Synthesis of Sounds: When Rock Met Hip-Hop by Steven Blush

 When Rock Met Hip-Hop: How Run-DMC, Aerosmith, Anthrax, The Beastie Boys, and More Crossed Cultural and Musical Boundaries by Steven Blush

When Rock Met Hip-Hop book cover

Author Steven Blush

Big props to Bloomsbury Academic and NetGalley for allowing me to preview Steven Blush’s fun and necessary book documenting the intersection of Rock and Hip-Hop over the past 50 years titled When Rock Met Hip-Hop: How Run-DMC, Aerosmith, Anthrax, The Beastie Boys, and More Crossed Cultural and Musical Boundaries. I was so excited to find this book, not only because I loved books about rock and hip-hop, but also because it’s by Steven Blush, whose American Hardcore basically reinvented music journalism for underground and misrepresented genres. Blush’s applies the same approach he used in American Hardcore here in When Rock Met Hip-Hop, where he  includes interviews with the primary artists involved in rock and hip-hop’s intersection as well as his own commentary and analysis of the music and movements associated with these gradual experiments in genre crossover. The book charts a predominantly chronological approach to examining these artists and the musical movements they helped to synthesize over time. I loved how Blush identifies the shared space that rock, especially genres like punk and metal, and hip-hop occupy. The beginning of the book focuses on the early innovators of hip-hop and how they frequently used rock beats as breakbeats, looking especially at Billy Squier, who would seem like an 80s artist not really aligned with hip-hop, but whose songs “Big Beat” and “The Stroke” have provided some foundations for early hip-hop classics. Blush also spends time exploring other early hip-hop artists and how they frequently made use of rock beats and instrumentation in their work. It’s a fascinating look at the early days of hip-hop and how, in many ways, Black artists were reinventing popular music in a wholly unique way.

Blush spends most of this section of the book in NYC, where hip-hop was born, and this leads us to Run-DMC and Def Jam, which is where some of the earliest attempts at brining together rock and hip-hop musicians to collaborate on songs happens. Although most would cite the Run-DMC and Aerosmith “Walk This Way” as the first major rock and rap collaboration, Blush cites some earlier examples, with Anthrax providing the beat for The Lone Rager’s “Metal Rap” in 1983. Blush also explores how Blondie’s experience in downtown NYC led to collaborations with Fab 5 Freddy and Basquiat to appear in their “Rapture” video, which included a rap by Debbie Harry. Interestingly, they did not say this was a rap song, but rather a song with rapping in it. Just like when I read American Hardcore over 20 years ago, I loved reading this book and finding new groups and songs to chase down and listen to in order to find these new examples of hip-hop and rock.

The Def Jam section was one of my favorite from this book since it focuses on not only Run-DMC, but also how the collaborative work of Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin helped to initiate a lot of this musical synthesis. Rubin, a fan of punk and metal, teamed up with Simmons, a party promoter, to create the iconic hip-hop label, which had the top hip-hop groups in the 80s and early 90s. Def Jam’s roster included The Beastie Boys, who started out as a punk band, and Public Enemy, whose songs “Sophisticated B….” and “She Watched Channel Zero” included amazing guitar work from Vernon Reid and a sample from Slayer’s “Angel of Death” respectively. PE also collaborated with Anthrax after they covered “Bring the Noise,” creating one of the more iconic and brash rock and rap collaborations form the early 90s. Interestingly too, I learned that Kerry King from Slayer played on License to Ill’s “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” and “Fight for Your Right to Party,” also appearing in the video with a wig. These are the kinds of tidbits I loved finding out in the book as well. Blush follows the careers and discography of PE and the Beasties to note how both bands gradually cultivated sounds that led to more synthesizing of rock and rap, and both bands moving more towards the hard and fast approaches to rock and rap.

Blush’s strengths throughout the book are that he’s thorough and brings a critical eye to the music and various forces and trends that drive the changes in rap and rock, whether it’s technology, shared ideas and philosophies, or even money and marketing. While the first part of the book is a deep dive into NYC and the East Coast scenes that birthed some of the most memorable rap and rock collaborations from the 1990s. I liked how Blush reviews the contributions from various bands running the gamut from Biohazard to Fun Loving Criminals in the mid to late 90s. I had some questions, though, about the inclusion of bands like 3^rd Bass, who were on Def Jam and apparently opened and replied to Slayer’s fan mail (Rick Rubin produced Slayer), but never made any rap-rock music. They had Henry Rollins in their video for “Pop Goes the Weasel,” which sampled Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” but I couldn’t really understand their inclusion in the book. I understood the inclusion of other bands like House of Pain and Cypress Hill since they both were on the Judgement Night Soundtrack and also ended up incorporating more rock and live instrumentation in their music. Similarly, Young Black Teenagers were included, but they did not include rock in their music beyond an album cover that looked like The Beatles. I think the section on the Judgment Night soundtrack was also the beginning of the end of the rap-rock collaboration. I loved this soundtrack in high school, and Blush spends some time arguing for its importance in helping to foster this collaboration. I also liked this section since he provides some insight from interviews of the artists about how the artists worked together to make music. It was fascinating since many of them hadn’t worked with different artists beyond Cypress Hill, Biohazard, Onyx, and Run-DMC. They all described the challenges, but also discussed the ways they managed to find different methods of collaborating. Unfortunately, though, Blush notes that the popularity of this soundtrack and possibly the idea that synthesizing these genres could bring in more ears and money to spend on two popular genres eventually led to Nu-Metal, which was the downfall of the genre. I didn’t like this section as much, and I wasn’t sure if it was because I’m just not a fan of this music and really didn’t want to read much about it, or if it was because Blush’s style seemed to get a little less detailed and critical in this section. Maybe it’s because Nu Metal is just under-reported or researched, but I just didn’t really delve into it too much. It seemed like Nu Metal was more of a money grab and that bands like Limp Bizkit were like MTV creations who sold lots of records, and once the tastes shifted more to boy bands and other softer pop music, Nu Metal lost its flavor. It seemed like there was more to analyze and criticize here, but there also might not be enough information and willing participants to make a strong case at this moment. Nevertheless, it was interesting to consider that Trip Hop, another somewhat maligned 90s synthesis of genres, arose from this rock-rap ethos. I hadn’t considered that, especially because bands like Portishead and Massive Attack seemed on the opposite end of the rage spectrum. However, Blush makes some compelling arguments about including this genre into the rap-rock rubric.

This book is a must have for any music fan who grew up in the 80s, 90s, or 2000s. Like Blush’s American Hardcore, this is essential reading for learning more about the evolution of rock music, and how hip-hop helped propel and energize rock in the 80s and 90s. Blush drops science with fun facts and information but also has some really interesting takes about the music. For example, when discussing Dr. Dre’s interest in creating Ghetto Metal with Eazy E, he notes that Jerry Heller, the head of Priority Records, may have died because of the way he was portrayed in Straight Outta Compton, which was both strange and fascinating. The book is full of these fun nuggets (and one Nugent too), so it serves as a good reference book as well. I especially loved the appendix of Lost Gems. My listening list has grown considerably since reading this book. Highly recommended!