Kevin Durant was perplexed when hip-hop music started thumping through the sound system at his first Warriors practice in September 2016. It was quite the contrast from his workouts with Oklahoma City, where the bounce of balls and the squeak of sneakers comprised most of the background noise.

“Is that the norm around here?” Durant asked Golden State assistant coach Mike Brown. “I’m not used to this.”

It wasn’t long before Durant came to appreciate the tunes — everything from rap to reggae to soul to electronica — blared during the team’s stretches, drills and individual work. Music at practices and shootarounds might seem trivial, but the Warriors view it as a fundamental part of the organization’s easygoing culture.

When Steve Kerr became Golden State’s head coach in May 2014, he mapped out four core values — joy, mindfulness, compassion and competition — that would guide his tenure. The presence of music at workouts helps prepare players for in-game distractions and provides a jolt of energy, but it also serves that first core value.

“More than anything, I think the guys enjoy it,” Kerr said. “The coaches enjoy it, too, so we do it.”

During a 15-year NBA playing career that included five championships (three with the Bulls, two with the Spurs), Kerr knew practice as a period for focused, diligent work. Music, a staple of players’ offseason workouts, stopped by the time training camp arrived.

Two months before his first camp with the Warriors, Kerr — a first-time coach — shadowed a Seattle Seahawks practice and saw players rapping along to hip-hop music. The beats, piped loudly through an on-field sound system, seemed to add to the workout rather than interfere with it.

After several weeks installing his offensive and defensive systems, Kerr began to make music a staple of Golden State’s routine. What he found was that players started to think about practice less as a perfunctory requirement to play in the games, and more as an extension of their own workouts.

During Kerr’s first two seasons, Nick U’Ren, then special assistant to the head coach and manager of advanced scouting, was the team’s resident DJ. Last season, with his other day-to-day duties piling up, U’Ren delegated his music responsibilities to video coordinator James Laughlin and assistant video coordinator Khalid Robinson.

“You’ve got to have young guys,” Kerr said. “Otherwise, guys like me are going to play Hall & Oates or something.”

Robinson, who started traveling with the team full-time after he was promoted to Kerr’s special assistant in September, is now the Warriors’ sole purveyor of tunes. It’s a role he takes seriously. During home stands, Robinson spends roughly 15-20 minutes the night before a practice or shootaround carefully crafting Spotify playlists (his go-to is an Oakland-themed list featuring East Bay artists such as E-40, Too $hort and Keak Da Sneak).

It takes him considerably longer on the road.

Robinson, a Harlem, N.Y., native who grew up listening to The Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z, tries to cater his music to the cities Golden State visits. During the Warriors’ recent trip, he bumped hometown artists at each stop: Kendrick Lamar and Dr. Dre in Los Angeles, Wale and Shy Glizzy in Washington, D.C., New Edition in Boston, and the Jackson 5 (Gary, Ind.) in Indianapolis.

There is a method to how Robinson orders his playlists. When players are stretching and warming up at the start of practice, he cues up slow jams or throwback R&B. Then, once the team transitions to up-tempo drills and scrimmaging, Robinson plays faster, bass-heavy hip-hop. The music stops only when coaches are instructing on a play, scheme or game plan.

Robinson’s DJ duties force him to stay up on current events. After he surprised some by playing a ballad at shootaround Thursday, he explained to players that it was “Just Once” by James Ingram, a popular R&B singer of the 1980s and ’90s who died two days earlier from brain cancer at 66.

For crowd-pleasers, Robinson keeps a pulse on the newest hip-hop. The latest albums from J. Cole, Future and Migos have all been played in their entirety.

Robinson is open to suggestions from players.

Retired big man David West, a Teaneck, N.J., native who attended high school outside Raleigh, N.C., wanted to hear at least one East Coast song per day. Former center Zaza Pachulia preferred electronic dance music from the likes of Avicii and Swedish House Mafia. The team’s two most volatile players, Draymond Green and DeMarcus Cousins, like to unwind to Luther Vandross, Aretha Franklin and the Temptations.

“I’ve got to ease my mind sometimes,” Cousins said. “Don’t get me wrong: I’m a hip-hop guy, but I’ve got to slow it down some days.”

Unlike most players who haven’t been with Golden State since the start of the Kerr era, Cousins was hardly surprised by what he heard when he arrived at his first practice.

His last team — the Pelicans, who are coached by former Kerr assistant Alvin Gentry — also made music a key part of their culture. It is no coincidence that the only other franchise to regularly blare tunes at practices and shootarounds is the Lakers, who are led by another ex-Kerr assistant, Luke Walton.

“You want to get work done and get better that day, but you also want to have fun with it,” Robinson said. “The music plays a role in that.”

Connor Letourneau is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cletourneau@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Con_Chron