Overview
During the 1990s and 2000s, rock musicians began mixing and matching genres to create new sounds and styles. In this lesson, we consider several different rock music hybrids. In the first section, we will look at the music of artists who combined rock instrumentation with rapped lyrics. In the second section, we will look at two artists who drew from rock as well as genres including (but not limited to) hip-hop, experimental music, blues, folk, funk, and classical music.
Objectives
- Recall how the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, and Kid Rock combined the aesthetics of rap and rock in their music
- Recall the eclectic musical styles of Radiohead and Beck in the context of the many different genres they drew upon in their music
Introduction
During the 1990s and 2000s, rock musicians began mixing and matching genres to create new sounds and styles. We have seen musicians blend genres of music before: Bob Dylan added the amplification of rock to the message of folk music in the 1960s, Graham Parson integrated the sounds of country music into rock in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Herbie Hancock melded rock and hip-hop's turntable scratching in 1983's "Rockit ♫." In this lesson, we consider several different rock music hybrids.In the first section, we will look at the music of artists who combined rock instrumentation with rapped lyrics, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, and Kid Rock.
In the second section, we will look at two artists, Radiohead and Beck, who drew from rock as well as genres including (but not limited to) hip-hop, experimental music, blues, folk, funk, and classical music.
“Barriers have been broken: rappers are singing, and singers are rapping. You might catch a rapper on a rock song, a pop artist on a hip-hop song - there are so many different things that are going on today. That is the same way in which we live our lives; we're all over the place. I like to try different things.”
