As we all already know, I am no music historian. So you can take it as read that I don’t know what the real key moments in the crossover of rap into other genres of music were.

I could probably take a stab at a few names that might be close to right. I’d be just as likely to make the argument – and even believe it! – that right thinking people shouldn’t be thinking in terms of musical genres “crossing over”; that the whole music thing is by necessity fluid, and as such, genre is by definition a limiting concept that cripples the creative endeavour.

Because frankly, I can be a really pretentious twat, sometimes.

But a more valid, less pompous point of view would be that rap and hip-hop grew out of a bunch of different styles and cultures, right from the start, like funk and soul, and that at the point where pop music and the vinyl revolution in recorded music first started, all of those genre structures were kind of mixed up in each other, with distinctions less defined and precious than they are now – and if you take that view, the point at which guitar rock and rap and everything else started feeding into each other was just a return to primal forms, anyway.

Regardless of all that, here are a few of my favourite moments of musical mind-meld hip-hop genius. These are in order of how much I think they’re awesome, rather than chronological or anything like that, and I’ve missed out other really important stuff, like Pop Will Eat Itself, The Beastie Boys, and the super-great “Walk This Way” by Run DMC and Aerosmith, because they’re either obvious or they deserve a post all of their own.

It’s a long one, this week, so it’s all hidden after the jump – as always, your opinions are welcome in the comments…

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