By Neil James
Spent much time in a metal band, or hung out with metal fans? Here’s something I guarantee you’ve heard before.
“I hate rap music! It doesn’t take any talent to make.”
I could probably pay off my house if I had the proverbial
nickel for each time I’ve heard this statement or its countless variants.
Interestingly, one might think that, given the child-like
ease with which rap songs can allegedly be made, some metal guy out there would have created the best album ever in
the history of rap in his spare time just to prove a point. After all, if Dr.
Dre and Snoop Dogg and their neophyte-level understanding of music can sell
millions of records, just imagine potential commercial dominance were someone capable
of sweep picking through all seven modes at 212 beats per minute to sit in the
producer’s chair.
Yet, for some reason, this has never happened.
Maybe this rap game does require a little bit of talent. And
maybe, this talent resonates on a little different frequency that what your
average metal fan is attenuated to detect.
All of this is somewhat sad, because rap and metal share far
more in common than practitioners of the latter are often willing to
acknowledge.
Yes, rap does not often have guys playing their own
instruments. It does not have blistering guitar solos. It does not have
hair-raising vocal arias. It does not celebrate rhythmic jackhammering through
EMG active pickups.
Ultimately, what rap shares in common with metal can’t be
seen through the mixing console or sheets of tablature. Good rap – classic rap
– 80s rap – was dangerous music.
The greatest threat that shareholder-sanitized metal acts
like Five Finger Death Punch and messianic self-preening artists like Kanye
West have posed to their genres is that they have made people forget that their
genres, at heart, are supposed to be dangerous.
The 80s and early 90s were certainly the golden period for
dangerous metal. Motley Crue’s success was as derived from their excess as
their music. Ozzy’s career was built on his ability to identify guitar players
with iconic potential and his willingness to do things that nobody, even in a
drug-addled state, would do. Guns’N’Roses represented pure non-acknowledgement
of authority and order and personified this attitude in their music.
Interestingly, rap was a little slower on this game, but
experienced a period of unprecedented dangerousness that reached its height in
1992 with “Cop Killer”, finally culminating with the deaths of Tupac Shakur and
Biggie Smalls.
Rap music by its nature had always flirted with these
dangerous elements, but did not see them fully come to fruition until 1988.
In 1986, Slayer released one of metal’s most defining
albums, Reign in Blood. Kerry King
himself states that if this album was released today, nobody would give a shit,
but at the time, this album represented the ultimate in dangerous metal.
While many people consider the album’s lyrical themes and
artwork to define this album’s evil, these were not the only aspects in which Reign in Blood pushed the envelope:
- The album itself clocks in at 29 minutes….an unheard of album length in any era.
- The album is almost entirely devoid of verse-chorus-verse structure.
- As a whole, the album’s average tempo is 210 beats per minute.
- There is little head paid to traditional theory or composition.
But perhaps most interesting, and likely unknown to Slayer
fans, is that following Hell Awaits,
Slayer and their management made the decision to leave Metal Blade Records for
Def Jam Recordings, owned by Russell Simmons of hip-hop fame, and primarily a
rap label. Jeff Hanneman himself was intrigued by Rick Rubin’s interest in the
band and was an admirer of his work with Run DMC and LL Cool J. While Reign in Blood was ultimately released
under American Recordings after Rubin dissolved his partnership with Simmons,
one of thrash’s most seminal recordings owes its existence to a partnership
between hip-hop and metal.
Throughout most of the 80s, rap was edgy, but it wasn’t dangerous.
Public Enemy, despite being legends, were far too intelligent and
cause-oriented to be truly dangerous. Run DMC reshaped the genre in terms of
image and sound, but were a mainstream act at heart. LL Cool J helped establish
the notion of a rap artist as a larger-than-life persona, but wasn’t
necessarily trail-blazing.
The foundation for Reign
in Blood’s lyrical content and artwork was laid by artists such as Black
Sabbath, Judas Priest, Bathory, Venom, Celtic Frost, and even Slayer’s own prior
work. Each of these bands dwelled within the realms of the occult, sometimes as
a metaphor for their perceptions of the world, other times for its own sake. To
that end, Reign in Blood’s success
wasn’t derived from its theme, but rather its visceral execution.
Similarly, N.W.A. wasn’t the first to rap about the
abominable conditions of inner-city life – it was merely the first to do so
through the lens of a YouTube documentarian. N.W.A’s music was entirely
uninterested in how it should be – it was only concerned with how it was.
It is from this perspective that Straight Outta Compton derived its dangerousness. N.W.A.’s lines
about life in South Central Los Angeles were dangerous because, well, life in
South Central Los Angeles was
extremely dangerous.
Consider the following lines:
- “More punks I smoke, yo, my rep gets bigger” – Straight Outta Compton
- “Young nigga got it bad cuz I’m brown and not the other color so police think they have the authority to kill a minority.” – Fuck Tha Police
- “Do I look like a mutha fuckin’ role model? To a kid lookin’ up ta me, life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money.” – Gangsta Gangsta
- “Some musicians curse at home but scared to use profanity when up on the microphone. Yeah, they want reality but you won’t here none. They rather exaggerate, a little fiction. Some say no to drugs and take a stand, but after the show they go lookin’ for the dope man.” – Express Yourself
N.W.A. lyrics were illustrative of life of urban youth in
Compton at the time and shone a light on a slice of American pie that few of
its bakers wanted its customers looking at. In fact, Straight Outta Compton is the only album to have ever been
condemned by the FBI for advocating violence against law enforcement officers.
Straight Outta Compton
and Reign in Blood were both
over-the-top records. To date, there is little evidence that Hanneman, King,
Araya and Lombardo have ever forcefully separated muscle from bone, conducted
rituals aimed at bringing about the return of the Antichrist or sacrificed any
living creatures to satisfy an unholy deity. Similarly, I’m willing to bet that
the actual murder count of Ice T, MC Ren, Eazy E and Dr. Dre is far smaller
than reputed.
While both records were clearly dangerous, each was
dangerous to the establishment in different ways.
For the Republican-driven PMRC, Slayer represented a threat
to Christianity. Their flagrant blasphemy of religious tenets certainly
encouraged immorality among impressionable youth, but perhaps more importantly,
it reduces sacred spiritual bedrocks to comic books. The more bands like Slayer
were allowed to exist, the more youth would view Christianity with the same
reverence that the modern world holds for Zeus and Odin.
NWA posed no such threat to God and Jesus. Rather, Straight Outta Compton represented a
threat to the other holy pillar of the right-wing establishment, capitalism. In the eyes of the
establishment, it’s simply irrational to sell drugs and join a gang. You’re
supposed to work through school, get a degree, and become a productive working
drone whose labors institutionalize the wealth of white collar masters.
Yet, for many youth in South Central, going straight was
simply too difficult to warrant pursuing. You dealt drugs and joined gangs as a
matter of survival and a means to prosperity. You didn’t do it out of some
James Dean Rebel Without a Cause sense.
Straight Outta Compton brought to the
surface that the system wasn’t working – an inconvenient fact for bureaucrats
in power. Worse, Straight Outta Compton
was so visceral, so crisply executed, that its power to galvanize people in the
belief that the system did not serve them that it posed a significant threat to
white people institutions.
In both cases, the impact on their genre was undeniable. Reign in Blood was the holy text that
influenced and continues to influence the genres of black metal, death metal
and thrash metal even today. Similarly, the most defining rap artists and
albums in the 90s, (The Chronic – Dr.
Dre, Doggystyle – Snoop Dogg, Me Against the World – Tupac) owe a
significant debt to Straight Outta
Compton.
How powerful was Straight
Outta Compton? Three of its members (Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Eazy E) are
considered among the most titanic figures in their genre. How many metal bands
featured three individual members whose legacy is looked upon as genre-defining? Pretty darn few.
In all my years, I have never heard rap artists lamenting
the critical success of metal musicians, yet this seems to happen routinely in
the metal community, which is sad. Maybe Slayer fans don’t like Straight Outta Compton based on personal
tastes – that’s fine – but they should absolutely
have an appreciation for it. Serious metal musicians and artists understand
that these divergent genres share much of the same pixie dust that makes their
brand of music special.
Sadly, the marriages between metal and rap have been
predominantly awkward and forced. Only twice have metal and rap artists at the
peak of their powers and artistic credibility collaborated (Anthrax+Public
Enemy, Run DMC+Aerosmith and yes I
realize I’m stretching the definition of metal when I cite Aerosmith.) In both
instances, their collaborations are considered legendary.
But for every Bring
the Noise and Walk This Way,
there are hundreds of rap-metal collaborations whose output is reminiscent of a
dish that combined jellybeans and oysters. Most rap-metal collaborations
involve untalented metal musicians (Limp
Bizkit, Korn) or simply shoehorning a rapper who happens to be friends with
a metal band onto a track (Mudhoney and Sir
Mix-A-Lot), or sometimes both (Linkin
Park and Busta Rhymes).
That said, I think there’s plenty of fertile ground for
awesome rap-metal collaborations to take place. The key is to match
like-sounding artists at the top of their game. Where does this start? Who
knows, but if we had more tracks like this, perhaps the outright dismissal of
rap by metalheads would finally wane.
