Rap metal
Rapped. Verses delivered as rap over the riffs.
In short
Rapped vocals over metal riffs, built around groove and a shouted chorus.
How it sounds
- Rapped verses over metal riffs, with the groove on the downbeat.
- DJ scratching, or guitar effects imitating scratching.
- Shouted choruses built for large venues.
Hear what that means
- A guitar imitating a turntable
Rage Against the Machine - Evil Empire
Killswitch, harmonics and a pickup toggle used to make a guitar scratch. Morello's whole technique is an attempt at a hip-hop instrument.
Open on YouTube - A funk rhythm section from 3:29
Rage Against the Machine - The Battle of Los Angeles
The bass plays funk lines rather than doubling the guitar, which is why this grooves where nu metal lurches.
Open on YouTube at 3:29 - Actually rapped from 0:46
Metre, internal rhyme and phrasing from hip-hop, because the vocalist is a rapper rather than a metal singer approximating one.
Open on YouTube at 0:46
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
- 3.5-5 min
- Tuning
- Drop D and lower, with the guitar written as a rhythmic loop for a rapper to work against rather than as a riff to sing over.
- Production
- Dry, punchy and rhythm-forward, with the vocal produced like a hip-hop record and the band produced like a metal one.
- Written about
- Politics, explicitly, Race and power, Anger, Institutional violence
What each part is doing
- Guitar Riffs built as loops with space in them, using scratching-like effects, harmonics and a killswitch. Tom Morello's technique is an attempt to make a guitar do a turntable's job.
- Bass Playing funk lines rather than doubling the guitar, which is what gives the genre its groove and separates it from metal generally.
- Drums Hip-hop derived, sitting in the pocket, with the kick pattern doing what a metal riff would do elsewhere.
- Vocals Actually rapped — metre, internal rhyme and phrasing from hip-hop rather than a metal singer approximating it.
What it isn't
That it is nu metal's political wing. Rage Against the Machine predate nu metal, and their rhythm section is playing funk rather than the down-tuned groove nu metal invented. The two got filed together because of chronology and radio programming, and the actual musical lineage runs from Public Enemy and the Chili Peppers rather than from Korn.
Told apart from
- Nu metal Nu metal sings as much as it raps and is emotionally inward. Rap metal is rapped throughout and is political outward.
- Rap rock Rap rock is the wider rock-branch category. Rap metal specifically uses metal's tuning, distortion and rhythm section.
- Funk rock Both take hip-hop's rhythmic vocabulary. Funk rock keeps a singer; rap metal brings a rapper.
- Industrial metal Both are loop-based and rhythm-first. Industrial metal's loops are machine-made; these are played.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
Rage Against the Machine released a debut in 1992 with no synthesizers and no samples, in which every strange sound came from Tom Morello's guitar. Limp Bizkit took the formula to the charts and into controversy. The genre is inseparable from the American political context of the 1990s.
Descended from
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Industrial rock 1.0 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
- Black 'n' roll 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.