IS IT POSSIBLE TO MAKE ANY BAND SOUND LIKE NU METAL?

Normally Pelican is one of the last bands I’d ever accuse of being a nu metal act; but Nick at The Deciblog posted a link to a mash-up of Pelican’s “Dead Between the Walls” and “Pillz” by Gucci Mane* this past Sunday, and while I find the resulting track catchier than I’m comfortable admitting (okay okay okay, so I may have listened it to five or six times in a row last night), it is amazing how adding rap over Pelican’s music suddenly makes it sound remarkably like late 90s/early aughties rap metal. Seriously: check out the bouncy, fat (phat?) riff, the gentle verses that really allowing the “flowing” to, uh, flow, etc., etc.

This raises a series of questions, like: if you put rapping over any band, will it automatically begin to sound like nu/rap/whatever metal? Would Limp Bizkit have been a semi-decent band if not for Fred Durst? Is Axl Rosenberg losing his fucking mind? Discuss amongst yourselves.

-AR

*I also did some homework on this Gucci Mane fellow, with whom I was previously unfamiliar, and have since decided that he is the single most brilliant artist working in hip-hop today. Take the lyrics to the song “Freaky Gurl,” for example: “First you get her name/Then you get her number/Then you get some brain in the front seat of her Hummer.” If that’s not the greatest love poetry of the 21st century so far, then my name isn’t Axl Rosenberg.