Finish The Lyric: The R&B Quiz That Doesn't Let You Cheat

There is a difference between recognising a song and knowing a song.

Recognising it means you know who made it, roughly when it was released, and that you like it. Knowing it means the next line is already in your head before the current line finishes. It means you have sung this song, quietly or loudly, in a car or a kitchen or a party in Oslo, enough times that the words are stored somewhere below the level of active thought.

Finish The Lyric is built for the second kind of knowing.

How It Works

The quiz cuts the hook off. Not at a natural pause — right in the middle. Right where the song is about to go somewhere you know by heart.

You fill in what comes next.

There are no multiple choice options. Either you know the lyric or you don't. Either you can hold the melody in your head and find the words that go with it, or you're going to stare at a blank field and realise you knew less than you thought.

This is what makes it different from trivia apps. Trivia tests knowledge about music. Finish The Lyric tests knowledge of music. The distinction is everything.

The Modes

90s Era — Boyz II Men. TLC. Aaliyah. Mariah Carey. Mary J. Blige. The songs that ran every house party in Oslo from 1994 to 2002. If you were in your late teens and twenties during those years, these lyrics are in your body the way muscle memory is in your hands.

2000s Era — Usher's Confessions. Beyoncé's "Crazy in Love." Alicia Keys. Ne-Yo. The Neptunes. The decade where R&B got its biggest budgets and its most durable singles. If you know the exact moment Usher's voice drops on "Burn," this is the mode you want.

Contemporary — SZA. H.E.R. Brent Faiyaz. Giveon. The current generation of R&B and R&B-adjacent artists who have been making the genre evolve in real time. Harder than the era modes for most players. Easier if you've been paying close attention.

Mixed — All eras, random order. The mode for people who do not believe in comfort zones.

Streaks and the Leaderboard

Daily challenges reset at midnight. Every day there is a new set of lyrics, and every day the leaderboard resets.

Streaks track how many consecutive days you have completed the challenge. This is where the social dimension of the quiz lives: the people in Oslo's R&B community who are maintaining thirty-day streaks are not casual listeners. They are the ones who have known these songs long enough that the quiz has become a daily ritual rather than a test.

The leaderboard shows you where you stand. Against the day's players. Against the week. Against everyone who has ever played.

The 90s die-hard and the contemporary-only listener are going to have different experiences on the same quiz. That is the point. The era modes exist because knowing R&B is not one kind of knowledge — it is several kinds, and the leaderboard reflects that.

The Culture Proof

R&B has always had a gatekeeping mechanism: you either know the culture or you don't, and the culture will find out immediately if you're pretending.

This is not exclusion for its own sake. It is the natural result of a music that has accumulated meaning across decades of use — at parties, at gatherings, at late nights and early mornings, in Oslo apartments and cars and venues. The people who have been present for that accumulation know the songs the way you know the people you have spent real time with.

Finish The Lyric is the version of that mechanism that you can carry on your phone.

It is also — and this is the part that matters for a community rather than just a competition — a way to find the other people who know. The leaderboard makes visible the Oslo listeners who have been carrying these songs for twenty years. The streaks make visible the people who show up every day.

Start Playing

Take the quiz →

There is a 90s mode, a 2000s mode, a contemporary mode, and a daily challenge. Start wherever the years land for you. The leaderboard will tell you how you did.

The Score That Matters

There is a score that the quiz tracks — correct answers, streaks, leaderboard position. That score matters because competition is interesting and because it tells you something real about how much you know.

But the more interesting score is the one you keep privately: the songs where you got the lyric immediately, without thinking, because the words have been stored somewhere beneath language for longer than you can account for. Those are the songs that made you who you are as a listener. The quiz just makes them visible.

Read more on R&B Vault: 90s R&B — The Golden Era · 2000s R&B — The Sound That Ran a Decade · Oslo's R&B Scene Guide