slap

Generally, slap means “to strike sharply with an open hand” or refers to such a hard blow so delivered. But what could this action have to do with groovy tunes?

Well, consider this: we call an extremely successful song a smash hit. And a song that we personally love? It’s our jam. Smash hit, jam, slaps—these terms, and many more, use direct, smack-dab force, contact, and motion as metaphors for excellence.

As for slap itself, the association of the word slap with great qualities isn’t brand spanking new, exactly. It was an adjective for “first-rate” in the mid-1800s and an adverb, meaning “excellently,” even earlier, in the mid-1700s.

Slap appears to start getting applied to music, specifically, by at least the early 2000s. Now, the origin of slang, especially successful and widespread slang terms like slap, are indeed hard to pin down, but the musical slap is often credited to Bay Area hip-hop slang. (Hyphy, anyone?) It was first entered into Urban Dictionary in 2004.

So, a song that slaps is one that has a prominent beat, perhaps as if its deep bass metaphorically slaps you in the face—or makes the speakers of your stereo thump when it’s cranked up nice and loud, so much so that it makes you slap the roof of your car in excitement. The slang slap also calls up slap bass, a style of playing the bass guitar, especially in funk music, where the strings are slapped and plucked for a punchy effect.

The electronic music and news website This Song Slaps—whose tagline is a slap-tacular “Bringing Bass to Your Face”—was launched in 2015. Thanks to social media and the influence of hip-hop in popular culture, slaps became a part of the mainstream vernacular in the late 2010s.