Hip-hop and rock, onstage together: it’s an idea whose time has come. And gone. And come again. And gone again. And so on.
You could witness the latest collision at Webster Hall on Thursday night, during a sold-out show by Gym Class Heroes, a band from Geneva, N.Y. This is rap-rock for the emo generation: the group’s leader is a self-deprecating rapper-heartthrob named Travis McCoy, whose rhymes include references to emo bands and MySpace. (Thursday’s set included “New Friend Request,” about an online romance.)
And the latest Gym Class Heroes album, “As Cruel as School Children” (Decaydance/Fueled By Ramen/Atlantic), was co-produced by Patrick Stump, from Fall Out Boy.
Mr. Stump also sings the chorus on the band’s current single, “Cupid’s Chokehold,” an old favorite that recently became a breakthrough hit. (It also appeared on the band’s 2005 album, “The Papercut Chronicles.”) Last week the song reached No. 7 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart; it’s at No. 8 this week. By that measure, it remains America’s second-favorite rap track, behind the latest from Ludacris. Hip-hop radio stations won’t go near it, but no matter: Gym Class Heroes are suddenly huge.
Of course, “suddenly” might not be quite the right word; as Mr. McCoy reminded the crowd, this band has been around for a decade. (He’s 25, and he formed the group when he was in high school.) In any case, Mr. McCoy has shrewdly identified something that mainstream emo has in common with alternative hip-hop: wordy, self-conscious lyrics.
As a rapper, and as a bandleader, Mr. McCoy’s greatest asset is his decency. Instead of trying to prove that he’s tough enough to hang with rappers, he’s happy to play the role of the nice boy, not least because he knows so many of his fans are girls. His idea of a lewd question is, “How many of you guys like to make out?” And at one point, he apologized to female fans for his obsession with relationships gone bad. “I’ve written my share of broken-hearted songs,” he said, “but you guys are kinda cool.”
In “Cupid’s Chokehold” Mr. McCoy half-sings his lyrics, but for most of the rest of the time, he’s a straight-ahead rapper, delivering long and sometimes tedious lines that emphasize sense over sound; he mainly avoids the tricky polysyllabic rhymes and shifting metrical schemes that currently rule hip-hop. (“Who cares if we don’t know each other’s last name?/All I know is that I’m smitten with your pictures, wishing you would feel the same.”)
But the band members kept the beats simple and brisk, and the melancholy emo choruses were always effective. During “7 Weeks,” about life on the road, William Beckett from The Academy Is ... emerged to deliver the refrain, drifting up into falsetto at the end.
Earlier rap-rock stars loved to remind their listeners that they were transgressing musical and cultural boundaries. But to their credit, Gym Class Heroes dispense with all that; at his best, Mr. McCoy sounds less like a maverick and more like an inevitability. Plenty of young listeners enjoy brash hip-hop and wimpy emo; it was only a matter of time before someone successfully combined the two.
Early on, he hyped up the crowd by saying, “I know you got some pent-up aggression or some teenage angst you wanna get out.” And what’s the difference, really?
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