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…

3. Clint Eastwood – Gorillaz

You’ll have certainly already heard this – it was a fairly big hit, and not that long ago – and it came at a time that rap and hip-hop were already all the way mainstream, so not really a turning point. However, the whole Gorillaz project was one of musical innovation and a playful confidence with the genres being smashed together, and Albarn et al were operating in an environment that arguably could only have existed post the indie-pop and mainstream hip-hop explosions.

Which is to say that Albarn’s vocal, the oddball-pretty style of Cibo Matto’s Miho Hatori, and the swooping, idiosyncratic and intelligent lackadaisical tempo of Del Tha Funkee Homosapien’s singular style could probably only have been brought together to such a great response at the point in time that they were – any earlier, and I think all except the most quirky of audiences might have found them a bit too perplexing.

(Incidentally, this is where I had to choose not to include The Go! Team and such – The Gorillaz are on the borderline, but The Go! Team are most definitely Post-crossover.)

As I said, you’ve heard “Clint Eastwood” before, but this time, listen out specifically for Del’s rapping. I really do love his style, and it’s sad that he was probably always just a little too weird for Will Smith-loving audiences, but not angry enough for the Ice fanbase (that’s Cube and T, not Mr Vanilla) that would have been around when his debut album “I Wish My Brother George Was Here” was released. That, and his apparent inability to get music out on time seems to have kept him on the musical fringe.

2. California Uber Alles – The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy

See, I love Michael Franti’s voice so much that these days, I’ll tend to stick to the stuff where his beautiful vocal creaminess is more apparent – such as the variable but always gem-laden Spearhead albums.

But The Disposable Heroes came first – and as heavy and experimental as they were, even they were a step toward accessibility from the man’s earlier project, The Beatnigs. Combative, creative and angry, the first Disposables album was lumped in with the growing Industrial music scene, but they were always something a little bit better than that label – Franti’s lyrics, for a start, were sharp and insightful, and more politically biting than a lot of the frankly whining worthiness of some of their peers, and his bandmate Rono Tse was frankly mental, and didn’t bother sticking to electronica and electric guitars to produce the music, often bringing DIY hardware into the mix.

My favourite crossover moment on their first album was the inclusion of “Water Pistol Man”, a song that Franti has stuck to through other incarnations, and one that has a beautiful reference to Billy Bragg’s song “The Passion”. But this song is the purest genre smash that they do – an updated, upgraded but otherwise pure cover of the Dead Kennedys song, and as such a mash-up of punk, rap and industrial music all in one.

1. Fallin’ – De La Soul/Teenage Fanclub

1993 was the year that we spent listening and dancing to the “Judgement Night” soundtrack. The album was ground-breaking, in that it was – at least as far as we were concerned – the first time anyone had put together such an ambitious musical project solely for the benefit of a movie soundtrack.

It was also, despite previous isolated forays into the world of the rap/rock crossover, the first time anyone had made a whole album of collaborations between rock/guitar and hip-hop acts.

There are very few dud tracks on the whole soundtrack, and there are some eye-opening moments, such as Mike Patton of Faith No More rapping – screeching and harmonising all in the space of one track with the Boo Yah Tribe, Sonic Youth and Cypress Hill drawling a love song to the ‘erb, and the rampant “Freak Momma” by Mudhoney and novelty soundtrack-whore Sir Mixalot.

However, this track stands out as unique on an album already unusual in it’s approach, because though the formula is there – rap act De La Soul partnered up with guitar band Teenage Fanclub – the acts are as different from the others on the album as the pairing is inspired.

De La Soul have never been like other hip-hop acts, notably distancing themselves from the brag-rap and gangland flirtation of their fellow rappers since the start, and extolling the peaceful virtues of their Daisy Age mantra even through their later more cynical work. And the Teenage Fanclub were floppy-haired indie – I can’t remember much about them, but it’s difficult to imagine them in the axe-brandishing company of the rest of the bands on this album without them being raped to buggery, prison style.

And what they’ve come up with is totally different from the other tracks on the album – obvious because this is the second track on the album after the unapologetically harsh and screechy “Just Another Victim” by Helmet and the House Of Pain.

It’s pretty, and sad, and it flows like a river as the lead vocals lament a mishandled past and a mediocre looking future. It doesn’t sound like the Teenage Fanclub provided the music, in another contrast to the dynamic on the other tracks on the album – instead, it seems that they’ve lent their harmonies to a lift of a Tom Petty track that provides the musical touchstone of the song, and that almost seems to promise that at some point they’ll drift into Buffalo Springfield’s evocative “Something’s Happening Here”. And there isn’t a single rap lyric in this song that doesn’t jump into my mind easily, all these years later.

Hard to imagine, now, but this sounded like nothing else that I’d heard before.

Jesus, we listened to this album, and this track, almost religiously for months, and waited eagerly for the film, until it took so long to come out that we forgot it existed, and just kept on listening to the album.

When it did come out, it was shit.