I'd be curious to know what some of you hair-whipping metalheads think of Dou[g] Pray's documentary, "Scratch" [(it's on DVD)]. Yes, it contains interviews with the *highly old skool* Afrika Bambaataa and Jazzy Jay, but that's not the point. It also contains performances by the likes of QBert and DJ Shadow that sound closer to metal guitar solos than anything I've seen at Tonic. Kid Koala has actually read scratch cues from sheet music and scratched with orchestras. I'm thinking you might appreciate the pyrotechnics.
One thing you have to admit is that rap is an integral part of hip-hop culture, without which DJ music would not exist, which means that a lot of mainstream singer-songwriter artists (like Bjork) wouldn't sound the same. I haven't noticed a lot of Matthew Herbert fans on this site, but he's a consummate musician/DJ who wouldn't exist if rap hadn't come before. And ATCQ's *The Low-End Theory* is one of the best albums of the early 90s. It has most of what we've been hearing for a decade: acoustic bass, jazzy arrangements over break beats -- eclecticism that raised the bar generally for what was to come.
Rap brought a kind of attention to internal rhyme, half-rhyme, word play and narrative that hadn't been seen since the forties -- if you doubt it, look at how insipid pop hooks had become in the days of The Message. And the DJ brought a level of culture and history to pop music that hadn't been heard since pompous faux-apocalyptic rock musicians first began to assert that history and erudition were irrelevant. Rap comes out of th[e] practice of toasting, which comes out of a history of neighborhood culture, in which people would engage in verbal put-down wars to hone their poetic skills.
All of which means, ironically enough, that rap and hip-hop are largely responsible for bringing back refined levels of intelligence and culture to otherwise idiotic mall-bland AOR.
