Boom bap is a rap production style built on a hard acoustic kick (the “boom”) and a snapping snare (the “bap”), with drums sampled from old jazz, funk and soul records and programmed on hardware samplers. It dominated New York rap from the late 1980s to the mid-’90s, and it never left. It is one of the oldest named sounds on the rap subgenres map, and the easiest to identify once you know what to listen for.
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Why it’s called boom bap
The name is onomatopoeia. KRS-One put it plainly to Red Bull Music Academy: the boom is the kick drum and the bap is the snare. The earliest documented use is T La Rock’s “It’s Yours” (1984), produced by Rick Rubin, where he says he coined the phrase as an ad-lib over the beat. KRS-One and Diamond D both told the same piece that “It’s Yours” was where they first heard it, per Red Bull Music Academy Daily. DJ Premier has suggested the word was floating around earlier.
So nobody invented boom bap the way someone invented the 808 pattern. T La Rock named it, and KRS-One’s Return of the Boom Bap (1993), which peaked at No. 37 on the Billboard 200 that October, is what made the name stick, according to Wikipedia. The sound was already a decade old.
What it sounds like
It is a drum sound before it is anything else. I’d boil it to four things:
- A hard acoustic kick on the downbeats and a snappy snare on the backbeat. Drums sit at the front of the mix.
- Sampled breaks, chopped. The raw material is jazz, funk and soul. Premier told MusicRadar that for one Notorious B.I.G. beat he took a single note and pitched it across different drum pads. That is the method in one sentence: break a record into pieces, replay the pieces.
- A little grit. The machines were crude, and the crudeness is the flavor.
- Few instruments. KRS-One’s own description, in that Red Bull piece, is that the style gets strong rhythm from very little.
Tempo is not on the list. Boom bap is a midtempo groove, but the drum sound identifies it, not the BPM. That is the cleanest way to separate it from its descendants. Trap puts a long, sustained 808 under rolling hi-hats, and drill slides that bass around. Boom bap’s low end is a kick drum you could imagine a person playing.
The hardware: SP-1200 and MPC60
The machines shaped the sound as much as the records did.
Marley Marl comes first. On MC Shan’s “The Bridge” (1986) he used a Roland 808’s pulse to trigger different sounds, per Wikipedia. The E-mu SP-1200 did not ship until August 1987. It gave the user ten seconds of sampling time, at 12-bit resolution and a 26.04 kHz sample rate, and the same source ties the “dirty,” “gritty” character to exactly those limits. Among its notable users: Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions (1988), A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory (1991), Wu-Tang’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (1993) and Ready to Die (1994).
Then the Akai MPC. Its pads respond to how hard you hit them, so a producer plays accents and velocity, not just timing, and the swing setting on the MPC series lets you push notes off the grid. Havoc made Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones, Part II” (1995) in his bedroom in the Queensbridge Houses, with the drums sequenced on an Akai MPC60 and the other samples on an Ensoniq EPS-16 Plus. He nearly deleted the beat before Prodigy talked him out of it.
The lineage runs Marley Marl to DJ Premier and Pete Rock to the 2010s revival, and I read it as one method getting refined, not a series of separate styles. Same instrument, same instinct, a different decade’s records.
The Golden Age canon
Eight records, in release order:
- Boogie Down Productions, Criminal Minded (1987). Scott La Rock and KRS-One, spare beats built on sampled James Brown, out on B-Boy Records in May.
- EPMD, Strictly Business (1988). EPMD produced it themselves, funky and sample-reliant.
- A Tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory (1991). Mostly Q-Tip, stripped to vocals, drums and bass, with jazz underneath.
- Pete Rock & CL Smooth, Mecca and the Soul Brother (1992). The lead single, “T.R.O.Y.,” flips a Tom Scott cover of “Today.”
- Wu-Tang Clan, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (1993). RZA produced, mixed and programmed it on a tiny budget. Pitchfork called the result “dusty yet digital.”
- Gang Starr, Hard to Earn (1994). DJ Premier’s chops at full strength. “Mass Appeal” samples a Vic Juris record and a Pete Rock remix vocal.
- Nas, Illmatic (1994). Premier, Large Professor, Pete Rock and Q-Tip split the production, and it still plays like one room.
- Mobb Deep, The Infamous (1995). The cold end of the sound.
The era label “Golden Age” stretches across all of that. The wider eras of hip-hop put it in context.
Is boom bap dead?
No. It changed labels. The most visible revival came from Buffalo. Griselda, the group of Westside Gunn, Conway the Machine and Benny the Butcher, signed with Eminem’s Shady Records in 2017 and released WWCD on November 29, 2019, produced end to end by Daringer and Beat Butcha. DJBooth called it a “new era boom-bap aesthetic” and noted that some fans define it as revivalism, which the reviewer thought was a mistake. The review also warned that your enjoyment depends on your “tolerance for lockstep breakbeats,” per DJBooth. That is a fair summary of both the appeal and the limit.
The Alchemist is the other pillar. He produced the whole of Boldy James’s The Price of Tea in China (February 7, 2020), which Pitchfork scored 8.0 per Wikipedia, and the whole of Freddie Gibbs’s Alfredo 2 (July 25, 2025), which Wikipedia reports reached No. 13 on the Billboard 200. A producer making two albums five years apart in the same dry, sample-heavy lane, and getting reviewed seriously both times, is not a nostalgia act.
My view: revival is the wrong word. The method didn’t stop, because the tools didn’t. The SP-1200 itself was reissued by Rossum Electro-Music in 2021.
Ten songs that show the range
- Marley Marl & MC Shan, “The Bridge” (1986). 808 pulse, Queensbridge, the starting gun.
- Pete Rock & CL Smooth, “T.R.O.Y. (They Reminisce Over You)” (1992). A tribute to Troy Dixon of Heavy D & the Boyz.
- Gang Starr, “Mass Appeal” (1994). Produced by DJ Premier.
- Nas, “N.Y. State of Mind” (1994). Premier again: a Kool & the Gang drum break, a Joe Chambers piano loop.
- Mobb Deep, “Shook Ones, Part II” (1995). A Herbie Hancock piano figure, slowed and pitch-altered.
- Jay-Z, “Dead Presidents” (1996). Ski Beatz flips Lonnie Liston Smith’s “A Garden of Peace.”
- Royce da 5’9″, “Boom” (single December 1999, on Rock City, 2002). Produced by DJ Premier.
- Boldy James & The Alchemist, “Scrape the Bowl” feat. Benny the Butcher (2020).
- Griselda, “Freddie HotSpot” (2019). DJBooth cited it as a highlight.
- Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist, “1995” (2025). The lead single, built on a guitar riff.
FAQ
Who invented boom bap?
No single inventor. T La Rock is the first person on record using the word, on “It’s Yours” (1984). The drum sound grew out of New York producers like Marley Marl in the mid-’80s.
Is Wu-Tang considered boom bap?
It depends on who you ask. RZA’s grimier, more off-kilter sound is its own branch, but 36 Chambers has the hard drums and dusty samples that define the style.
Can you make boom bap on an MPC today?
Yes. The MPC series has the swing control and the pads, and the SP-1200 itself was reissued in 2021. The technique is chopping a sample and playing the pieces back. The gear helps, but the chopping is the point.
Is boom bap the same as 90s rap?
No. 90s rap includes G-funk, Southern rap and more. Boom bap is the New York drum-and-sample style within it, and it is still being made.
If the sound clicks, the next step is the family tree. The rap subgenres hub shows where boom bap branches into jazz rap and beyond.
— Davood Tavakoli, Cyphlore