The musical culture of America is rich in traditions, genres and styles.
With the beginning of the 21st century attempts to organize musical culture not only in the States, but in the whole world seemed to be more and more futile. Now, summing up the first past decade, we can certainly say that there are two opposite tendencies in the world of music. Let’s take the classic basic genres: rock, rhythm and blues, rap. Trends of contemporary world music are that the basis of the genre is becoming increasingly appealing to the beginning, and starting to be more clear and amenable to categorization. At the same time, the boundaries between genres erased completely, that is characterized by a huge number of various genres, sub-genres, combining the features of several completely different directions, the number of which is sometimes up to ten.
From the middle of the decade not pop already, but hip-hop music has the greatest effect on neighboring genres, especially on rhythm and blues, which has finally lost contact with its ancestor of the ‘70s. Now 70% of R&B music is characterized as a combination of melodic chorus with rap verses or vice versa. However, there are still performers who propagate classical principles of rhythm and blues in music: Ne-Yo, John Legend, Raphael Saadiq, Jamie Foxx, partly Usher, Alicia Keys. But representatives of new rhythm and blues school also deserve attention: Beyonce, Bruno Mars, Akon, Chris Brown and many others. While rap performers easily take first places in many charts. It is primarily a question of Jay-Z, Eminem, Kanye West, 50 cent, Drake, Lil Wayne. Sales of their albums are estimated at least by hundreds of thousands, that is a real figure for information society.
Rock lost its ground a little, probably due to its flirtation with a different mix of trends and directions, plus the growing popularity of indie rock and rap that pushes this ancient genre to the wayside. However, we have an opportunity to observe the climbing scene of «The Killers», «The White Stripes», «Nickelback», «Linkin Park», «Good Charlotte», «Fall Out Boy», «Kings Of Leon» and other brilliant groups.