UK rap

UK rap, also known as British hip hop or UK hip hop or British rap, is a music genre and culture that covers a variety of styles of hip hop music made in the United Kingdom. The development of UK rap was shaped by a distinct set of regional influences, slang, and grassroots movements that differentiated it from American hip hop. It is generally classified as one of a number of styles of R&B/hip-hop. British hip hop can also be referred to as Brit-hop, a term coined and popularised mainly by British Vogue magazine and the BBC. British hip hop was originally influenced by the dub/toasting introduced to the United Kingdom by Jamaican migrants in the 1950s–70s, who eventually developed uniquely influenced rapping (or speed-toasting) in order to match the rhythm of the ever-increasing pace and aggression of Jamaican-influenced dub in the UK. Toasting and soundsystem cultures were also influential in genres outside of hip hop that still included rapping – such as grime, jungle, and UK garage.

In 2003, The Times described British hip hop's broad-ranging approach:

..."UK hip-hop" is a broad sonic church, encompassing anything made in Britain by musicians informed or inspired by hip-hop's possibilities, whose music is a response to the same stimuli that gave birth to rap in New York in the mid-Seventies.

Although the underground scene was well established by the late 1980s, UK rap music saw little commercial success for several decades. Outside of a few exceptions such as Derek B and later the birth of trip-hop, from the 1980s until the early 2010s UK rap made up a small percentage of album sales in the domestic market. Performers saw wider success in the 2020s, including Stormzy headlining Glastonbury Festival, Dave releasing back-to-back UK number one albums with Psychodrama followed by We're All Alone in This Together, and Little Simz winning the Mercury Prize.