Rap rock
Rapped. Verses delivered as rap over the riffs.
In short
Rapped vocals over rock riffs. The Run-DMC and Aerosmith collaboration opened the door; Rage turned it into a political weapon.
How it sounds
- Rapped verses over guitar riffs, with drums borrowed from breakbeats.
- DJ scratching or samples built into the arrangement.
- Groove on the downbeat, built for movement rather than speed.
Hear what that means
- Rock records as source material from 4:08
Beastie Boys - Licensed to Ill
Built from rock samples chosen by a hip-hop producer. The genre starts in hip-hop and reaches rock, not the other way round.
Open on YouTube at 4:08 - The moment rock noticed from 9:17
An Aerosmith record chopped and looped. Run-DMC had been rapping over rock for two years before this; 1986 is when rock found out.
Open on YouTube at 9:17 - Where it became a band from 4:02
Rage Against the Machine - Rage Against the Machine
No samples and no turntables - the whole thing played, which is the point at which rap rock stops being a hip-hop production method.
Open on YouTube at 4:02
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Every second here is the uploader's own, read from the recording's tracklist.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 90-130 bpm
- Song length
- 3-4.5 min
- Tuning
- Standard and drop D, with the guitar sampled or looped as often as played — on the founding records it is literally a sample.
- Production
- Built like a hip-hop record: a loop, a break and a vocal, with the rock element supplying the loop rather than the arrangement.
- Written about
- Party and boast, Politics, on the later records, Youth, Genre itself, self-consciously
What each part is doing
- Guitar Frequently a sampled riff rather than a played one — Run-DMC's Walk This Way is an Aerosmith record chopped and looped, which is the genre's founding method.
- Turntables A lead instrument on the founding records, providing the scratching that the rock instrumentation is arranged around.
- Drum machine or break An SP-1200 or a sampled break underneath, with a live kit added rather than replacing it.
- Vocals Rapped, with hip-hop's phrasing and structure intact — the rock element is the accompaniment, not the reverse.
What it isn't
That it began with Aerosmith. Run-DMC had been rapping over rock records for two years before that collaboration, and the Beastie Boys' first album is built from rock samples chosen by a hip-hop producer. The genre starts in hip-hop and reaches rock, not the other way round, and the famous 1986 single is the moment rock noticed rather than the moment it began.
Told apart from
- Rap metal Rap metal uses metal's tuning, distortion and rhythm section. Rap rock is broader and frequently lighter, and predates it by five years.
- Funk rock Funk rock has a singer and takes hip-hop's rhythm. Rap rock has a rapper and takes rock's guitars.
- Nu metal Nu metal descends from this and turned it inward and much heavier.
- Industrial rock Both are constructed from loops and samples rather than performed. Industrial rock's sources are noise and machinery; this one's are rock records.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
In 1986, Run-DMC and Aerosmith remade Walk This Way together and MTV played the video on loop. The Beastie Boys came out of hardcore and arrived at hip-hop. Rage Against the Machine turned the formula into a political weapon and remain the genre's best argument.
Descended from
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Black 'n' roll 1.4 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim. These share no ancestor with it at all.