Rebels With a Cause: The Complex Relationship Between Rap and Rock Music
While alternative rock and hip hop might be at polar ends of the musical spectrum, the genres have formed a symbiotic relationship over the decades, highlighting and bridging longstanding cultural gaps.
Written by Myah Taylor
Photo courtesy of Complex
In 2010, Young Money protégés Drake and Nicki Minaj ascended to the top of the rap game with Thank Me Later and Pink Friday, respectively. Meanwhile, their mentor Lil Wayne, of “Lollipop” fame, had just released a rock album. Rather than continue competing with other rap artists, Wayne decided to turn to his alt-rock inspirations — Fall Out Boy, Blink-182, and others — on his 2010 rap-rock LP Rebirth, raising eyebrows in the process.
Notable single “Knockout,” a collaboration with Minaj, leans on pop-punk inclinations: climbing guitar melodies, spunky drums, and power chords galore. However, neither artist forgets their rap roots — autotune is still Wayne’s friend, and Minaj delivers a punchy rap verse after a guitar bridge that parallels the main melody in Kings of Leon’s “Use Somebody.” “Knockout” and other songs from Rebirth, such as the grungy “Prom Queen,” are attention grabbing and incredibly ironic.
Yes, Wayne, a Nirvana fan, had dipped his toes into the rock genre before, mostly with lyrical references to rock culture staples like skateboarding. However, no one anticipated that he would ever play a guitar or that he actually skateboarded himself. Wayne’s embrace of rock music as a tenured rap star was a sight previously unseen, contradicting the racial and cultural stereotypes that have become intertwined with music. For the record, Rebirth wasn’t a good album — it’s incoherent and grating — but not because Wayne crossed over and broke boundaries. He gets a gold star for that.
Rap music, a perceived “Black” artform, and rock music, an artform appropriated by white people, may be sonically different, but the two are kindred spirits in terms of energy and purpose. Wayne’s experimentation may not make much sense from a musical standpoint, but it does when considering aesthetic. To reference “Knockout” again, Minaj’s wig in the video parallels a Hayley Williams dye job, and Wayne is just as animated as a rock frontman. Rappers and rockers alike embrace eccentricity and the unconventional, as each genre makes room for theatrics. Both are loud and provocative — visually and thematically.
From a cultural lens, rap and rock similarly began as something to be feared: each genre began in the Black community, “threatening” white suburban parents. Because of this, both genres have been adopted by rebellious youth aiming to uproot the establishment. The Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” and Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” are, in many ways, cut from the same cloth, although one is a form of “white” rebellion and the other “Black.” Additionally, rock music’s playfulness, highlighted by acts like the aforementioned Blink-182 (“What’s My Age Again?”), parallels rap’s clever word play and humor, as shown in songs such as “My Name Is” and “The Real Slim Shady” by Eminem and “Ms. Jackson” by Outkast.
In the 1980s, the rap-rock group Beastie Boys, formerly a hardcore punk band, rocked the hip hop world with their wild take on the genre, but their music mainly reached a white audience who appreciated their rock sensibilities. They would predate other funk rock and rap-rock acts such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and much later, Limp Bizkit. However, it wasn’t until 1986 that rap and rock music truly intersected in a more significant way with the release of hip hop group Run-DMC’s cover of the hard rock band Aerosmith’s 1975 single “Walk This Way.” The New York City rappers didn’t just take on the cover themselves, though — they invited Aerosmith’s lead singer Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry along to reimagine their song.
Intentionally or otherwise, even a few elements of Aerosmtih’s original “Walk This Way” take a page from the rap catalogue: the song begins with a hip-hop sounding drum beat before falling underneath a funky guitar riff, and, in its own way, Tyler’s delivery of the verses edges on rapping. Run-DMC ultimately didn’t change much with their take on the song, inserting record scratches and their own verses between Tyler’s belting and Perry’s dirty guitar.
The collaboration was a win-win for both parties, with the cover charting higher than its original up to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming a hit around the globe, and earning numerous accolades. Run-DMC’s “Walk This Way” revived Aerosmith’s declining career, popularized hip hop, and tore down cultural barriers as a pioneering track of the rap-rock genre. The “Walk This Way” video symbolizes this historic merger between the musical (and racial) cultures, depicting a battle between neighboring music studios separated by a wall that Tyler breaks down before joining Run-DMC on stage for a joint performance.
To an extent, the “Walk This Way” collaboration acted as a loose form of allyship on Aerosmith’s part. By the 1980s, rock music — more suburban, signifying white rebellion — had become more culturally acceptable since the moral panic of the ‘50s. Hip hop, the sound of Black rebellion — filled with tales of police brutality, gang violence, and stands against systemic racism — was still under scrutiny. Run-DMC needed Aerosmith as much as the aging rockers needed them, albeit for different reasons.
The next rap-rock collab that would pack the same amount of punch and cultural significance came in 2004 when Linkin Park, a nu-metal band that already incorporated hip hop into its sound, mashed its song “Numb” with rapper Jay-Z’s track “Encore” as a part of the two acts’ mashup EP, Collision Course. “Numb/Encore” (very creative) wasn't a rap song or a rock song, for white or Black audiences, specifically, but it was music that reached numerous demographics.
Rappers found success in sampling rock songs throughout the 2000s, from Eminem’s use of Aerosmith’s “Dream On” in “Sing for the Moment” to Jay-Z’s use of Billy Squier’s “The Big Beat” and Mountain’s “Long Red” in “99 Problems”. By 2010, when Wayne released Rebirth, the genres swapped places, as rock music became less popular and hip hop took center stage to start the new decade. This role reversal resulted in more alt-rock acts like Twenty One Pilots and Fall Out Boy incorporating rhymes and hip hop beats into their music. Meanwhile, the hip hop genre had taken a trap route, while adopting a rock aesthetic and attitude — more colorful dye jobs and emotion, more singing and experimentation (think Lil Uzi Vert and Travis Scott).
Photo courtesy of The Guardian
Post Malone, who rose to prominence in the late 2010s, embodies this fusion of genres and perspectives — and it’s not because of his “rockstar'' collaboration with 21 Savage. Before he jumped over to (and capitalized on) the hip hop genre, Post rocked out in an unsigned metalcore band called Ashley’s Arrival. Post’s transition isn’t so far fetched — sex, drugs, and rock & roll apply to rap music too. Citing rock acts like Kurt Cobain and John Lennon as inspirations, Post looks every bit the “rockstar” — he’s simply one who dabbles in trap beats and wears grills.
Of course, racial undertones exist underneath the relationship between rock and hip hop music, separating the two genres in the same way charts historically segregated music. It shouldn’t go unnoticed that rap only became more culturally acceptable when the Beastie Boys took it on, when Eminem blew up, and when Post Malone appealed to white suburbanites. The same thing happened years earlier with rock music, when white musicians covered songs by Black soul and R&B artists and experienced much more success than the original creators. That is to say, rap artists, mostly Black individuals, have been rockstars since the beginning; society has just told them they can’t be. This exclusion is where the irony of Wayne’s affinity for rock music comes in: cultural stereotypes led people to believe Wayne was trying something new when he created a rock album, stepping out of his lane. However, the rapper was merely returning to his storied roots, knocking down the box the industry put him in and heading straight to the skate park.