10 Rock Songs That Were Written By Accident

If you’re a guitar player, you should never be afraid to go outside the boundaries of what tuning you’re in. There’s a lot that can be done with just six strings, and grunge blew the doors wide open with drop D, using the fattest string to tap into something that was a lot more gravelly in tone. It made for a much deeper tone, and even practicing it yielded one of the most badass riffs of the decade.

In between nights of playing with rock acts in the California area, Tom Morello would also turn in time as a guitar teacher, with drop D being one of the main things that he would teach some of his students during the sessions. After demonstrating how to tune everything, Tom started to play little licks that would give the student an idea of what to work on, until he realized that he hit upon something that was too good to waste on a training exercise. Cutting the session short, Morello halted everything and recorded the riff onto his little Radioshack speaker before it eventually became the main riff behind Killing in the Name.

For all of the hard edged power behind it though, there’s something almost inherently funky about the lick as well, almost sounding like what James Brown would have done if he were fronting a heavy metal band instead of his trademark funk sound. The vibe in California at the time may have still been squarely focused on the Sunset Strip brand of rock and roll, but these were the kind of angry riffs that were destined to fill out arenas.