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
Rap Meets Rock continued
Another artist who hybridized rock and rap in the 1990s was the Detroit musician Kid Rock. Kid Rock recorded a number of singles, demos, and albums on independent labels, and his musical style during this period was heavily influenced by the Beastie Boys. His first album for a major label was 1998's Devil Without a Cause, which blended the sounds of rock, hip-hop, and, at times, country music and country rock. For example, Kid Rock claimed that his single "Cowboy ♫" was a combination of the sounds of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Run-DMC.
The song blends Kid Rock's rapped lyrics, sampled sounds from psychedelic rock, background vocals and sung choruses that evoke 1960s female Motown groups, honky-tonk piano, and heavily distorted guitars. In addition, "Cowboy ♫" includes the sounds of a jaw harp(sometimes called a Jew’s harp or mouth harp) an instrument that is placed in the mouth and then plucked, creating a “boingy” sound; mostly commonly used in folk and bluegrass music, Kid Rock features the instrument in his song “Cowboy” (sometimes called a Jew's harp or mouth harp), an instrument that is placed in the mouth and then plucked. The "boingy" sound of a jaw harp is commonly found in bluegrass and early country and western music. In "Cowboy ♫" and other early singles, Kid Rock melded the sounds of rap, country rock, and psychedelic rock with occasional splashes of genres such as Motown, heavy metal, and bluegrass.
In the 2000s, Kid Rock largely left rap behind and instead focused on singing the lyrics of his songs. Most of his albums after Devil Without a Cause feature him singing in a country- and country rock-influenced style. The single "Lonely Road of Faith ♫" (2001) is a country rock ballad with piano and guitar accompaniment, and "All Summer Long ♫" (2008) mixed samples of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama ♫," Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London ♫," and Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean ♫." Although the act of sampling reflects Kid Rock's roots in hip-hop, the
music he chose to sample as well as the country rock-inflected style of singing mark "All Summer Long ♫" as a country rock song, not a hip-hop track. In his music, Kid Rock moves seamlessly between genres and disparate as hip-hop and country 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.”
