E-Mail This Article to a Friend Monster crunk rallies Hip-hop takes rap metal in the right direction BY CARLY CARIOLI

In the summer of 2003, as Fred Durst was getting booed off Metallica’s stage and rap metal seemed finally to be getting the boot, a Las Vegas DJ collective called the Inhumanz dropped the first volume in its "Satanic Mash-Ups" series of bootleg remix 12-inches. On the A-side, Nine Inch Nails’ "Closer" served as a backing track for 50 Cent’s "In da Club" — a neat trick, but these days, it’s a snap for any bedroom bootlegger with a Pro Tools rig to edit drum-machine beats to fit an a cappella verse. The flip side, on the other hand, was something of a revelation: Nas spitting his hit "Made You Look" over Black Sabbath’s "War Pigs." It was startling to hear Nas’s verses fit over Sabbath’s stutter-step guitars — but even more startling to realize how long hip-hop producers have slept on Sabbath drummer Bill Ward, and on heavy-metal drummers in general. In part, that’s metal’s fault: though the Aerosmith/Run-D.M.C. collaboration "Walk This Way" was an unprecedented smash, the memory that lingered in rap producers’ minds was AC/DC’s lawsuit against Beastie Boys, who used a sample of "Back in Black" on "She’s on It," from the 1985 Krush Groove soundtrack. DJs have long known that there are classic breaks lurking in metal’s back catalogue — "Back in Black" has been a staple of hip-hop crates since the beginning — but there has never been much of an incentive to go digging for them, since metal bands were unlikely to license the samples.

It’s impossible to know for sure who heard the Inhumanz’ salvo, but the single — which was collected alongside the rest of the "Satanic Mash-Ups" series on the Inhumanz’ Hell To Pay CD this summer — seems to have set off a ripple effect. In April, a new Nas effort hit the mix-tape circuit, an eerie track called "The Thief’s Theme" built around the evil bass line and the tremulous organ groan of Iron Butterfly’s "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." Coincidence? Probably not. The shame of it is that the Inhumanz bootleg track (called, in mash-up fashion, "Shoot the War Pigs") was better than the remake. The Iron Butterfly beat on "The Thief’s Theme" is a suitably menacing plod. But on "Shoot the War Pigs," Nas sounds as if he were dancing around bullets, with Ward’s fills raining down like machine-gun fire while, in the background, Ozzy’s yowls — "Aw lawd yea!" — function like an amen to Nas’s testimony.

By summer, there were inklings of a rap-metal resurgence — this time from the rap side of the tracks. DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album spawned a bootleg remix craze that included two distinct albums pitting Jay-Z’s The Black Album against Metallica’s "black album," though neither was as raucous as the Inhumanz mash-up pitting Metallica’s "St. Anger" against Lil’ Jon’s crunk classic "Bia Bia" or mash-up ace Dopplebanger’s punk-rock remix of Jigga’s "Dirt off Your Shoulder" using the Ramones’ "Go Mental." Meanwhile, as Lollapalooza crashed and burned, Linkin Park’s "Projekt: Revolution" tour brought Snoop Dogg, Wu Tang’s Ghostface, and Brooklyn underground thugs M.O.P. to enthusiastic metal crowds. Snoop showed up with a band and performed a live mash-up of sorts, replacing the backing track of "Murder Was the Case" with the music to Sabbath’s "Iron Man." (Perhaps he’d been inspired by the Hell To Pay track "Back in the Episode," which flips Snoop’s verses from Dr. Dre’s "The Next Episode" over "Back in Black.") Even without the benefit of guitars, M.O.P. have been inciting mosh pits since the mid ’90s; but when they signed to Roc-A-Fella, they decided to forgo the traditional mix-tape teaser and instead went into the studio to re-record their indie-label hits with the Brooklyn metal band Shiner Massive. That album, Mash Out Posse, got a legit release through Koch; and one of its tracks, a cover of the Beasties’ "No Sleep to Brooklyn," was a hit with Linkin Park audiences before showing up on the semi-official street mix tape that DJ Green Lantern issued to promote the Beasties’ own To the 5 Boroughs. Another outfit on the Linkin Park tour, England’s Rasta-inspired Skindred, stoked a stateside buzz with a dancehall singer backed by a metal band — to their credit, their album Babylon (Lava/Atlantic) mostly avoids sounding like a cross between Sevendust and 311.

Still, Mash Out Posse and Skindred are merely continuations of the old rap-rock tradition: Skindred cite the soundtrack to the 1993 film Judgment Night as a prime inspiration. At the time, Judgment Night was hyped as the ultimate in rap-rock hybrids, but it’s aged about as well as Anthrax and Public Enemy’s "Fight the Power," which isn’t saying much. The soundtrack marked, in many ways, the beginning of the end: rap metal followed the path not of Run-D.M.C.’s "Rock Box" — of guitars massaged into hip-hop tracks — but of Biohazard and Onyx, with rappers yelling over rote hardcore. And in that context, Mash Out Posse doesn’t sound particularly new or enlightening. It’s an offshoot of the legacy that spawned Korn and Limp Bizkit: even when rap rock had the Loud Records roster on its side — as on 2000’s dimly recalled Loud Rocks disc, where the Wu-Tang Clan teamed up with Ozzy, System of a Down, and Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello — it usually just came out sounding like, well, bad metal. Take the Loud Rocks track "Survival of the Fittest," a collaboration between Mobb Deep and Sick of It All, and play it against the Inhumanz’ "Wizard Storm," which loudens up Mobb Deep’s "Quiet Storm" with the electric blooze of Sabbath’s "The Wizard": it’s the difference between the sound of rock impersonating rap and that of recognizably functional hip-hop. The difference, as in so much hip-hop, is in the production: a feel for the perfect breakbeat.

Which brings us to Trick Daddy, a Miami thug (he told us so on his breakout hit, "I’m a Thug") who’ll be here this Sunday to perform at Monster Jam ’04. He came up through the ranks of Luke "Skyywalker" Campbell’s post–2 Live Crew bass empire and was instrumental in popularizing the chant-heavy Dirty South bounce that’s become the bedrock of crunk. With the exception of Trick’s gold teeth, you’d be hard-pressed to find a trace of metal in his past. But his "Let’s Go," which leaked over the summer and has been a legit radio hit all autumn long, might be the best rap-metal song since "Walk This Way." Built around the riff from Ozzy’s solo hit "Crazy Train," it begins with the Prince of Darkness’s instantly identifiable call-out "Aye! Aye! Aye!" — though in this context, with Lil’ Jon barking back-ups and Twista sputtering a guest verse with typical speed-metal velocity, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for a high-pitched "Aiiight?!" The late Randy Rhoades probably would not approve of what’s been done to his riff, but screw him — which is, after all, what Lil Jon’s production does. A studio guitarist mangles Rhodes’s classic arpeggio on a trebly amp, skipping notes altogether, but as a punk might opine, that’s what makes it hip-hop. Fortified with synth-string stabs and a skittering bounce undertow, the "Crazy Train" melody serves the same purpose it served for Ozzy: a hellbent warhorse thundering down the tracks and coming off the rails as Trick and Twista trade tales of clearing clubs with broken Hennessy bottles.

Lil’ Jon, as much a master of self-promotion as he is of repetitive, pummeling hooks, has already coined a name for it: crunk rock. And he’s way ahead of the game. Over the summer, he holed up with the other little Jon — Korn’s Jonathan Davis — to record a remake of the Anthrax/PE "Fight the Power," which is now slated for a film soundtrack to be released next year. And Lil’ Jon’s forthcoming, sure-to-be-a-smash Crunk Juice (TVT; due November 16) includes a bonus disc featuring a remix of "Let’s Go" as well as a rock remix of a new song called "Roll Call" that features backing by Bad Brains. (Headline: "Skindred rendered superfluous.") If Lil’ Jon scores with crunk rock, there are a few guys in the wings who’ll be able to claim a piece of the credit. Earlier this year, Lil’ Flip made the charts with "Game Over," which morphed a video-game sample into a club-smashing ode to murder — just as former Anthrax bassist Dan Lilker did grindcore-style on Nuclear Assault’s "Game Over" back in 1986! But the real metal on Flip’s disc came on the bonus CD, where a screwed-as-syrup track called "Drugz" brought thrash guitars to a sluggish tempo of doom and the vocals, sounding like a 45-rpm disc stuck on 33, approximated the ferocious growl of, say, Napalm Death.

Meanwhile, former Trick Daddy hypeman Lil’ Zay has quietly released a song called "So Long" that as yet hasn’t made it out of the clubs down South. "This is a classic hit, baby: shhhh!", Zay whispers at the beginning, suggesting that he hasn’t cleared the hook — a re-recorded interpolation, or slight reworking, of Metallica’s Ride the Lightning–era fave "Fade to Black." "I been a thug so long, can’t remember when I was home/Living life as a kid, wanna be grown/Those days are all gone," he sings in the chorus before giving a nod to James Hetfield’s opening line: "Life seems to fade away." Unlike his former mentor’s burly club track, Zay’s "So Long" is, like "Fade to Black," a power ballad: an introspective tear-jerker about dead friends that flips midway through, quotes Martin Luther King, and turns into a rousing plea for interracial unity. It’s evocative of the ideological baggage that has underscored rap rock since the beginning — the idea, however naive, that rap and rock are merely metaphorical stand-ins for blackness and whiteness. Sure, Lil’ Jon isn’t going to win a Nobel Prize anytime soon. But you don’t need to be a utopian to hear in "Let’s Go" and "So Long" the promise that, at long last, rap metal might be headed in the right direction.

Trick Daddy plays Monster Jam ’04 this Sunday, October 31, at the FleetCenter, on Causeway Street at North Station; call (617) 931-2000.