R&B has been tussling with hip-hop for around three decades, and depending what lens you’re looking through, has been either roundly defeated or sneakily triumphant.

As hip-hop rose to prominence in the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, it began to view R&B as a partner, sometimes willing, and sometimes not. There were collaborations between rappers and singers, devised to bridge the culture and generation gaps (think Jody Watley and Rakim). And hip-hop aggressively borrowed soul melodies via sampling, as exemplified by Bad Boy Records. But by the turn of the century, as hip-hop officially took its place at the center of pop innovation and mainstream dominance, R&B began to feel like a footnote. Young stars like Trey Songz and Ashanti aligned themselves with hip-hop, a strategy of survival but not of confidence. Ultimately, it reduced the R&B — once the center of black social and political culture, and the conduit that brought the energy of sacred music into the secular realm — to an accent.

In the mid-to-late 2000s, singing became a full-fledged part of hip-hop, owing to the success of Drake, one of the first stars — Lauryn Hill got there earlier — who toggled cleanly between rapping and singing and understood them as variations of each other, not oppositional forces. Rappers are singers now, to the point where the framework of singing has been refracted almost wholly through the needs of hip-hop. Post Malone is a singer. Swae Lee is a singer. Young Thug is a singer. Quavo is a singer. And to varying degrees, they’ve imbibed lessons from R&B. Finding someone who solely raps, in the classical sense, in the mainstream is becoming increasingly rare.

Not all hip-hop singers are mining R&B traditions; Juice WRLD works in a style derived from pop-punk, as did XXXTentacion. But if R&B was a bit player a decade ago, it has at times felt like a ghost in the years since.