Rap metal

• 1. Introduction

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  Rap metal arrived not with a manifesto but with a question nobody had asked yet: what happens when you put a DJ and a shredding guitarist in the same room? The genre fuses hip hop with heavy metal, built on heavy guitar riffs, funk metal grooves, rapped vocals, and sometimes turntables. Its story runs from late-night club experiments in the 1980s through a period of stadium-filling dominance in the late 1990s, and it raises a stranger question than it first appears. How did a form dismissed as a novelty become the best-selling genre of an entire calendar year? And how did a single festival weekend in 1999 turn critical opinion against something that had just conquered the charts?

• 2. Roots and Pioneers

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  In 1987, Anthrax became one of the earliest bands to deliberately combine hip hop and heavy metal, releasing an extended play called I'm the Man. The following year, rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot collaborated with the metal band Metal Church on the 1988 single "Iron Man", drawn loosely from the Black Sabbath song of the same name, featured on his debut album Swass. Both hip hop acts who sampled metal and rock bands who absorbed hip hop were feeding the same emerging current. Beastie Boys, Cypress Hill, Esham, and Run-DMC were among the hip hop side; Faith No More and 24-7 Spyz were among the rock side.

  Ministry brought the genre into industrial territory on their 1989 album The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste, on a track called "Test" for which they hired two vocalists credited as The Grand Wizard (K. Lite) and The Slogan God (Tommie Boyskee). Stuck Mojo and Clawfinger, both formed in 1989, are counted among the genre's early pioneers as well. Ice-T formed a heavy metal group called Body Count in 1990, and at the 1991 Lollapalooza tour, Body Count performed a set that split evenly between rap songs and metal songs. That same year, Anthrax joined forces with Public Enemy for a remake of "Bring the Noise" that set hip hop against thrash metal. Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian, who helped shape the genre, has said he believes Rage Against the Machine actually invented it.

• 3. Chart Ascent

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  Faith No More's song "Epic" gave rap metal its first significant pop foothold, peaking at number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Judgment Night soundtrack in 1993 broadened the genre's reach by pairing rappers directly with rock and metal acts in a series of collaborations. Rage Against the Machine's 1996 album Evil Empire entered the Billboard 200 at number one, and their 1999 third studio album The Battle of Los Angeles also debuted at number one, selling 430,000 copies in its first week. Every album the band released reached at least platinum certification.

  Kid Rock's trajectory from regional curiosity to national star captures the improbable pace of the genre's rise. Atlantic released his album Devil Without a Cause on the 18th of August 1998, initially to slow sales. A performance at the 1998 Warped Tour in Northampton, Massachusetts generated regional radio airplay on WZLX and WAAF through that summer and fall. In early December 1998, while working as a DJ at a club, he met MTV host Carson Daly and talked his way onto the network. On the 28th of December 1998, he performed on MTV Fashionably Loud in Miami, Florida, upstaging Jay-Z at the event. By April 1999, Devil Without a Cause had reached gold certification; the following month it went platinum. His single "Only God Knows Why" charted at number 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 and is noted as one of the first songs to use the autotune effect. By the time the album's final single "Wasting Time" was released, the album had sold 7 million copies. The RIAA certified it 11 times platinum on the 17th of April 2003, and Nielsen SoundScan figures from 2013 place actual sales at 9.3 million. Kid Rock was nominated for Best New Artist at the 2000 Grammy Awards, losing to Christina Aguilera, and was nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance for "Bawitdaba", losing to Metallica's "Whiskey in the Jar".

• 4. Peak and Backlash

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  The Port Huron Times-Herald described the summer of 1999 as a "bipolar menu of harsh rap-metal and gooey teen pop," capturing the moment when the genre sat at its widest commercial reach. Limp Bizkit's 1999 album Significant Other climbed to number 1 on the Billboard 200, selling 643,874 copies in its first week, with an additional 335,000 copies sold in the second week. Their follow-up album, Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water, broke the record for highest week-one sales for a rock album, selling over one million copies in the United States in its first week, with 400,000 of those sold on the first day alone. That record had previously been held for seven years by Pearl Jam's Vs.

  Linkin Park released their debut album Hybrid Theory late in 2000, and it remains both the best-selling debut album by any artist in the 21st century and the best-selling nu metal album of all time. It was also the best-selling album across all genres in 2001, outselling releases by Backstreet Boys and N'Sync. The band won a Grammy Award for their second single "Crawling", and their fourth single "In the End" became one of the most recognized songs of the first decade of the 21st century.

  The criticism that had been building against the genre crystallized around the Woodstock 1999 festival, which featured Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, Rage Against the Machine, and Reveille among others. Pop punk musician Jeff Brogowski told The Morning Call newspaper in 1999 that the rap-metal bands seemed "just so mean-spirited," pointing to the violence, looting, and fires at Woodstock as evidence of something disturbing in the music's atmosphere. Crazy Town's single "Butterfly", from their 1999 album The Gift of Game, reached number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 during March 2001 and remained on the chart for 23 weeks, a commercial peak that arrived just as critical disdain was deepening.

• 5. Cross-Genre Experiments

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  Cypress Hill moved directly into metal territory on their 2000 album Skull & Bones, which featured six tracks where rappers B-Real and Sen Dog were backed by a band that included Fear Factory members Christian Olde Wolbers and Dino Cazares alongside Rage Against the Machine drummer Brad Wilk. B-Real also formed a separate rap metal group called Kush with Wolbers, Fear Factory drummer Raymond Herrera, and Deftones guitarist Stephen Carpenter. B-Real has described Kush as more aggressive than other bands in the genre. Ice Cube's 1998 album War & Peace Vol. 1 (The War Disc) incorporated nu metal and rap metal elements across some of its tracks, including a feature from Korn; it debuted at number 7 on the Billboard 200, selling 180,000 copies in its first week.

  P.O.D.'s 1999 album The Fundamental Elements of Southtown went platinum in 2000 and ranked as the 143rd best-selling album of that year. Their follow-up Satellite, released in 2001, went triple platinum and peaked at number 6 on the Billboard 200. Papa Roach's major label debut Infest from 2000 became a platinum hit and eventually sold over 3 million copies worldwide, making it the band's most commercially successful album. Saliva's Every Six Seconds debuted at number 6 on the Billboard 200 in 2001. Sen Dog, also of Cypress Hill, had founded SX-10 in 1996, a group that performs rap rock and rap metal. Spanish progressive rock band Proyecto Eskhata, which debuted in 2012, drew press attention in Spain for blending progressive rock with rap metal in what journalists described as "progressive rap metal."

• 6. The Genres It Shaped

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  Nu metal, also known as nü-metal and aggro-metal, pulled from rap metal's template and extended it by absorbing additional influences from alternative metal, funk, industrial, and groove metal. Trap metal grew from a different angle, combining trap music's rhythms with elements drawn from metal and hardcore punk, and is also known by the names ragecore, death rap, hardcore trap, industrial trap, and scream rap. It is built on distorted beats, hip hop flows, harsh vocals, and in some cases guitar riffs that are sampled, synthesized, or played live.

  Bones has been recognized by Kerrang! as one of the earliest practitioners of trap metal, releasing tracks that fit the genre beginning around 2014. WQHT described OG Maco's 2014 eponymous EP as part of the genre's early development. British rapper Scarlxrd is widely considered a pioneer of trap metal. Artists including Dropout Kings, Bone Crew, Ghostemane, ZillaKami, Fever 333, Ho99o9, City Morgue, Kim Dracula, Backxwash, Denzel Curry, and $uicideboy$ have all been associated with the genre, along with the early careers of XXXTentacion, 6ix9ine, and Ski Mask the Slump God. Within trap metal itself, stylistic ranges are wide: City Morgue and Ho99o9 lean into hardcore punk, while Ghostemane draws from gothic rock, industrial metal, black metal, and emo.