10 Rap Albums That Every Rock Fan Should Listen To

As rap was starting to come into its own, it could oftentimes fall onto the wrong side of corny. The offshoot of disco may have set everything in the right direction, but there's a fine line between something like the Sugarhill Gang dropping bars and your middle school teacher trying to rap to seem down with the kids these days. Rap needed some sort of edge, and Run-DMC were the first example of the original gangstas.

Compared to what we'd see later with A Tribe Called Quest playing around with jazz samples, this is the kind of album that feels like a rock album from the backing tracks alone. From the samples and real instrumentation used on every track, Darryl and Joe definitely earned their rock stripes on here, taking riffs that wouldn't feel that out of place on a Led Zeppelin record and making the entire world groove to it.

While it's easy to just chalk it up to the bars, the real MVP of this entire project is Jam Master Jay, taking the sounds of rock and making it sound like the heaviest thing you've ever heard. Since this was the band that shared a label with Slayer, DMC definitely needed to bring the thunder and delivered in spades. After all, if you want to bring rap to the arenas, you're going to need to have the kind of music that sounds good in arenas too.