10 Greatest Guitar Riffs Of The 90s

After years of trying to become the next Eddie Van Halen, the guitar scene in the '90s started to become like the Wild West. You could try your hand at going the alternative route, but there wasn't really a set rulebook for how to play guitar in that scene outside of just getting a fuzz pedal. Then Rage Against the Machine came on the scene and introduced us to the guitar mastery of Tom Morello.

While it would be easy to just talk about the amazing groove of Killing in the Name, the real gamechanger for the scene was the sound of Drop D. Tuning down the lowest string to a D note, Morello's signature licks on this song made everything seem a whole lot heavier, almost as if the guitar had the volume and intensity to peel through concrete.

Granted, if you have a song that's about a heavy subject matter like this, you need the guitars to respond in kind, and Morello definitely delivers by making what sounds like Black Sabbath if they were told to play funk music. It's almost hard to pick one signature lick out of here, since every one of them has a little nugget of genius in it. Even though you can hear influences in every guitarists' style, Tom Morello has practically made his own lane for writing guitar riffs.