The Pop Corporation

We appreciate that some people like it when rock and rap mix. There’s no accounting for taste and all that, but the nadir of the late ’90s and early ’00s when Woodstock went from a peace and love festival and turned into an awful frat house party filled with rap-rock groups shows just how dismal the two can be when they collide.

If your wallet is on a chain and you’re over the age of 21 and you still gel your hair into spikes, this article invariably isn’t for you. You could argue that we should be more fair about these things, but we’d argue that you need these pointless lines in the sand and hate on stuff for the fuck of it, because that’s one of the nice things about music fandom.

And so, to the time rap-rock didn’t totally suck. And where’s Public Enemy and Anthrax? No chance. Not on this list.

OUTKAST – GASOLINE DREAMS

There’s nothing Outkast can’t do, and if they decide to rock the fuck out on the opening track of the greatest hip hop LP of all time, then you know it’ll be some outstanding shit. Their brand of rock on ‘Gasoline Dreams’ goes hard, but still has that acid-fried goodness that seeped through all the classic Outkast tracks. They can do what they like and we should be grateful that they did.

PARIS TEXAS – SEAN JARED

Paris Texas’ brand of indie hip hop/rap rock is one of the most surprising things to land in anyone’s ears in recent years. Their albums sound like the kind of live shows that will go off like a nuclear bomb, but the way they’ve incorporated rock into their rap doesn’t sound like Limp Dipshit or anything like that. It’s almost post-punk NYC skuzz in places. They’re brilliant and if you haven’t got into them yet, now is your chance.

BEASTIE BOYS – SABOTAGE

Look, the Beastie Boys are responsible for a lot of crappy stuff but it isn’t their fault that their imitators aren’t very good. There’s countless Beastie tunes we could have chosen, but we went for the famous one that’s almost more punk than rap – we could have easily chosen ‘So Wat’cha Want’ and probably prefer it – but ‘Sabotage’ has a fun video and we haven’t watched it in a while.

RUN DMC – WALK THIS WAY

The daddy of all good rap rock, right? Still sounds ridiculously fun on a night out and in the headphones on the way to work.

EMINEM – LOSE YOURSELF

We’re almost annoyed that this made the cut, what with it being squarely within that window of rock-rap that stinks to high heaven. However, Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ is pretty undeniable and the rock quotient of this track is absolutely equal to the rap portion, so in it goes. A knuckleheaded classic.

And that’s it? It was barely worth doing this was it? And there’s some famous ones we could have included because they’re regarded to be good rap-rock songs, but sadly, they suck and the whole point of this was to try and find ones that didn’t suck.

What a waste of time. At least we got to be excited about Outkast and Paris Texas.