Serbian hip hop started in the early 80's, with the birth of b-boy crews and their battles which have spread over the country in no time. The first sound recording of the Serbian hip hop is the Degout EP by the band named The Master Scratch Band, which was released through Jugoton in the year 1984. - 5-tracker presenting b-boy electro-breakbeat tracks with a bit of rapping. In the late 80's, bands such are Budweiser, Green Kool Posse, Who Is The Best and Robin Hood started the first demo scene. The music spread slowly until 1995, when the first significant album was released: Da li imaš pravo? by Gru. This release marked the beginning of the first wave of Serbian hip hop, which reached its peak in 1997-98, when many new groups started to break out from the underground: Voodoo Popeye, Full Moon, Straight Jackin, Sunshine, Bad Copy, Belgrade Ghetto, CYA, 187. Monteniggers, from Montenegro (at the time in a union with Serbia), were another popular rap group. Just as the scene was taking off, the flood of new talent slowed to a trickle, probably due to the economic effects of the Kosovo War of 1999, which resulted in only a few hip hop albums released in 1999-2001. However, in 2002 the silence was shown to be temporary with the founding of the Bassivity label, which made Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian hip hop widely available in record stores. Their first release, V.I.P. - Ekipa Stigla, was one of the two albums which marked the beginning of the second wave of Serbian hip hop. The other was BSSST...Tišinčina by the Belgrade group Beogradski Sindikat. The same group also released the highly controversial political single Govedina in late 2002, which greatly aided the popularisation of hip hop in Serbia.
Since 2002, Bassivity Music has released many more records and Beogradski Sindikat have followed up their debut with 2005's Svi Zajedno, having founded their own label, Prohibicija, due to their dissatisfaction with Automatik Records. One of the group's members, Škabo, has also released several solo albums.
