10 Perfect Hard Rock Albums Everyone Tried To Copy

As far as genre clashes go, the worlds of rock and hip hop tended to feel like oil and water a lot of the time. While there may have been crossovers like the Beastie Boys, some of their songs were treated more as jokes from both sides of the fence than anything too substantial. These genres have a lot more in common than most people realized though, and it took just the right amount of anger for it all to make sense.

Coming out of the same California scenes where bands like Ratt were coming up a few years before, you could feel a cultural shift when you heard Rage Against the Machine, taking the heavy as hell riffs from the world of hard rock and metal and combining it with the aggressive flows you would find in hip hop, as Zack de la Rocha sounds on the verge of exploding on every single track. And the band delivers on the promise of each of his lyrics as well, from the solid backbeat from Brad Wilk and Timmy C to Tom Morello creating sounds that no guitarist had ever done, electing to create insane guitar effects with different pedals and making him the DJ in the band instead of the typical shredder.

In the wake of Rage's breakout though, a lot of metalheads started to combine both genres together under one roof, giving birth to the era of nu metal with bands like Limp Bizkit towards the end of the decade. Whether or not that's necessarily a good thing is up to you, but Rage was one of the first bands that realized the power behind their aggression. This anger was a gift, and it was up to you to share it with the rest of the world.