Rap Everything
A couple days ago I watched a competition show on YouTube called NO COVER, which hosts new and unsigned artists at the Troubadour in Los Angeles and pits them against each other for a chance to win life-changing prizes such as record deals or management contracts. They compete by performing live in front of judges which include Alice Cooper, Lzzy Hale, Tosin Abasi (from Animals as Leaders) and Gavin Rossdale (from Bush).
The premise is sort of like American Idol except that these artists play original music and instead of the guarantee to be America’s next most famous person, what they’re competing for is a helping hand to get them into the studio or touring all over.
The episode that I watched featured a few different artists ranging from a singer-songwriter named Loveless, who sang high notes and played an acoustic guitar; to a pop singer named Tillie, whose lyrics were straight out of a diary; to a very energetic heavy metal band called Slay Squad.
While every artist that performed was unique in their way, what made Slay Squad so much more unique was that it was essentially a heavy metal band with two frontmen rapping. Now, I’m not going to say that it was the greatest performance I’ve ever heard, but it was definitely distinguishable in that it combined two different genres of music that share in common something non-music related.
Even though combining two genres of music isn’t anything new or necessarily special, knowing what to combine is what requires consideration.
A closer look
Rap oozes energy
If you’ve listened to rap music, especially old-school rap, you’d know that it is in-your-face, loud and alive. Rap, a subset of hip-hop culture, is full of raw energy that empowers the artist as well as those who listen. With its origins in New York City in the late 1970s, rap/hip-hop was a form of expression that made itself be heard. With loud beats and lyrics that caught attention, it’s no wonder that rap music took off the way it did.
Similarly, heavy metal music is also loud and in-your-face. But while neither genre particularly sound alike, they do share in the energy that they produce. While rap/hip-hop music generally deals with the frustration of the difficulties of day-to-day life, heavy metal music in contrast deals with the anger of oftentimes being misunderstood. That’s great news for the performers of
each genre as it allows them to release pent-up energy. This is why rap/hip-hop and heavy metal can be paired together organically.
Other genres
Watching Slay Squad perform and mix rap and heavy metal (djent even), made me realize that rap is in everything nowadays.
Since as early as the 1980s rap music has been alongside rock music, with some early examples including Blondie’s “Rapture” and Run-DMC’s “Walk This Way,” which featured Aerosmith.
Certainly, there have even been complete genres of music created from rap/hip-hop influencing rock. One of the easiest to think about is nu-metal, which was really popular in the mid-1990s to early-2000s. This genre was known for mixing metal with hip-hop beats and even some rapping. Some bands include Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Korn and Rage Against the Machine to name a few.
Thinking about rap and rock music made me curious to do some light research as to what else is being mixed and quite unexpectedly I came across a new genre of music that is known as country rap. Little did I know it has history dating back to the 1960s crediting spoken blues as an influence. Modern country rap as we know it however, can be traced back to Kid Rock’s “Cowboy.” A subgenre of country rap is country trap which was made famous by Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” which features country themes and even Billy Ray Cyrus.
On a related note, the genre of banda music has also started to incorporate rap/hip-hop as Snoop Dogg was featured in their 2020 song “Que Maldicion.”
Why?
When we think about why rap/hip-hop would be incorporated into other genres of music we can come up with a couple different reasons.
It’s popular
Without a doubt the genre of music that is most popular right now is rap/hip-hop. It’s what’s on the radio, in the movies and pretty much everywhere else. It’s funny because even in films set in different eras, there is rap/hip-hop in them, and even though it detracts from the authenticity of the movie experience, it’s somewhat understandable that that genre of music would be used. In action movies set in the past, rap/hip-hop playing in the action scenes add more excitement than if they stuck with music of that era.
When artists add rapping to their music, they put more thought into it. Apart from coming up with words that rhyme, they also try to incorporate story-telling. All this means that the words in a song run a higher chance of being recognized and remembered by the listener. How often does someone listen to rock music and not even know what the song is about? When artists take the time to focus their lyrics just as much as their instrumentation, then it has the potential to create a very well-rounded song.
Final thoughts
It’s strange that Slay Squad triggered me to do some research into rap/hip-hop in other genres of music. I had always known that nu-metal existed, but the difference in Slay Squad is that they didn’t use hip-hop beats; it was a full-on metal band almost completely removed from hip-hop except for the energy and rapping. It’s interesting when you realize that rap/hip-hop is everywhere, it’s a genre that caught on and it’s for good reason.