These days, I love hip-hop and metal in almost equal measure, but if you went back in time 3-5 years ago and told me that that will be the case in my near future, I'd tell you that you're fucking crazy and smack you across the face with my leather and stud encrusted arm.
I hated rap. It was the bane of my fucking miserable existence and I openly declared my strong distaste for it, often to the dissatisfaction of my peers who sometimes threatened to kick my ass just for making fun of Lil Wayne, who I still think sucks even though I'm a big hip-hop fan now. The problem was that I was ignorant. I was basing my hatred of hip-hop on how terrible mainstream rap was at the time: a lot of Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, the incredibly awful Soulja Boy, and those little skinny jean bastards (New Boyz), also, the dreadfully boring Drake was just coming out at the time as well. It took a little bit of the old (Wu-Tang, Beastie Boys) and a little bit of the new (MF DOOM, Odd Future) to make me realize that hip-hop was a viable genre of music that was worthy of being added to my quickly growing collection of music. I now have about 70 hip-hop albums in said collection and more are on the way, as in coming by mail to my house right now (OutKast's Aquemini and Goodie Mob's Soul Food.)
Still, metal is my favorite music of all and that isn't going to change anytime soon, but this leads to today's question: can metal and hip-hop be friends? Or can metal and hip-hop mix together? First of all, liking metal and hip-hop should not be the cause of conflict within the listener. If you stand by the guitar crunch of metal, there should be no shame in liking the bass booms hip-hop as well, and you shouldn't debate with yourself about which style you should or shouldn't like more than the other, that's just ridiculous. Since there is no problem with liking the two genres together, what about the two genres mixing to create a hybrid of the two styles? As we all know, this has happened many, many times before, sometimes to impressive effect, and most of the time to an effect so disastrous that the results were just too damn slimy, stinky, and repulsive for anyone to do anything about. Of course, I'm talking about nu-metal monstrosities like Papa Roach, Coal Chamber and the kings of bad, Limp Bizkit.
Instead of uselessly pointing to all the flaws inherent in that reviled style - the clunky down-tuned guitars, flabby bass, feeble rapping, and angsty screaming - lets avoid that and look at the success stories of rap-metal fusion. In my opinion, there are only about two or three of those in total. You have Aerosmith's landmark collaboration with Run DMC in 1986, and then you have Rage Against the Machine...and that's about it. Anthrax's attempts at rap metal were cringe-inducing, and Faith No More's song "Epic" was admittingly pretty epic, but the rapping on the track was basic at best, in short, it wasn't so much of a hip-hop feat as it was a hard rock one. Rage, in my opinion, was the single biggest achievement in rap metal fusion. They had the heaviest riffs around, they were all fantastic musicians, and Zach De La Rocha is one hell of a rapper; he just sounds hungry and on fire most of the goddamned time, just waiting to break the fuck out of his cage and tear you to bits. Their music makes you bang your head AND throw up wiggery arm gestures at the same time.
So Rage taught us how to do rap metal right, so what's the future for rap metal? Honestly, I hope there is none. One band got it right, and the entire genre that came after it was so god-awful that it could make you un-like music entirely if you're exposed to it for too long. Let's put it to rest. Let's remember the good times, and lets never go back to it.
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