.
Artists and musicians whose meaningful work has influenced contemporary conversations about Black “alt(ness)” include, but aren’t limited to: duo Nova Twins (Amy Love and Georgia South) who won “Best UK Breakthrough Band” at the 2020 Heavy Music Awards; Rachel Chinouriri, whose music influences are indie, electronic/alternative and pop, and was nominated in the categories of “Artist of the Year” and “Best New Artist” for the 2025 Brit Awards; ALT BLK ERA (sisters Nyrobi Beckett-Messam and Chaya Beckett-Messam), whose 2025 debut album Rave Immortal reached number one of the UK Rock & Metal chart, and who won the 2025 MOBO award for “Best Alternative Music Act”; Bob Vylan, who won the first ever “Best Alternative Music Act” award at the MOBOs in 2022, and SPIDER (Jennifer Osakpolor Irabor), whose Kerrang! interview with Aliya Chaudhry includes an encouraging call for “more Black women in alternative music”, and who was joined by Safesp8ce and Bukky for a debut headline show in London.
Relatedly, in the world of digital culture, creator Aliyah has been highlighted in pieces on, as Gael Laguerre puts it, “The Black Alt Resurgence”, “Aliyahcore”, and “Black alternative fashion baddies”. Elsewhere, and particularly as it receives more attention within popular culture, a sense of spectacle can surround certain ideas about “Black alt(ness)”. This was the case with images of “alt Black” people that were generated by artificial intelligence (AI) in 2022. Uncanny AI-generated depictions of Black people were created using Midjourney (a generative AI software programme) and shared on social media. This resulted in online critiques that called out the creepiness of the images, while also amplifying the work and experiences of real Black people in “alt” music scenes (e.g., Tina Bell – deemed “The Black Godmother of Grunge”, the Black feminist punk band Big Joanie, Jada Pinkett Smith’s band Wicked Wisdom, and the music of Pinkett Smith’s daughter WILLOW – aka Willow Smith).
As is foregrounded in the collection Black Punk Now: Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Comics, edited by James Spooner and Chris L. Terry, punk and alt rock genres and subcultures are part of Black history. But being Black and perceived as being “alt” – be it emo, indie, punk, goth, or more, transcends the boundaries of any single genre.
To return to the prescient words of Tricia Rose, much can be gained from “understanding the processes of culture making in a capitalist and fully commodified society”, such as by considering “[h]ow does new technology change the nature of black cultural production”? Attempting to address this question, now, involves thinking about the dynamics between social media and sub-genres – from the labelling of R&B, rap, and the idea of being “Black alt” to the patchwork of different perceptions of music and media made by Black people.
Black “alt” creativity and ways of living will no doubt continue to grow, thankfully. Ultimately, being Black and “alt” is an expansive experience. It isn’t about a single song, style, statement, or symbol. It’s about imagining and being “otherwise” – living boldly, and dare I say, embracing tenderness, in a world that often seeks to suppress.
L: Kid Bookie, R: Rachel Chinouriri, by Francesca Sobande
This research and writing was supported by funding from an AHRC IAA KEPSs grant from UKRI, provided through Cardiff University.
Francesca Sobande (Instagram and Blue Sky) is a writer and reader in digital media studies (Cardiff University), who has published widely in journals, magazines, and online outlets on media, culture, music, and the internet. Her books include The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan) which was published in 2020, Consuming Crisis: Commodifying Care and COVID-19 (SAGE) which was published in 2022, and Big Brands Are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture (University of California Press), published in 2024. Additionally, Francesca’s book with layla-roxanne hill, Black Oot Here: Black Lives in Scotland (Bloomsbury), was published in 2022. They also co-authored the graphic novel Black Oot Here: Dreams O Us which was self-published in 2023, and the new book, Look, Don’t Touch: Reflections on the Freedom to Feel (404 Ink, 2025).
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