10 Iconic Rock Stars Who Guested On Pop Songs
Jamming outside the norms.
Within the confines of rock and roll, there are a lot of different avenues that you can go down. Since there are millions of subgenres in the game at this point, you can take your pick of almost any great style of rock and find something that would suit you. For the heavy hitters of the genre, there comes a point where even the concept of rock and roll isn't even enough.
Any artist is going to want to do more than just their same old schtick, so they've ended up turning to the world of pop to get their rocks off from time to time. Across many different pop albums, you can find some of your favorite rockers hiding in the cracks, waiting to sprinkle in a little bit of their genius. That doesn't mean that they've sold out by any stretch.
In most of these cases, the pop stars reach out to these guys to give their signature spin on their new tunes, and they hold up their end of the bargain by making some of the most creative turns of their career. While all of these artists like to identify themselves as rock, you can't say that they were snobs. It's all music at the end of the day, and these collabs were well worth the risk.
10. Sing for the Moment - Joe Perry
The entire art behind rap albums is to add in a guest verse by some of your peers. No one in the rap game gets to the top alone, and Eminem knew that all too well, getting someone like Dr. Dre to be his right hand man on most his early records. He had reached the top on the Eminem Show though, so why stop at samples when you can get the real thing?
Em was trying to approach this record from a more rock perspective, and Sing for the Moment is practically the thesis statement, with the sample being borrowed heavily from Aerosmith's Dream On. As the song plays out though, we get an extended guitar solo that wasn't in the original cut, which was actually played by Joe Perry after being called into Em's studio.
For as far as Aerosmith have come since the days of Dream On though, this collab actually made a lot more sense than you probably realized. Before rock and rap were even thinking about comingling together, Aerosmith were already breaking down barriers by being one of the first bands to collab with a hip hop artist on their own reworking of Walk This Way with Run-DMC. In that respect, this is just Em calling in a favor from one of the men who helped open the floodgates for rap rock to become a thing later down the line. It might sound a little strange on paper, but there's a lot more in common between rock and hip hop than most people realize.