10 Songs That Changed Rock History

When talking about the best moments in rock and roll, most people have certain albums to hang their hat on. As opposed to just sitting down with the traditional stuff that you heard on the radio, these are the records that made you rethink the entire concept of what music could be. While you need to cherish those moments when they come around, the true legends can distill all of that power into a single song.

Rather than just throw together an album to make a coherent statement, these songs alone were enough to change the tide of the entire music industry going forward. Whether it was a new sound that no one had heard before or a call to arms from the next generation, these are the tracks that made rock and roll actually feel exciting and relevant to the conversation.

This isn't just a lost art either, with tracks as far back as the '00s still holding their own against any other genre they were up against. Even if the albums that these songs were a part of were amazing, these tracks make the rest of their parent albums look weak by comparison. You better hold on tight, because you only get songs like these once in your lifetime.

Before 1994, the term nu metal wasn't all that much of a thing. Though we did have some blending of rap and rock from people like Rage Against the Machine at the time, we wouldn't see the likes of Deftones and Limp Bizkit come into their own until much later. Once we heard Blind though, people started to put the pieces together.

Granted, most of Korn's self titled release could have made this list, being the archetype of what would become the nu metal album. The reason why Blind gets the spot here though was because of its first exposure to MTV. With a twisted music video to boot, this was a lot of fans' first taste of this sort of moody introspection being played with a lot of aggression.

Even though we had gotten used to people like Zack De La Rocha spewing his venom at crooked cops, the tone of Jonathan Davis' voice was something strange for the time, sounding almost like a patient in a mental institution in the verses before absolutely exploding when the choruses come back up. Across every second, it feels like each member has the potential to lose their minds at any moment. Little did we know that this was just the beginning of angst taking over the metal scene.