10 Perfect Rap Songs For Rock Music Fans

10. Rock Star - N.E.R.D.

In the early '00s, the rap game was starting to go through a bit of a sea change. We may have been a long way from people like Kanye West coming up in the next few years, but the sounds of people like the Neptunes were dipping their toes into pop culture, taking the kind of off the wall mentality of Outkast and putting their own unique spin on it. When the production crew wasn't working with stars like Gwen Stefani or Snoop Dogg though, they still had one hell of a track record on their own.

Though most of NERD's first record is what you'd expect from the Neptunes' typical production style, Rock Star is probably one of the hardest beats that they had put together at that point. While it would be easy to just see this song as a joke to use the kind of macho bravado of a rock star, the main riff and especially the drums take you for a ride in the headphones, taking a sample from John Bonham's drums from a Led Zeppelin song and sprinkling Pharrell's smooth delivery on top of it.

And even though people like to talk up genres blending together in the past few years, this is probably one of the first times that it was all pulled off effectively, with Tyler the Creator seeing this as one of the templates for his career coming off of albums like Bastard. The licks might not be from a virtuoso or anything, but it's sometimes the simplest riffs that are the most effective.