Rock, Rap, Roll: Towards an Intergenre Authenticity

In March, a call for papers was circulated for a special issue of Rock Music Studies, which called for contributions to address the theme of ‘Authenticity as Process’. I read the call, and sat with it for a few weeks, mulling over the possibilities and re-reading many of the subthemes suggested in the call. These subthemes included ideas of freedom and constraint, subcultures, neotribes, and creation and interpretation among others. But for me, what was intriguing was the theme of ‘rock or beyond’, loaded with the prompts: “While authenticity has long been held up as a key criterion of value in the domain of rock music (Grayck), the term has also been associated with ‘popular music’ discourse more broadly (Desler) as well as being applied to specific ‘pop’ contexts (Leach).” What follows was a specific (certainly in terms of a cfp) question, which asked:

What are the relationships between these understandings of value across genres? How are these values transferred from one genre to another?

I have long been interested in the relationship between rap and rock, since learning about the formative hip hop park jams during the seventies and early eighties where rock records were being spun. These included songs such as Billy Squier’s ‘The Big Beat’, Babe Ruth’s ‘The Mexican’ and ‘Keep Your Distance’, and Thin Lizzy’s ‘Johnny The Fox Meets Jimmy The Weed’, songs which have evolved to be positioned as anthemic in the world of hip hop. For DJs, Bboys and Bgirls, these rock records were all about the drum break. Yet, there is a sense of embryonic intergenre here, a term I hope that over the next three parts, this article will begin to explore. Part 1 (this post) will outline the idea of intergenre and introduce the research methodology and frame the source material, Part 2 will deep dive into each song and carry out a close reading in an attempt to define intergenre, and Part 3 will draw conclusions and pose future directions.

The first obvious integrations of a rock record in a hip hop record is present in ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ by Sugar Daddy (1980) and Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel’ (1981), both of which utilize ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ by Queen to great effect – the former as an interpolation of the drum and bassline, and the latter as a break dropped from the original record into Flash’s cut-up mix.

In essence, ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ acts as a material-cultural bridge between the genres and praxes of rock and hip hop, embodied through the recorded artefact.