The post-1980s heavy metal and hip hop: rap metal!

Rap-metal is a genre that fuses hardcore rap with heavy metal. It became one of the most famous genre of the ‘90s, sticking its head out of the heavy metal scene during those years. Since 1986 there were attempts to mix rap and hard-rock guitars, like the collaboration between Aerosmith and Run-DMC for the remake of the former’s famous song Walk This Way, which Run-DMC included in the record Raising Hell.

The Beastie Boys, with their record Licensed to Ill, represent another excellent and very peculiar example of the genre. The collaborations spread among this new music scene, ranging from Public Enemy and Slayer in the record It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back where Slayer’s guitar were sampled. The comic Anthrax single I’m the Man marked the official beginning of the genre, in 1987. The song combined heavy guitar riffs (actually, the riffs came from the song Hava Nagila) with rapping.

RHCP and Faith no More started experimenting with this new sound, too. In the ‘90s, another Anthrax song Bring the Noise, a cover of a Public Enemy song (featuring some elements of Public Enemy), is considered as a milestone of the genre. Many of these bands decided to focus on the use of shouted lyrics to convey their feeling of urban decay and violence, avoiding too much melodic study and typical rapping devices, with the exception of the Rage Against the Machine. In the second half of the decade, many bands started to mix alternative metal elements and MC’s singing about juvenile humor and introspective angst.

The genre was further experimented by the rapper Ice-T, who founded the band Body Count, drawing inspiration from the Black Sabbath and the heavy metal. Some bands like Korn just included in their songs hip-hop rhythms (the rap-metal band has a rapper as frontman), but other bands contributed to the development of the genre, like Deftones, Limp Bizkit, P.O.D. and, recently, Hollywood Undead.