Ye's a known fan of metal tees, having been spotted wearing ones from slightly more obscure bands like Type O Negative, and it appears that this interest extends to his creative team. His personal involvement in hip hop and pop design work, like a vast majority of the things that are now en vogue, just so happens to be at least somewhat traceable back to Kanye West. To get a better perspective on the matter, I got in contact with illustrator Mark Riddick, who worked exclusively with underground metal bands until last year. It seems like hip hop's increasing interest in metal aesthetics seems to be coinciding with a waning interest in actual metal music. These days, Lil Uzi Vert slaps a Metallica-inspired logo on tapes that have more in common with electropop than they do with any sort of guitar-driven music. Pairing screwed-up Houston with stoner metal is a genius combination, but not one that's been attempted very often. Take Trae Tha Truth's 2008 cut "I'm Fresh," which licks the riff from Electric Wizard's "Dopethrone," a cult classic. There are, however, astonishing outliers that diverge from the classic metal pantheon rappers tend to favor (Sabbath, Maiden, Metallica, Slayer). In the last ten years, metal sampling's all but died out. Metal mining persisted into the late '90s and early 2000s, with Three 6 Mafia's Koopsta Knicca sampling Metallica, Lil Wayne sampling Iron Maiden, Lil Jon reworking Ozzy Osborne's "Crazy Train" for Trick Daddy, and Busta Rhymes getting the Prince of Darkness himself to reprise Sabbath's "Iron Man"- but you could never call it popular. It was common to see people moshing at their shows, even though the heaviest thing they were sampling was one of Black Sabbath's more subdued songs. In the mid '80s, metalhead Rick Rubin set a precedent by sampling Black Sabbath, AC/DC, and Led Zeppelin on the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill, and Terminator X went even heavier, creating Public Enemy's "She Watch Channel Zero?!" atop a bed of riffs lifted from Slayer's classic "Angel of Death." Bands like Rage Against the Machine and Ice-T's Body Count went on to create more balanced fusions of the genres with live instrumentation in the '90s, and Cypress Hill even started attracting metal fans with their ominous aesthetic on the album Black Sunday, though they barely ever made use of anything resembling a metal riff. In fact, the actual sound of that genre is far rarer on rap records today than it was ten, twenty, or even thirty years ago. Since metal music itself hasn't seen any huge leaps in the charts since its big-ticket days of the '80s and early '90s, it would seem that rappers are more to blame for this new wave of popularization than anyone else, as they were on this steez a year or two before the latest wave of pop stars and fashionistas.īut apart from Bones' throat-shredding screams in the above live performance of Rocky's "Canal Street," there are very few traces of actual metal influence in the music of the many young rappers who take fashion and performance cues from those genres. Justin Bieber's "Purpose" tour apparel mimicked the band Pentagram's logo, Rihanna unveiled a very metal logo at the VMAs a few weeks ago, and fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar featured model Gigi Hadid wearing an "edgy rock tee" (AKA vintage Metallica shirt) as the header to its list of 2016 summer looks. But that's nothing compared to how mainstream the phenomenon's gone this year. A few years ago, it would have seemed unthinkable for A$AP Rocky to collaborate with a rapper who owns a Burzum shirt, or for Pusha T to commission merch from an artist who had previously only worked with death metal bands like Nunslaughter and Rotting Christ. In typography, fashion, and live shows, rappers are adopting various aspects of metal in unprecedented numbers, whether that means Kanye copping the Metallica font for his Yeezus logo, Travis Scott wearing a Slayer shirt in GQ, or ScHoolboy Q urging you to mosh at his concerts. It's hard to imagine a previous era of hip hop in which such a disclaimer would have been necessary, but today, even the most pop-friendly artists are co-opting metal aesthetics. As the artwork features a man in corpse paint and a classically illegible metal logo, it seems unlikely that it would be mistaken for anything other than an album from metal's bleakest genre, but even still, Banks felt the need to tell his followers that it was not the cover of his next mixtape. Last year, Florida rapper Robb Banks posted artwork from a black metal album, Leviathan's Verräter, on his Instagram. Denzel Curry, Robb Banks, and metal illustrator Mark Riddick weigh in on this recent phenomenon. Metal culture is more visible in hip hop than it's ever been, even if nobody in hip hop's listening to it.