Run-D.M.C. (1981-2002): Legendary, iconic, and innovative composers, songwriters, rappers, arrangers, ensemble leaders, producers and teachers.

SOUND PROJECTIONS

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR:  KOFI NATAMBU

SUMMER, 2019

VOLUME SEVEN    NUMBER TWO

HOLLAND DOZIER HOLLAND

(L-R:  Lamont Dozier, Eddie Holland, Brian Holland)

Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:

SHIRLEY SCOTT

(June 15-21)

FREDDIE HUBBARD

(June 22-28)

BILL WITHERS

(June 29- July 5)

OUTKAST

(July 6-12)

J. J. JOHNSON

(July 13-19)

JIMMY SMITH

(July 20-26)

JACKIE WILSON

(July 27-August 2)

LITTLE RICHARD

(August 3-9)

KENNY BARRON
(August 10-16)

BUSTER WILLIAMS

(August 17-23)

MOS DEF

(August 24-30)

RUN-D.M.C

(August 31-September 6)

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/run-dmc-mn0000358408/biography

Run-D.M.C.

1981-2002

Artist Biography by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

More than any other hip-hop group, Run-D.M.C. are responsible for the sound and style of the music. As the first hardcore rap outfit, the trio set the sound and style for the next decade of rap. With their spare beats and excursions into heavy metal samples, the trio were tougher and more menacing than their predecessors Grandmaster Flash and Whodini. In the process, they opened the door for both the politicized rap of Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions, as well as the hedonistic gangsta fantasies of N.W.A. At the same time, Run-D.M.C. helped move rap from a singles-oriented genre to an album-oriented one -- they were the first hip-hop artist to construct full-fledged albums, not just collections with two singles and a bunch of filler. By the end of the '80s, Run-D.M.C. had been overtaken by the groups they had spawned, but they continued to perform to a dedicated following well into the '90s.

All three members of Run-D.M.C. were natives of the middle-class New York borough Hollis, Queens. Run (born Joseph Simmons, November 14, 1964) was the brother of Russell Simmons, who formed the hip-hop management company Rush Productions in the early '80s; by the mid-'80s, Russell had formed the pioneering record label Def Jam with Rick Rubin. Russell encouraged his brother Joey and his friend Darryl McDaniels (born May 31, 1964) to form a rap duo. The pair of friends did just that, adopting the names Run and D.M.C., respectively. After they graduated from high school in 1982, the pair enlisted their friend Jason Mizell (born January 21, 1965) to scratch turntables; Mizell adopted the stage name Jam Master Jay.

In 1983, Run-D.M.C. released their first single, "It's Like That"/"Sucker M.C.'s," on Profile Records. The single sounded like no other rap at the time -- it was spare, blunt, and skillful, with hard beats and powerful, literate, daring vocals, where Run and D.M.C.'s vocals overlapped, as they finished each other's lines. It was the first "new school" hip-hop recording. "It's Like That" became a Top 20 R&B hit, as did the group's second single, "Hard Times"/"Jam Master Jay." Two other hit R&B singles followed in early 1984 -- "Rock Box" and "30 Days" -- before the group's eponymous debut appeared.

By the time of their second album, 1985's King of Rock, Run-D.M.C. had become the most popular and influential rappers in America, already spawning a number of imitators. As the King of Rock title suggests, the group were breaking down the barriers between rock & roll and rap, rapping over heavy metal records and thick, dense drum loops. Besides releasing the King of Rock album and scoring the R&B hits "King of Rock," "You Talk Too Much," and "Can You Rock It Like This" in 1985, the group also appeared in the rap movie Krush Groove, which also featured Kurtis Blow, the Beastie Boys, and the Fat Boys.

Run-D.M.C.'s fusion of rock and rap broke into the mainstream with their third album, 1986's Raising Hell. The album was preceded by the Top Ten R&B single "My Adidas," which set the stage for the group's biggest hit single, a cover of Aerosmith's "Walk This Way." Recorded with Aerosmith's Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, "Walk This Way" was the first hip-hop record to appeal to both rockers and rappers, as evidenced by its peak position of number four on the pop charts. In the wake of the success of "Walk This Way," Raising Hell became the first rap album to reach number one on the R&B charts, to chart in the pop Top Ten, and to go platinum, and Run-D.M.C. were the first rap act to received airplay on MTV -- they were the first rappers to cross over into the pop mainstream. Raising Hell also spawned the hit singles "You Be Illin'" and "It's Tricky."

Run-D.M.C. spent most of 1987 recording Tougher Than Leather, their follow-up to Raising Hell. Tougher Than Leather was accompanied by a movie of the same name. Starring Run-D.M.C., the film was an affectionate parody of '70s blaxploitation films. Although Run-D.M.C. had been at the height of their popularity when they were recording and filming Tougher Than Leather, by the time the project was released, the rap world had changed. Most of the hip-hop audience wanted to hear hardcore political rappers like Public Enemy, not crossover artists like Run-D.M.C. Consequently, the film bombed and the album only went platinum, failing to spawn any significant hit singles.

Two years after Tougher Than Leather, Run-D.M.C. returned with Back From Hell, which became their first album not to go platinum. Following its release, both Run and D.M.C. suffered personal problems as McDaniels suffered a bout of alcoholism and Simmons was accused of rape. After McDaniels sobered up and the charges against Simmons were dismissed, both of the rappers became born-again Christians, touting their religious conversion on the 1993 album Down With the King. Featuring guest appearances and production assistance from artists as diverse as Public Enemy, EPMD, Naughty by Nature, A Tribe Called Quest, Neneh Cherry, Pete Rock, and KRS-One, Down With the King became the comeback Run-D.M.C. needed. The title track became a Top Ten R&B hit and the album went gold, peaking at number 21. Although they were no longer hip-hop innovators, the success of Down With the King proved that Run-D.M.C. were still respected pioneers.

After a long studio hiatus, the trio returned in early 2000 with Crown Royal. The album did little to add to their ailing record sales, but the following promotional efforts saw them join Aerosmith and Kid Rock for a blockbuster performance on MTV. By 2002, the release of two greatest-hits albums prompted a tour with Aerosmith that saw them travel the U.S., always performing "Walk This Way" to transition between their sets. Sadly, only weeks after the end of the tour, Jam Master Jay was senselessly murdered in a studio session in Queens. Only 37 years old, the news of his passing spread quick and hip-hop luminaries like Big Daddy Kane and Funkmaster Flex took the time to pay tribute to him on New York radio stations. Possibly the most visible DJ in the history of hip-hop, his death was truly the end of an era and unfortunately perpetuated the cycle of violence that has haunted the genre since the late '80s. 

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/04/arts/street-smart-rapping-is-innovative-art-form.html

STREET-SMART RAPPING IS INNOVATIVE ART FORM

by Robert Palmer 

February 4, 1985

New York Times

Credit:  The New York Times Archives

See the article in its original context from
February 4, 1985, Section C, Page 1

Two years ago, Joseph Simmons was sitting in class at La Guardia Community College in Queens, jotting rhymes and observations in his notebook to pass the time. ''One thing I know is that life is short,'' he wrote - hardly a surprising observation, since the class was in mortuary science. ''The next time someone's teaching, why don't you get taught,'' he continued, and then added, almost as an afterthought, ''It's like that.''

After school he showed his rhymes to Darryl McDaniels, a friend he had grown up with in Hollis, Queens. ''It's like that,'' Mr. McDaniels repeated, and then added, ''and that's the way it is !'' The afterthought had become a catch phrase.

The two friends were chanting their rhymes at each other on the streets of their neighborhood the same day. Within a few weeks, they were calling themselves Run-D.M.C. and had recorded ''It's Like That'' for the independent Profile label with the help of Mr. Simmons' brother Russell, an associate of the early rap star Kurtis Blow. ''It's Like That'' was soon a hit, and their first album, simply titled ''Run-D.M.C.,'' went on to sell more than 500,000 copies, becoming the first rap album to earn a gold record late in 1984. The album included ''It's Like That'' and a newer rap, ''Rock Box,'' with Jimi Hendrix-style rock guitar added to the sparse rap sound of two voices, drum machine and a smattering of electronic effects.

On their new Profile album, ''King of Rock,'' D.J. Run (Mr. Simmons) and D.M.C. (Mr. McDaniels), along with their accompanying disk jockey, Jam Master Jay, and the guitarist from ''Rock Box,'' Eddie Martinez, have forged a powerful and impressively varied set of musical performances from the basics of rap, the New York street music that first developed around the same time as break dancing, in the late 1970's.

Broadening the Raps

Watchers of pop music have been touting rap as a current trend, and predicting its rapid demise, since the first rap hit, the Sugarhill Gang's ''Rapper's Delight'' in 1979. There did not seem to be much future for an idiom that consisted of two or more M.C.'s shouting catch phrases and boasts at one another while a disk jockey accompanied them by playing back and repeating parts of records on two turntables.

But rap has confounded the doubters. M.C.'s have broadened their raps by making up rhymes on war and poverty, living conditions and cultural issues, while continuing to toast their own prowess at rapping and romance in the tradition of earlier black blues, rhythm-and-blues, and soul. The disk jockeys have become virtuoso improvisers, using ''scratching'' (moving a record back and forth on a turntable by hand), and other collagist techniques to build fresh musical structures from bits and pieces of existing records, ''found-object'' tape recordings, and other sound sources. Films about rapping (''Wild Style'' and ''Beat Street'') have come and gone, but the music has survived being a fad and continues to grow.

When rapping and the creative techniques of the disk jockey are combined effectively, as they are on ''It's Not Funny,'' ''Jam-Master Jammin','' and other selections from Run-D.M.C.'s ''King of Rock'' album, the result has as much musicality and richness as any other brand of popular or improvisational music. Rap, or hip-hop as the overall musical idiom is often called, has become an art form that is consistently enlivened by innovations and infusions of new talent, a form that is winning a national and international audience while retaining strong ties to the rhythms and lore of New York's streets. And rap has brought a measure of financial stability to several low-overhead independent record companies, despite the domination of the pop record business by a handful of corporate conglomerates.

Run-D.M.C. recently headlined a package tour that featured a variety of hip-hop artists and was sponsored by a watch manufacturer: the Swatch Watch New York City Fresh Fest. The show, which also included hot new performers like Whodini and UTFO (UnTouchable FOrce), played to arena crowds of 15,000 to 20,000 in Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit and other cities. ''We'd ask them to scream and they'd all scream,'' D.J. Run reported.

'A Cross-Racial Audience'

''Even in cities like Chicago, where no rap music is played on the radio, the show attracted 15,000 people, which is some indication of rap's underground appeal,'' said Run- D.M.C.'s manager, a former rock critic named Bill Adler. ''At this point, the audience is predominately black teen-agers, but we also drew crowds in some Midwestern cities where there isn't a large black population. The rap industry now is a lot like black rhythm-and-blues just before it was discovered by the mass audience, in the 50's. The major radio programmers and record labels are trying to ignore that, but it's building a strong cross-racial audience anyway.''

Hip-hop is now an international phenomenon. One of the most popular new rap groups, Whodini, was put together in Brooklyn but records in Britain, where the pop star Thomas Dolby took an active interest in its work. Whodini had won a large and loyal following in Britain and on the European continent before it began to attract a substantial audience on the fiercely competitive New York hip- hop scene. But Whodini's second album, ''Escape'' (on the Jive/ Arista label), went gold soon after ''Run-D.M.C.'' and Whodini dance singles like ''Five Minutes of Funk'' and ''Freaks Come Out at Night'' are now heard almost constantly in New York dance clubs, as well as on local urban-contemporary radio stations.

Another current rap hit, UTFO's ''Roxanne, Roxanne,'' reportedly sold more than 150,000 copies in its first three weeks of release, and has been heard on at least one local top-40 radio station. Like the Force M.D.'s, who have recorded several hits on the Tommy Boy label, the members of UTFO sing as well as rap, and they are first-rate dancers as well. This versatility could be a key factor in establishing rap with a wider audience.

Ironically, rap groups that have been as successful as Run-D.M.C. or Whodini are currently having trouble finding suitable places to perform in their hometown. They feel they have outgrown the Roxy and smaller clubs, but despite the cross-country success of the Swatch tour in arenas the size of Madison Square Garden, the Garden itself has yet to present a comparable rap show. ''We're ready for the Garden,'' say Run-D.M.C. members, and though the rap groups lack the major record-label clout of other Garden-scale performers, one suspects their emergence into upper- echelon pop circuits is only a matter of time.

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 3, 1985, Section C, Page 13 of the National edition with the headline: STREET-SMART RAPPING IS INNOVATIVE ART FORM. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/run-d-m-c-is-beating-the-rap-106981/ 

Home Music Music News

Run-D.M.C. Is Beating the Rap

Three kids from Queens are ‘Raising Hell’ at their shows. Run-D.M.C. set the record straight on rap music and violence

 

Run-D.M.C. on the cover of Rolling Stone. 

Moshe Brakha 

by Ed Kiersh

December 4, 1986

Rolling Stone

Eyeing a gold Jacuzzi in his $750-a-night suite at the Stouffer airport hotel in Los Angeles, Run, the deffest rapper in the world, exclaims, “Me go to Michael Jackson‘s for dinner? I just don’t know if I’m going. Shit! Who cares? Why should I go? Is his thing really mine?”

Run (Joe Simmons), D.M.C. (Darryl McDaniels, also known as D) and Jam Master Jay (Jason Mizell) — the trio that has recently injected rap into the American mainstream with its double-platinum album Raising Hell – are blasting the white-gloved Jackson and other glitzy pop stars

Kids can look up to us,” yells Run, so named because of his motor mouth. “We don’t do any dumb shit.”

“We don’t paint our faces neither,” says Jay, 21.

Run, 22, who is careful to distance his group from Boy George and “homo-assed drug takers,” says, “Michael wants us to make a record with him, and we don’t really want to make a record with Michael. We really dig Barry White.” The rappers have discussed collaborating with White, the rotund soul man who had a string of sexy hits in the Seventies.

“Michael’s not really us,” says Jay.

“He doesn’t fit the program,” says Darryl, 22. “Michael? If I met Michael Jackson and he had that thing on his face [Jackson’s famed surgical mask], I’d rip it off. I’ve got no germs, man.”

“Michael doesn’t feel the way I feel,” snaps Run, a native of Hollis, a middle-class neighborhood in Queens, New York. “He wants us on his next album. He wants to make a record about crack. We have good rhymes about it because we still see it, we live in the neighborhood still. I’ve made a lot of money, but I still live in Hollis. It’s so funny. I don’t have a big mansion and beautiful clothes. I see the crack on the corner. I need to get rid of this thing. Michael probably would like me to lay some of this on his album. Michael writes lyrics, but I write what I think. I see and feel all day.”

While their remarks have the same uncompromising grittiness as their music, the tension behind their words reveals that Run-D.M.C. is now at a crossroads. Having broken through to white radio with “Walk This Way,” its collaboration with the hard-rock group Aerosmith, Run-D.M.C. must decide how to be pop and streetwise at the same time. Run-D.M.C. also faces another crisis. As its fame has increased, the trio has consistently been associated with violence. A riot between two youth gangs at the Long Beach Arena last August left forty-two people injured. It was the fifth time this past summer that a Run-D.M.C. concert led to mass arrests or serious injuries. Bloody incidents also plagued some theaters showing Krush Groove, the 1985 film in which the group appeared, leading Parents’ Music Resource Center spokeswoman Tipper Gore to claim that rappers tell fans, “It’s all right to beat people up.” While promoters have canceled Run-D.M.C. shows or added to the hysteria with talk of hiring extra security guards for concerts, more dispassionate observers have suggested that the group is getting a bum rap.

Yet the image has stuck. To much of white America, rap means mayhem and bloodletting.

So as Run leaves his penthouse suite to collect a rented black Corvette at the hotel’s carport, he looks concerned. He insists that he, D and Jay have come to Los Angeles to promote a truce among warring “gang-bangers,” not simply to clean up their image. As Run explains, the group will take phone calls at KDAY, a local radio station, “just so a small beginning can be made to stop gangs, stop drugs. If only one kid turns away from gangs or drugs, we’ve been successful.”

That squeaky-clean image is reinforced outside the hotel when Run encounters a black deputy marshal from the L.A. municipal court. Moving through a group of well-dressed businesswomen to shake Run’s hand, the marshal says, “Boy, is my son a fan of yours! All because of you he wants to be a DJ. I just bought him a mixer.”

“That’s how I started out. DJing and playing basketball,” Run coos boyishly, staring at the man’s shiny badge and gun. “Give your son the word: DJing is good, it’s def. Tell your son you were hanging out with me.”

“I will, I will,” the marshal says. “My son will go wild about this.”

Run’s smile broadens once his car arrives. Instead of renting a large silver or gold Mercedes like other members of the Run-D.M.C. entourage, Run prefers the sportier feel of a Corvette. As he dials his wife, Valerie, and his three-year-old daughter, Vanessa, on the car’s cellular phone, he says, “I’m a real family man now. I even took them to Europe this summer, and we had a ball. I’m the kind of guy who gets lonely after a show and takes a flight home.”

Run chats with Valerie for ten minutes, learning that his daughter spent the day at Belmont Racetrack. He promises to call again later that evening, and that reminds him about Michael Jackson’s dinner invitation.

Run knows that it’s one thing to scratch, rhyme and scat over Aerosmith’s tune, but it’s a different move to cross into Jackson’s pasteurized pop world. He burrows deeper in the comfy front seat and sighs. “I have to go for a ride to clear the bees out of my head. Later I’ll get in the Jacuzzi – that way I can get my brain together. I have to decide if I want to hang out with Michael. I just don’t know. I.”

Run’s last words are lost in a loud vroooom as he puts his foot to the gas and screeches out of the carport.

Run-D.M.C.’s Raps Echo the Sounds of the City, capturing the aggressive boasts and frustrated threats of street-toughened youths. The group’s debut album, Run-DM.C. was a bravado-filled jaunt on which Run urgently bragged that he was “the coolest and the baddest.” Run-D.M.C. was the first rap album to go gold and the first to have a song featured on MTV. The follow-up LP. King of Rock, was similarly boastful but less stark, as the group drifted into entertaining musicality, adding some reggae riffs and hard-rock guitar.

Raising Hell, the record that’s catapulted Run-D.M.C. into the realm of appearances on Saturday Night Live and The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers (they rapped with Rivers), teems with raw messages about the streets, drugs and promiscuity. The huge success of the album – it’s the first rap LP to go platinum – and the “Walk This Way” single has caused Run-D.M.C. to soar far beyond hip-hop. With sales of Raising Hell now well over 2 million, Run-D.M.C. has more than mainstream credibility. It is now one of the hottest groups in America.


And although their defiant, socially urgent anthems certainly speak to inner-city youths, Run, D and Jay are hardly products of Watts or Harlem. Friends since childhood, all three grew up in Hollis, a neighborhood of one-family homes and well-tended gardens. Both of Run’s parents worked, holding down respectable jobs with the city. So little Joey played basketball, listened to his Stevie Wonder and Barry White records and otherwise led a genteel life.

Still the doting son, Run is quick to pay homage to his father, Daniel Simmons, a New York Board of Education employee who inspired him to write poetry at age ten. “My father is a great person,” says Run, sounding like a true product of the middle class. “My mother and my father made sure I was never deprived of anything.

“The worst thing that ever happened to me as a kid was that gym class would run out of time. I couldn’t play my basketball game. Oh yeah, I couldn’t bring my box to school neither. But that’s it. No way was I brainwashed or hurt by being black . . . It’s not like I never had any money. I’ve always had money.”

By the time Joey became a teenager, the staccato, thumping beats of rap were beginning to replace disco in black nightclubs nationwide. Acts like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five made Sugarhill Records the king of the ghetto blaster. Run’s brother Russell, whose life story is depicted in Krush Groove, was also starting to make noise. Establishing Rush Productions, he began to book rappers into his college, and it was under his aegis that Curtis Walker became Kurtis Blow, the early rap superstar responsible for the smash hit “The Breaks.” Blow would often sleep over at the Simmonses’. “I knew my brother and Kurt were having a great time,” says Run. “I wanted to be with them.”

So Joey started scratching over records, modeling his style after Blow’s. Soon Joey’s DJ’ing was so inspired that he toured along with his mentor, billed as “The Son of Kurtis Blow.”

Joey played tapes of his appearances with Kurtis Blow shows for Darryl, a friend at St. Pascal Baylon, a Catholic elementary school in Queens. A comic-book aficionado, Darryl gave up drawing Spiderman and Captain America to start rapping with Joey. The pair didn’t team up officially with Jay, an old basketball friend of Joey’s, until after they’d graduated from high school. Their first single, “It’s Like That/Sucker M.C.’s,” coproduced by Russell, became a hit in 1983, as did their next release, “Hard Times/Jam-Master Jay.” Rap music, which had seemingly peaked in popularity, suddenly rebounded. And Joey Simmons, eager to become rap’s most recognizable star, decided to make a final commitment to the genre. He gave up studying mortuary science at LaGuardia Community College for a life on the run.

I knew there was going to be trouble, there had to be,” says Chino, a gang member, recounting how violence erupted at the Long Beach Arena last August 17th between his gang, the Bloods, and their rivals, the Crips. “We were just sitting there, listening to LL Cool J [one of the opening acts], and these Crips started to show their colors under their jackets. That wasn’t right, man. Then they started snatching gold chains and breaking chairs, you know, to use the legs as clubs. We had to do the same shit.”

As Run-D.M.C. looked on from backstage, club-wielding policemen swept through the packed 14,500-seat arena, and over the next three hours fights raged in and out of the hall. Run-D.M.C. never made it to the stage.

“It was crazy,” says another member of the Bloods, eighteen-year-old Mafia Dick. “Everybody was messing with everybody. We don’t get along outside, so we’re not going to get along inside. Some go to get a kick out of Run-D.M.C.’s music, but most of the guys just go there to fight. I did. We knew other gang bangers would be there. Run’s music is up-to-date. We like their rhymin’. It’s hip, it says something to me, and I like their clothes – it’s B-boy style to the highest degree. So gangs want to see them, and when you put all these groups together, you’re lookin’ for trouble.”

That view is supported by Steve Young and Lloyd Smith, two Inglewood detectives, both of whom are veteran observers of the gang lifestyle and its deadly eruptions of machismo. They have little patience for liberal-toned explanations of violence. To them, all gang strife is to be condemned and swiftly punished. And yet, as they sit in an office strewn with photos of gang members, they take a far different stance from the usual Run-D.M.C. headlines.

“It could’ve been a dog or pony show at the arena, the violence would’ve still broken out,” says Young. “Run-D.M.C. gets a bad rap because of the crowds they draw. There are long-held grudges between these gangs, and when they converge in one place, the paybacks will come. Sure, Run-D.M.C.’s music touches a nerve, and the raps are all street, but even if Reagan was speaking, there’d have been bloodshed.”

The legacy of Long Beach – and the reverberations from other incidents this past summer in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Atlanta, Cincinnati and New York – is not yet forgotten. For many, Run-D.M.C.’s name is now synonymous with rioting crowds, wailing ambulances and wholesale arrests. Newspaper editorials have blamed the group’s driving lyrics for drawing crowds “bent on havoc.” Jittery politicians have tried to ban the group from playing in various cities. Dates in L.A. and Providence, Rhode Island, were canceled, and after a Run-D.M.C. appearance at an L.A. street fair was scrubbed in September, Deputy Mayor Tom Houston proclaimed, “I’ll be damned if we’ll have them.”

For Run, however, the most hurting blast came from Kurtis Blow. In several interviews, Run’s former mentor rebuked him for laying down raps that might encourage violence. Run is still smarting from the charge. Attributing Blow’s outburst to jealousy, Run bristles. “Kurt tried to ruin us,” he says. “He’s so jealous. He never had a gold album in his life. He’s disgusting.”

Run also dismisses criticism from the media and politicians, boasting, in typically grand fashion, “They say we’re putting out bad messages to the kids. All – you hear? – all our messages are good . . . Our image is clean, man. Kids beat each other’s heads every day. They are fighting because they were fighting before I was born. I’m no sociologist, but we’re role models, man, big-time role models . . . I get bigger and bigger, and I don’t care what people think.”


Considering some of the press his group has received recently, it’s not very surprising that Run seems defensive, even nervous, about talking with reporters. At a morning press conference to discuss the next day’s KDAY event, he looks away as we shake hands, and he bitterly asks, “What type of article is this going to be, anyway?” Further irritated by the photographers buzzing around him, he snaps, “I talk from the heart, but no matter what I try to say, people always dis [criticize] us. They sensationalize everything . . . They have to stereotype us.”

His temper cools once the conference begins. Wearing green pants, a matching work shirt, characteristically unlaced white Adidas low tops and a porkpie hat, he grins at the TV cameras as Barry White compliments the group for its social concern. After various community activists pay their own tributes to Run-D.M.C, White describes the L.A. gang problem – 268 gang killings last year – as “the coming Armageddon at your front door.”

White’s intensity brings a look of anguish to Jay’s face. Run nervously fondles a miniature gold sneaker dangling from his neck and tells the crowd, “Life is hard enough without drugs or joining gangs. We have great positive messages for kids. We’re in touch with all the kids. They’ll listen to us before they’ll listen to their teachers or mothers and fathers. We’re cooler than them as far as the kids are concerned, and being cool is staying in school.”

The follow-up questioning is rather timid. Only one reporter challenges Run’s sincerity, suggesting the group’s L.A. visit was a necessary act of public relations after the Long Beach riot. Dismissing that implication, Run reiterates the group’s positive message. “We offer kids alternatives. We tell them they can go play ball, go to school. There are lots of other things you can do besides taking drugs or joining gangs . . . We’re positive.”

The conference unceremoniously ends on that note, and in keeping with their pure-boy image, America’s hottest rappers want to go to a national landmark for lunch: McDonald’s.

Run-D.M.C.’s common-man approach to dining is also in sync with other aspects of their lives. All three guys continue to live in Hollis, either in houses they grew up in or close by. Run insists that the trappings of success – platinum and gold albums, offers from Adidas and Technics to do commercials, a forthcoming line of B-boy clothes – haven’t spoiled them. “Move?” Run says. “What for? Beverly Hills? That’s corny and fake, man. If Michael Jackson is happy out here, more power to him. I just need two dollars in my pocket and a basketball game.”

Unlike Jay and D.M.C., who stud their fingers with diamond rings, Run wears little jewelry. “I don’t want money,” he says. “I’ve made money. Right now I don’t need ten cars, but I have enough money for fifty cars. I don’t want anything. I’m so happy. I look at my daughter sleeping. I kiss her while she’s asleep. I sit with a pen and see if I can write something. If not, I go shine up my ’66 Oldsmobile [he also has an ’86 Riviera], gas it up and drive my wife to work. She works at a doctor’s office. Then I go call Jay.”

Run punctuates that self-portrait with a rhyme: “People always saying/’Yo, Run, you made a killing/Where’s your car, where’s your gold?’/Yo, man, I’m just chilling/I’m not rhyming for the money/This is straight from the heart/People think my car is funny/But I get it to start.”

But now that Run-D.M.C. hats and T-shirts have supplanted Michael Jackson items in American households, Run is not your ordinary two-cheeseburger man at McDonald’s. Even before he could ride to the Golden Arches in the group’s gold Mercedes and before he had a troop of P.R. agents to pamper him, he never knew the crippling destitution of many black lives. So how can he really talk to a fourteen-year-old who sees selling drugs as the only way out of the ghetto? This philosophical discussion with Run must be shelved; he doesn’t want any company during the group’s jaunt to McDonald’s. When he finally appears back at the hotel, he gives me a long, hard stare. He sits sullenly near a window, twirling his hat and staring at the bleak airport environs.

Jay said earlier, “I don’t think nobody’s after me; I forgive those reporters who fucked us.” Now he takes the lead. “Bad lyrics? Bullshit! We’re not talking about laying the girl down or doing this drug. . . We’re the only people who can talk to kids. Besides Bruce Springsteen, Born in the U.S.A., I haven’t heard a decent record.”

Yeah, I love Bruce Springsteen,” Run quickly interjects. “Like us, he has a positive message. We’re gonna sell as much as him, if not more, ’cause we feel the same way. I hang with Bruce. I know him. I did a record with Bruce Springsteen, we made ‘Sun City’ because we would never play there [in South Africa] . . . I’m making lots of money now. I’m going to go over there with suitcases filled with money and build things . . . We’re also going to open drug rehabilitation centers. I’m not going to call them the Run-D.M.C. House, I’ll just open them.”

“Yeah, we’re bigger and better than any bullshit bands,” yells D. The usually quiet, six-foot-plus McDaniels takes off his thick, black-rimmed shades and continues. “The reason why they are listening to us is because we are the Michael Jackson of now. Prince was it when Purple Rain came out. But we are what’s going on right now. We are the music. We are what’s hot.”

“We are the world, we are the children,” sings Run. Jerking himself up in his chair, he says he doesn’t want to be known as the man who ended crack in America. “But, oh, my God,” he says, “my mission is so big. We just left New York. We did a big thing with Mayor Koch, Cuomo [an anticrack rally for New York City schoolchildren], and the kids didn’t care about them. We came onstage, and we all did it . . . Kids listened.

“I’d just like to ask Tipper Gore if she ever listened to my records,” continues Run. Then he launches into the autobiographical “Here We Go” rap: “Cool chief rocker, I don’t drink vodka/I keep a microphone inside my locker/Go to school every day/On the side make them pay/The things I do make me a star/And you can be too if you know who you are/Just put your mind to it, you’ll go real far/Like the pedal to the metal when you’re driving a car.”

Grimacing and disgustedly shaking his head, Run expands on this beat to talk about the Aerosmith collaboration. “Nag, nag, nag, everybody is nagging me because of ‘Walk This Way.’ Everyone’s talking about crossovers. ‘Hey, son, didn’t you do this to get more radio play?’ . . . I hope nobody wants to talk to me next year. I’m ready for a flop. You know why? If everybody is nagging me about ‘Walk This Way,’ they can get my dick head.” Run bangs his fist on the table before continuing. “You know why? Because I made that record because I used to rap over it when I was twelve. There were lots of hip-hoppers rapping over rock when I was a kid. Now I made it and everyone wants to nag me. As for my trying to get more radio play, I’ll never . . . I always say what I feel.”

Run doesn’t advise other rappers to move into rock, saying, “You have to do what’s real. It’s like how my ideas come to me, naturally. That’s how I came up with the idea for ‘My Adidas.’ I thought one day of all the incredible things I’ve done with these sneakers on. Live Aid and all the concerts.”

Talk then turns to the group’s next movie. Run wants Tougher Than Leather, which is about to go into production, to be more “real” than Krush Groove. “Krush Groove was nothing but a Walt Disney movie,” Run says. “The Fat Boys [another rap group that appeared in the film] were just being funny, and I didn’t do nothing. This next one is going to be action filled, a real mystery.”

All three guys start screaming at once. Jay keeps saying, “Leather‘s going to be much more violent, a lot more violent.” And this prompts D to chime in: “That’s right, it’s gonna be like a good John Wayne flick. The violence is there, but you don’t mind if the good guys are doing it.”

Run says that the film will revolve around the group’s search for the killers of their beloved real-life roadie, Runny Ray. Since the murderers plant drugs on Ray, the cops view the case as “just another dead nigger.” So the boys must become detective-avengers, or a cross between Eddie Murphy in 48 HRS. and Sylvester Stallone in Rambo.

Run says it will be “the best movie in the world. At the end, we’re all heroes. You’re happy we’re kicking their butts. It has to be violent because it has to be violent. Sometimes violence is needed.”

Playing the diplomat, Jay insists, “We don’t promote violence to the kids.” As for the violence at the Long Beach concert, he says, “I wanted to bang some bangers’ heads out there. Whoever I see fucking up in my concert, I want to be the big motherfucking Bruce Lee and kick the gang’s ass, throw them all in fucking jail and do my concert.”

“We’re positive,” says Run. “We’ve played so many beautiful gigs. We’re not a threat. I want to be happy every day. I’m fighting to help things . . . I’ve got a movement of happiness. We are not thugs. We don’t use drugs. People try to stereotype us . . . “

“Yeah, we look like young black kids that are going to rob you,” says Darryl, laughing.

But they all say that it wouldn’t be happening if they were a white band. “Some people just want to stop rap,” says Run. “The politicians blame it on us. Other people are hoping we’ll mess up . . . But we’re investing our money wisely, we have good accountants, and the three of us are so close we think the same. We’re not gonna do anything to hurt ourselves, nothing.”

Russell Simmons is worried – not about the public-relations problem caused by violence at Run-D.M.C.’s shows but about the group’s current do-good attitude. The cochairman of Def Jam Recordings and the manager of Whodini, the Beastie Boys and Run-D.M.C, Simmons worries that the group is becoming too “straight,” that its edge will be dulled by too many anticrack, antigang campaigns. He wants to make them “harder” but is worried that Run is on a “mission” that could undermine their commercial clout. “I look at them and say, ‘Stop being a pussy.’ But Joey really thinks he owes these kids something. This crack thing is a serious concern . . . Let’s hope a year from now people don’t think they’re suckers.”

Simmons admits that he sees how his little brother’s lyrics could lead to antisocial behavior. Still, he calls his brother’s group “one of the most positive teenage bands there is. These lyrics are done with kids in mind that should be able to understand them. If they can’t, that’s not even a tragedy . . . The guys sing about staying in school, going to church, respecting your mother, don’t take drugs . . . They’re positive; that’s the bottom line.”

But Russell Simmons feels the “preachy” lecturing of the group’s civic-minded projects, like the Jackson collaboration, will sabotage Run’s promise of “not doing anything to hurt ourselves.”

“This preaching scares me,” he says. “It gets on people’s nerves . . . They [Run-D.M.C.] spend so much time wanting to do shit like this Michael Jackson thing . . . I said, ‘Yeah, but fuck that. You have a career to worry about.’ The idea of Michael and Run is kinda soft . . . This is something that’s certainly not going to make Run-D.M.C. bigger or better; it could kill them. It could kill their careers in front of their first audience.”

Kday has called its call-in show Day of Peace, but outside the studio, dozens of husky security guards expect trouble. It’s rumored the Rollin’ Sixties branch of the Crips gang will disrupt Run-D.M.C.’s appearance. And when a youth in a passing car shouts, “Those Bloods shot my momma and brother,” a nervous worker at the event says, “This whole thing is a farce. Kids with Uzis and sawed-off shotguns are not going to stop their shit because of a radio program.”

Exuding far more optimism, Barry White arrives in an ivory Rolls, and once again he effusively praises Run-D.M.C. The hefty, stringy-haired White has lost a brother in the gang wars, but he’s upbeat today. “This day’s a beginning,” he says. “We can put a stop to drugs and gangs . . . The young people, blacks, white, Hispanic, all colors, love Run-D.M.C. They have reached the nerve of the people through their young grooves, their rapping genius.”

Excited by the prospect of doing an antidrug song with Run-D.M.C., White gives each of the three a bear hug upon their arrival. But as the boys enter the studio, they all but forget White. Now the talk is only of Michael Jackson.

“He’s the best man in the world,” says Run, making sure the depth of his new feelings is understood. “He’s an incredible human being. We ate soul food at Michael’s studio last night, and it seemed like he was in touch with God. He’s so calm, so content, and I’m going to go into the studio to do a tape with him. It’ll be an anticrack song. The guy who did Mean Streets and Taxi Driver [director Martin Scorsese] is going to make the video. The whole thing was just great. Michael kept asking me, about rap. I asked him about record sales. And when the fried chicken came, I knew he was cool.”

Smiling beatifically as a KDAY worker adjusts his headset, Run keeps raving about Michael. “He’s just a normal, nice man. He’s just as D described him. Have you ever seen Bambi? Well, he’s just like that. If he went outside and saw a flower, he’d probably say, “That’s beautiful.’ People say he’s gay and stuff. I don’t believe that . . . In the middle of the evening I was just thinking, ‘Gee, I’m sitting next to Michael Jackson, a superstar,’ and then I realized he’s just normal, sitting there eating his rice and playing with my gold sneaker.”

This story is from the December 4th, 1986 issue of Rolling Stone.

https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/run-dmc

ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME

Run-D.M.C.

INDUCTED:  2009

Category:  Performers

Members:

• Darryl “DMC” McDaniels
• Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell
• Joseph “Rev Run” Simmons

Run DMC was a group of firsts.

First rappers on MTV, first rappers on Saturday Night Live, first rappers on the cover of Rolling Stone, first rappers to win a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. They broke down barriers for future rap acts, crossed boundaries between rap and rock and dispelled old notions of what rap could be.

Biography

 

Run DMC exploded out of Hollis, Queens in 1983, changing the sound of rap music, street fashion and popular culture in general.

Their approach was stripped-down and spare, and they innovated by rapping over rock beats, even incorporating hard-rock guitar samples on occasion. Most important they stayed true to the realities of the street. Their first release, the 12-inch single “It’s Like That”/”Sucker MCs” inaugurated a revolution in rap. Released on Profile Records and produced by Kurtis Blow, it was the first rap single with a hard beat and stripped-down, no-nonsense delivery.

Run DMC gave rap both its first gold album (Run-D.M.C., 1984) and its first platinum album (King of Rock, 1985). They also took rap into the Top Ten when they collaborated with Aerosmith on a rap remake of that group’s “Walk This Way.” After that single and video conquered radio and MTV, the racial and stylistic barriers between rock and rap were never again quite so pronounced.

The list of “firsts” for Run DMC continues: first rappers to turn up on MTV, Saturday Night Live and the cover of Rolling Stone. They were the first rap act nominated for a Grammy Award (Best R&B Vocal Performance by a Group), for 1986’s Raising Hell. They even turned up at Live-Aid and on American Bandstand. Rap and its messages became more assimilated into the American mainstream following the trailblazing lead of Run DMC They did it all by being themselves—dressing without image or affectation, popularizing black tennis shoes in the process. They even did a popular ode to their favorite footwear, “My Adidas,” which also saluted the “beat of the street.”

Run DMC were to rap what Sam and Dave were to soul, defining their respective genres as frontmen in a duo format. It all started when a youthful DJ Run—nicknamed for his speedy turntable prowess—was deejaying for rap artist Kurtis Blow, who was managed by Run’s brother, Russell Simmons. (Simmons would go on to found Def Jam Recordings, becoming one of America’s premier black entrepreneurs.) The trio of Run, D.M.C. and Jam Master Jay, who had grown up and gone to school together in Hollis, Queens, issued their first single, which was produced by Kurtis Blow.

Coming four years after the earliest rap records, “It’s Like That”/”Sucker MCs” was hailed by critics as the first b-boy (“bad boy”) record, signaling a hardcore, streetwise new direction for rap. The delivery was straightforward, the words hard-hitting and the beats and backing sparse and powerful, with lots of space. Hip-hop writer Sasha Frere-Jones noted the “legible, populist minimalism” of Run DMC’s records, and made this observation about their interplay as rappers: “The rhymes go back and forth like beach balls between sea lions, with one finishing the other’s line, a strategy that hasn’t been heard since battle crews like Cold Crush Brothers ruled in 1980 and 1981.”

The albums that followed—Run-D.M.C. (1984), King of Rock (1985) and Raising Hell (1986)—firmly cemented Run DMC’s stature in the vanguard of this harder-edge “new school” rap. (A quarter century and several schools later, they are now viewed as the progenitors of “old school” rap.) The self-titled debut album was a veritable greatest-hits release in itself, with four of its songs—“It’s Like That,” “Hard Times,” “Rock Box” and “30 Days”—placing high on the R&B charts. King of Rock kept the streak going by contributing three Top 20 R&B hits of its own: the title track, “You Talk Too Much” and “Can You Rock It Like This.”

Run DMC’s third album, Raising Hell, made them rap’s first superstars. The album sold 3 million copies in the first year of its release, making it the best-selling rap album to date and pointing the way toward the ascension of rap and hip-hop as the dominant genres in popular music in the Nineties. The album yielded the titanic hits “My Adidas” (Number Five R&B), “You Be Illin’” (Number Twelve R&B, Number Twenty-Nine pop) and “It’s Tricky” (Number Twenty-One R&B, Number Fifty-Seven pop). The biggest breakthrough, however, came with their collaboration with Aerosmith on a remake of “Walk This Way.” The single and hugely popular accompanying video brought down the walls between rap and rock, ushering rap into the musical mainstream. With “Walk This Way,” Run DMC actually found themselves charting higher on the pop chart (Number Four) than the R&B chart (Number Eight). Their Together Forever Tour with the Beastie Boys furthered the union between black and white audiences.

While Run DMC unflinchingly rapped about urban realities, they also spread positive messages—pro-education, pro-voting, anti-gang and anti-drug—to help change the paradigm. “Our image is clean,” Run said in a 1986 cover story in Rolling Stone. “I’m no sociologist, but we’re role models, man, big-time role models.”

Run DMC’s fourth album, Tougher Than Leather (1988), provided the title and inspiration for a feature film in which they starred as themselves. On Back from Hell, they broke new ground by rapping over instrumental R&B grooves. The title alluded to the fact that this album followed a darker period in the business and personal lives of the group members. They finished out their six-album run for Profile Records with Down With the King, released in 1993. This ended their remarkable ten-year reign in rap’s vanguard. An attempted comeback on the Arista label in 2001 resulted in the disparaged Crown Royal album.

Despite their clean image, behind the scenes there were some issues with alcohol and drugs, which Darryl McDaniels (“D.M.C.”) forthrightly addressed in his autobiography, King of Rock: Respect, Responsibility, and My Life with Run-D.M.C. All the tribulations of the high life led his partner Run to become a born-again Christian. Now known as Rev. Run, he launched a family-based reality series, Run’s House. Tragically, Jam Master Jay fell victim to the sort of violence Run DMC deplored. After returning from a Run-D.M.C. tour, he was shot to death at his studio in Hollis, Queens in October 2002. His murder has never been solved.

The key albums in Run-D.M.C.’s catalog—Run-D.M.C., King of Rock, Raising Hell and Tougher Than Leather—were re-released in deluxe editions with bonus tracks in 2005. As new generations discover the old-school sound, Run DMC continue to receive their due for kicking the rap revolution into high gear. As R&B singer Pharrell noted in 2009, “Run DMC has been at the core of what could be possible for kids who liked big beats, catchy rhymes and hard guitars. From ‘Walk This Way’ to ‘My Adidas’ they changed the face of music forever.” 

Inductees: Darryl "D.M.C." McDaniels (born May 31, 1964), Jason William Mizell "Jam Master Jay" (born January 21, 1965, died October 30, 2002), Joseph "Rev Run" Simmons (born November 14, 1964)

Run-D.M.C.

 

Music Interviews

 

RUN DMC On The Birth Of Rap

 

April 3, 2009 • Twenty-five years after RUN DMC's first single was released, member Darryl McDaniels sees the group's success as coming from a deliberate decision to create music that was sparse, hard-hitting and extremely rhythmic — just the way it sounded in those city parks.

Music Interviews

 

RUN DMC Crashes Rock's Hall Of Fame, Again

 

April 3, 2009 • When it's inducted on Saturday, RUN DMC will not be the first rap group to make it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — that was Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. But RUN DMC did achieve a number of historic firsts during its heyday in the 1980s.

• Download

• Transcript

 

Music Interviews

 

Run-D.M.C.'s Reverend Run Goes Solo

 

October 24, 2005 • Farai Chideya talks with Reverend Run aka Rev Run, formerly of the rap trio Run-D.M.C. He's back with his first solo CD, Distortion, and his own reality show on MTV, Run's House.

• Download

• Transcript

The History of Hip-Hop

Rapper Darryl McDaniels of Run-D.M.C.

 

Fresh Air

 

August 30, 2005 • Darryl McDaniels is the "D.M.C" of the seminal rap group Run-D.M.C, which brought new fashion and language to popular culture. Their self-titled first album — the first rap record to go gold — was the first of a string of successful releases. (This interview originally aired May 19, 1997.)

https://www.spin.com/featured/run-dmc-raising-hell-interview/

Hell Raisin’

Run-D.M.C.'s Raising Hell turns 31 years old today. In honor of the anniversary, we've republished our feature on the album, which ran in our August 1986 print issue.

by John Leland  

May 15 2017

SPIN 

This is Mom’s Place, a combination Jamaican restaurant/car service/pool hall on Hollis Avenue and 200th Street in Hollis, Queens, the middle-class black neighborhood where the three members of Run-D.M.C. grew up. On a cold, rainy Tuesday night, a couple dozen neighborhood teenagers and slightly older folks have gravitated from the sidewalk in front of a Chinese take-out place down the block and into Mom’s. Brown paper sacks holding 40 dogs (40-ounce bottles of Olde English Malt Liquor) circulate, and the sweetish chemical smell of crack cuts through the damp air. A jukebox blares the Temps’ “Just My Imagination” over the shrill bleeps from the video game, as someone sings along, off-key: “Of all the skeezers in New York…” Mom surveys the crowd with a look you could use to cut glass.

“Yo, turn us on to the box. We need two skeezers. I’m a single-minded man with a plural. Yo, where the skeezers be hanging out at?”

“You think you made up skeezers? Like Jonah said to the whale, I ain’t swallowing that.”

“Can I get some sidewalk here?”

“You gonna get the next 40, Jay? Jay! Jay!“

“Yo, I just heard your new album.”

“What did you think? You know it’s a winning album. Either that or leave Hollis now. You can’t front on my album. You know it’s the best shit. You don’t like ‘My Adidas’? You don’t like ‘Peter Piper’? You don’t like ‘Hit It Run’?”

“You liked it, but you liked it in your mouth.”

“Run” (Joe Simmons), “D.M.C.” (Daryll McDaniels), “Jam-Master Jay” (Jason Mizell), and I had been sitting in Jay’s 1986 black Lincoln for about 20 minutes, discussing whether Mom would let me in. There’d been a problem with a white guy before. But D.M.C. didn’t want to go bowling, and on a Tuesday night in Hollis there isn’t a hell of a lot else to do. So here we are. No problems. Everyone seems to think I’m someone else.

“Yo, Danny! … You’re not Danny? I’m gonna call you Danny anyway.”

Run explains: MC Danny White Boy. The only white guy in Hollis.

“Are you down with the Beastie Boys?”

This is the Hollis crew, the people who remember when Run and D.M.C. were 15 and part of the Magnificent Super Seven, rapping in Hollis Park in checkered blazers. Back in the di-days, the people who gathered around Jay when he cut up Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and Billy Squier’s “Big Beat” on the biggest sound system in the neighborhood included: Butter Love, formerly Dougie Bee of the Magnificent Super Seven, now part of the rap group called the Hollis Crew; Runnie Ray, with his ghetto blaster wrapped in plastic against the rain; Cool Tee, a Super Seven alumnus; stocky, nappy-haired Country; Shane, who compares Cadillacs with D.M.C.; Daryl Woods, an almost skin-headed guy in a varsity jacket who put laces into Jay’s Adidas; barrel-chested Jocko in a gray down jacket and a gray Adidas ski hat.

“We made Run-D.M.C. what they are,” says a childlike 17-year-old named Lamont, or Little L. “We go to all their jams and we boost them and get the crowd pumping. Get the girls motivated. You know, we’re the party motivators. Run used to hang out with my cousin, so they used to be at the house a lot. He used to come with a book of rhymes. This was back in the days. And Daryl, he used to be battling my cousin, drawing Bruce Lee pictures.”

Everybody has a story: about boxing with D.M.C. using nine pairs of socks for gloves, about how Run’s going to give them their big break. “This guy’s the best rapper around here,” says Run, pointing to Romeo, a handsome, caramel-complexioned youth with a transparent mustache and leather gaucho hat. “We’ll go outside and jam.” And in the cold rain, Run spits, lip farts, and otherwise human beatboxes while Romeo reels off a sly string of rhymes. Jay comes out to join in, and picks the jam way up with a counter rhythm.

“They don’t forget nobody,” adds Leslie, a 16-year-old with light brown braids and a bright gold front tooth. “They play ball in the park. And then the thing is, they say what’s true. It’s a rap, but it’s the truth, and it’s all about life. You gotta be around it, and everything’s out here.”

The crew is all here, and scattered among them is the most powerful group playing any genre of music today: Run, in a black Def Jam baseball jacket, black Adidas pants with the string hanging out, and beige Kangol hat; D.M.C., in a furry blue Kangol, fur-trimmed snorkel parka, blue Adidas warm-up top, unfaded blue Levis, and his trademark black-framed glasses; and Jay, shooting pool with Country, in a nylon Fila hooded warm-up top, black denim Lees, and the first example of hip-hop merchandising, a black Kangol with the Run-D.M.C. logo.

Run-D.M.C. are on edge tonight. As they shoot the shit and swill 40s at Mom’s, they are waiting for their third album, Raising Hell, to hit the racks. It will either break them out to a huge new audience or signal that they’ve gone as far as they can. They also know that they’ve got a motherfucker in the can. But the also know that rap careers tend to be meteoric, then collapse. Their last album, the weakly meandering King of Rock, raised some doubts that only two strong non-LP singles could erase. And they know that LL Cool J, dishing out the best of their old hard b-boy sound, is more than ready to push them aside. King of Rock sold better than 800,000 copies, but that was only a slight improvement over the sales of their debut album, despite heavy MTV exposure. All three members believe that the rock route was a mistake. This album could be their last chance.

“Everybody is looking for us to go downhill now,” says Jay. “Everybody’s praying and planning for our downfall. If we come with another weak album, we could be over with. Know what I’m saying? So we went to work. A couple of people say, ‘Hey, you know if you come weak this time, I’ll just be happy to step up.’ I ain’t going to say no names. Like when Run’s lung collapsed (in December), I know a lot of rappers who was real happy. There were people who actually talked about it. That’s real fucked up. Some people think if Run-D.M.C. is out of the race, it’s easy to go for yours out there.”

“Myself,” says Run, “I’m not interested in reaching a giant audience. I could sell a million and be happy every time. I like the b-boys that I know to buy records. I don’t want to go stretching my neck out to go find a rock crowd or whatever, trying to sell 50 million, cause I don’t even really understand that too much. I only know how to make what I know how to make. If there’s a million b-boys that buy that type of record, I’m straight. I’m not really trying to catch that Live Aid crowd or whatever.”

Despite their boasts and middle-brow moralizing, Run-D.M.C.’s lyrics have always been strikingly, powerfully banal autobiography. Cold, stark pedestrianism, as if any deviation from the straight and narrow were a step toward damnation. They rap about their friends, their glasses, about taking airplane flights at huge heights. On the Aerosmith collaboration, “Walk This Way,” their clumsy fumbling with Steve Tyler’s jaded lyrics drives home just how unsexual the group is. They’ve always been more about slicing away the bullshit than expanding a vision.

Drug rumors follow the band, and they probably aren’t as straight as they play it. But they really are victoriously mundane, directed guys. Family men.

Their money is in their cars: Jay’s Lincoln, D.M.C.’s Cadillac Fleetwood, Run’s Buick Riviera, all 1986, all black. Run wants to trade his in for a Jaguar; D.M.C. wants to give his to his father and buy a van with a water bed in the back. But there are plenty of Caddies in Hollis, and the three seem otherwise no different from the rest of the people at Mom’s. “I gave my moms a lot of money,” says Jay. “Fixed up my basement. Couple of color TVs, couple of VHSs, little bit of jewelry, some gold. Santa Claus at Christmas. Few thousand in the bank.”

D.M.C.: “I had a dream last night I was in a Datsun 280-Z, came out my house, and the cops just started chasing me and shit. And I went up on the sidewalk and shit. I said, this shit is def. I woke up, I was so happy.”

Run: “I dreamed we was in a fucking Datsun 280-Z, too. And the cops came up to us and Jay went through the light. And we said something to ‘em, and one cop said, ‘I don’t give a fuck what you do.’ It was a black cop, man. You know about wild dreams, man?”

Run is trying to make a point here. “Note that,” he says, as two more members of the Hollis crew make their way into Mom’s. Daryl Woods hugs each of them and wrestles him to the ground. Is this the usual Hollis greeting? “No,” he says. “That’s they own dumb shit.” Run keeps asking me about the new album. “You like ‘You Be Illin’ a lot, though? That’s the deffest shit. “You Be Illin’ is def, Jay. You think the record ‘[My] Adidas’ is going to do good, all the little kids are going to like it and everybody? What do you think of ‘[It’s] Tricky’?”

A penny falls to the floor. “Waste not,” screams Daryl Woods, slapping his huge palm over it, “want not.” Run and D.M.C., fortified by Olde English, break into an impromptu version of “Hit It Run,” with Run sputtering a beat behind D.M.C.’s raps. “Everybody likes that beatbox shit,” he says. “Bugs everybody the fuck out. Lets motherfuckers know what time it is.”

After their unsuccessful flirtation with musicality on King of Rock, Run-D.M.C. have returned to their roots. They ditched producer Larry Smith (he still makes great pop records with Whodini) and produced most of Raising Hell themselves in a street style. Despite the cover version of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” the album is almost exclusively hard b-boy jams, with little or not music. Just beats and rhymes– the style that they invented in 1983 with “Sucker M.C.’s,” the B-side of their first single, and turned into the dominant form in hip hop. The shit that put them on top in the first place.

“Before us,” says Jay, “rap records was corny. Everything was soft. Nobody made no hard beat records. Everybody just wanted to sing, but they didn’t know how to sing, so they’ll just rap on the record. There was no real meaning to a rapper. Bam[baataa] and them was getting weak. Flash was getting weak. Everybody was telling me it was a fad. And before Run-D.M.C. came along, rap music could have been a fad.”

“None of them was hard-hitting street jams,” says Run. “We came and got ill. There it is.”

“There was never a b-boy record made until we made ‘Sucker M.C.’s.'” Jay continues. “Now you got groups that just try to be all b.boy. Rappers wasn’t even street before we came out at all. Rappers used to dress up, leather this, leather that, chains. Did you ever see them back in the days? Motorcycle-gang-looking-people. When we came in, we dressed the way we always dressed, and we just did our thing. We was street. We was hard. When people seen us, they seen that we was regular, normal people. Didn’t go around with no braids in our hair, flicking them around. People tend to like what’s real. And we was real.

“‘Sucker M.C.’s.,’ ‘Jam-Master Jay,’ those records were trendsetting records. People based their whole lives on the way we looked. Even LL Cool J used to wear boots when he started rapping. His image wasn’t Kangol and rough and all that. He got that from us. We told him, ‘If you’re going to be from around our way, you can’t be like that.'”

You’re a five dollar boy and I’m a million dollar man
You’ze a sucker M.C., and you’re my fan. You’re tryna bite lines or rhymes of mine You’re a sucker M.C. in a pair of Calvin Kleins

–from “Sucker M.C.’s”

Run: “I had a dream last night I have my girl a car, but she didn’t want it. She wanted to paint it. But it turned into a barbecue grill that could make French fries and everything. How ’bout a car that could make French fries?”

D.M.C: “I had a crazy dream I was on the road with Michael Jackson. We went into a room, and we didn’t have to be at the show till five or something, and there was three Chinese girls in there tending to all my needs; it was real crazy, ironing my clothes. I went and took a shower, and I’m in the shower naked, and in the dream someone said, ‘Someone’s coming, someone’s coming.’ And I couldn’t see the face, but someone came in there with a knife. And it was like, what’s that movie? Alfred Hitchcock. Psycho. And then I just woke myself up. Word.”

“Everybody’s trying to call us the second generation of rap,” says Jay. “But we was doing it back in the days. We just wasn’t televised. Run was out there. Before the Sugar Hill Gang made ‘Rapper’s Delight,’ I was scratching already. 

I was about 15 by that time, so I been scratching.”

You can neatly divide rap history at Run-D.M.C.’s first single, “Sucker M.C.’s.” It was as radical and influential a record as “Anarchy in the UK.” With “The Message,” Sugar Hill abandoned the dominant production machine in rap music, and the label’s house band left. The artists who built the music from a Bronx subculture to a national phenomenon were suddenly hurled into a collective decline. As rappers tried to repeat the huge crossover success of “The Message” with transparently insincere social-consciousness raps, and break dancers made their way into soft-drink commercials, hip hop was losing its essential street urgency. In a little over three minutes, “Sucker M.C.’s” literally revived and redefined the anemic genre. Two guys and a gunshot drum machine (Jay hadn’t joined the group yet,) slicing through the malaise with the rawest kind of street talk: the dozens. Almost overnight, the dis (disrespect) rap controlled the street, and rappers started stripping their sound of all music. Hip hop was no longer, as Afrika Bambaataa called it, a renegade breed of funk. “Sucker M.C.’s” gave it its own brutal sound.

“It was just out there,” says Run, “like basketball, man. Something to do. Found out I was good at scratching and made a record. There it is.” This sort of “case closed” ejaculation, condensing eight years of his life into an epigram, is typical Run. He’s the loud member of the group, periodically screaming a line from a song or pumping bravado. “Bloods aren’t going to fuck with us, I’m telling you.” I know my town.” But when he’s drawn into conversation, he’s uncomfortable and closemouthed. In the pool hall he’s jumpy, running outside, never spending much time with anybody.

“I ain’t usually out here,” he says. “I never go nowhere. I’m not into going out. I just play basketball, come in the house, eat dinner, and go to sleep. I don’t like it out. I just stay in the house.”

“Run never was a hang-out guy,” Jay confirms. “Ever. He would go to a party and go home. ‘Cause Run always had to go home to his wife and kid.” Run just bought a house in Hollis, but for now he still lives with his father, his girlfriend of more than six years, and their almost three-year-old daughter, Vanessa. He is almost constantly looking for a phone to call home.

“Yes. No. No, I’m coming right home after this.”

“Cut Creator!” Shane yells, mimicking the line from LL Cool J’s “Rock the Bells”: “What’s your DJ’s name? / Cut Creator.”

“Valerie,” says Run. “That ain’t funny, man. She should read that in the article, then you in trouble.”

Run’s earned a reputation for being rude and smart-assed. He doesn’t pay much attention to anything I say unless it concerns his music. (By the end of our three says, he’s able to tell me just about every record I like, which mix, and why.) He got his start as DJ Run Love, the Song of Kurtis Blow. Blow and Run’s older brother, Russell, who now runs the Def Jam label and manages Run-D.M.C., LL Cool J, Whodini, the Beastie Boys, and a host of other rappers, were freshmen at the City University of New York in Harlem, where Simmons started Rush Productions to book rap acts into college parties. At 12, Run joined Blow onstage and the two traded places in the spotlight before an audience that was hungry for this new music.

Simmons has been the group’s guiding influence. At 28, Run’s prematurely balding older brother, who rarely leaves the house without a Kangol, may be the most powerful figure in hip hop. His career formed the center of the film Krush Groove, and his Rush Productions groups have traditionally been the heart of any big rap tour. When Slick Rick split from Doug E. Fresh, he signed with Rush. And with Def Jam, as all new Rush artists now automatically do.

“The first year,” says Jay, “Russell had us out there working for free. That means a lot of towns had big packed shows, and Run-D.M.C. was working free. He wasn’t just trying to get money, he was trying to build something. So I love Russell for that, cause he built us.”

Unlike his protégés, the older Simmons left Hollis and lives in Manhattan. He’s a visionary while Run is content. He has worked very hard as an independent businessman, and built a small empire. His vision is probably all that stands between Run-D.M.C. and the facile satisfaction of being local heroes. Like obedient younger brothers, Run, D.M.C., and Jay dutifully do what he wants.

School girl sleazy with classy kinda sassy
Little skirt hanging way up her knee
It was three young ladies in the school gym locker
And I found they were looking at D.

–from “Walk This Way”

Two car stories:

I’m riding with Jay in his Continental, breathing the strawberry and green apple scent of ten pine-tree air fresheners: two hanging from the rear-view mirror, four from the ceiling, and two from each side of the backseat. An ’86 black Cadillac Fleetwood pulls up beside us. The automatic windows of each car lower. Run sticks his head out the passenger-side window of the Fleetwood and yells: “Burger King!”

Run: “I was driving past Daryl Woods on his bicycle one day, and I said, ‘Let me just dis him real quick.’ I pulled over and said, ‘I believe that’s a hard way to get around.’ He said, ‘Perhaps’.”

A fleet of cruisers are assembled in front of D.M.C.’s house. There’s Jay’s back Continental, Run’s black ’96 Buick Riviera, Fat Boy Markie Dee’s silver Mercedes, and, just pulling up, D.M.C.’s black Fleetwood. Fifteen or 20 people from the neighborhood are hanging out around the cars.

“Where’s the kid at?” says Run, and finding me, leads me and D.M.C. inside; no, he tells Mrs. McDaniels, it isn’t necessary to get a pizza. D.M.C.’s brother Al and a light-skinned, freckled guy named Bimmy follow us down to the basement, where a row of two-liter soda bottles and an ice bucket flank candy dishes filled with nuts.

“This is like my waiting room,” says D.M.C., cueing up and scratching a copy of Yellowman and Fathead’s Bad Boy Shanking album on the glass-enclosed stereo. “When people come over, I gotta get up, take a shower, brush my teeth, clean my sneakers, shave. So I tell them to come down here and wait. I’m just living a life, man.” He grins broadly.

Like Run, D.M.C. is a hard man to get a word out of. He just doesn’t understand why you want to know, why you aren’t as beatifically content as he is. “Today,” he says, “I ain’t got nothing to worry about. I washed my car, I gave my friend some money, he gonna pay me back tonight.” Five days into kicking cigarettes, he seems happy.

“I used to draw the comic books,” says D.M.C. “Spiderman, the Hulk, Captain America, Superman, and all that. Until I was 12. When I turned 12 I found out about rap and started rapping. First, I was a DJ. I used to DJ in my basement. Then I got tired of deejaying, and I just started writing rhymes. I used to rhyme for hours. Drink a 40-ounce beer, Olde English, and I wouldn’t be able to shut up for the whole day and the whole night. Be rhyming all night loud everywhere I go. Everybody’d tell me, ‘Yo, why don’t you shut up, you been rhyming all night. Shut up, I don’t like this guy he won’t shut up.’ Rapping was more fun than being a DJ for me. ‘Cause I could get on the mike and tell people how devastating I am.”

After a few Yellowman and Fathead tracks, he pulls out an album of old hip-hop instrumentals, and plays a rapless version of Grandmaster Flash’s “Freedom.”

“Remember this?” he asks, and passes the album jackets around. It’s a generic white sleeve, custom decorated as the first record by the Magnificent Super Seven. In different-colored felt-tip pens, Easy Dee (D.M.C.), DJ Run, Terrible Tee, Runny Ray, Capri, Masta Tee Thiggs, and Dougie Bee invested the jacket with their names and their most unguarded hopes. It’s a beautiful artifact of innocence and diligence ,a meticulous enshrinement of seven adolescents’ most prized icons–their names and their dreams.

He’s the better of the best
Best believe he’s the baddest
Perfect timing when I’m climbing
I’m a rhyming apparatus Lotta guts when he cuts Girls move their butts His name is Jay come to play He must be nuts

From “Peter Piper”

Jay lives in an apartment in the basement of his mother’s house with his girlfriend and their newborn baby, Jason Jr. Possibly because he’s a new father, Jay seems the most responsible member of the group. In Burger King, he was the only one to throw out his garbage; D.M.C. saw him, looked back at the table, and continued to the checkout counter to deliver autographs. In the pool hall, when Daryl Woods tried to put Danny White Boy and me into a mock lineup, Jay put a stop to it. “I believe if one of my live homeboys came here,” he told Woods, “he’d fuck one of y’all up.” Then, to me: “I don’t even come down here no more. You bring a friend down here, and they try to disrespect you. Ain’t nobody in here anything compared to nothing.”

“I was a wild kid,” he says. “I hung out late. Hung out till the morning sometimes with my friends. I was the motivator. When I was 14, 15, all the big guys would say, ‘Where we going tonight?’ Any event that went down, I was on that train. I stopped being wild when I was 16. I started wanting to go to school all the time, wanting to be into books, When I say wild, I just didn’t care. I was smarter than everybody in my class all the time, so I just felt like I didn’t have to do the work. I was going to school, but I was messing up in school.

“After my father died, I really wised up. Everything changed for me then. I wanted to do what was right. Settled down, got a girlfriend. I was never really close, close friends with Run and D.M.C., but me and Run used to play basketball together, and me and D.M.C. used to drink Olde English.”

As a kid, Jay played bass and drums at block parties in a corny band, but saw that DJs had more pull than bands. “I had a turntable,” he says, “my friend had a turntable, all I had to do was buy a mixer. They had mixers for like 39 dollars. So my moms got me a mixer, and I started off like that. DJ battles was a fun thing. It was like a big park, and you’re over there and I’m over here. My crew used to have so much equipment that if you was anywhere that we could see you, they couldn’t hear you. Parties in Hollis, I was the DJ. Best guy in the neighborhood, for sure.

“The night I gave my biggest party, Run and D. went to the studio and put down ‘It’s Like That.’ I couldn’t go. They couldn’t be at my party. I was mad that D. and Run wasn’t at my party. Next day they came around with a tape. We started doing shows.”

When “It’s Like That” and “Sucker M.C.’s” became hits, Jay dropped out of Queens College, in the middle of his freshman year. Run dropped out of LaGuardia Community College, where he was studying mortuary science, and D.M.C. left St. John’s. For a group that claims to be a the first street-rap crew, these middle-class citizens aren’t exactly street kids.

“The feeling inside of me was never a soft feeling,” says Jay. “It’s no matter where you’re from. It’s who you are. There’s no difference between the Bronx and Queens. It’s just that we live in houses and they live in projects. So what? They went outside and had a fight with the guy down the block, we went outside and had a fight with the guy around the corner. No difference. Everybody seems to think that cause we come from a nice neighborhood… yo, everything that was everywhere else was in Queens, too. Drugs was out there. And then, I think that people from Queens have something more to prove than people from the Bronx. Mo Dee [from the Tenacious Three] and them, since they came from a rough neighborhood, they tried to act like they was from somewhere else. They used to be b-boys, but now they want to change their image to be like pop or something.”

As far as Run-D.M.C.’s label is concerned, Jay is not a member of the group. He isn’t signed to the label, and his picture appears on the back but never the front of the album covers. Until the new album, his royalties were half those of his partners: one percent of the retail sales. On Raising Hell, he gets two. “I spent the most time in the studio,” he says. “I put the album together. It’s all coming from a DJ’s point of view, instead of a musician’s point of view. If there was a producer of this album, Jason Mizell would be the producer of the album. But it’s not. Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin [Simmons’ partner at Def Jam] are. But I feel I produced it more than anybody produced it.”

A gold Cadillac insignia the size of a tennis ball hangs from a chain around D.M.C.’s neck, and a slightly smaller one gleams on his finger. “Anybody that sees him knows that that’s a rapper,” says Run, his friend since kindergarten. Though he limits his wardrobe to Adidas-wear and jeans (Run-D.M.C. recently posed for an Adidas promotional poster), he has the biggest beeper and the most gold. He gets up to change the record.

“You hear this record,” Run says, peeling the decals off a Rubik’s cube in frustration to get one all-black side. “‘You can’t change your fate.’ I don’t appreciate that. You can change your fate.”

But D.M.C. isn’t concerned. Nor is he worried about the band’s competition. “I’m telling you,” he tells his nervous partner, “Niggers don’t put us down for not being out. Niggers still love us. LL could have a lot of hits, niggers still come and tell me, ‘You can Run are the best.’ I’d be like, ‘What about LL?’ ‘No, you and Run are the best. I haven’t heard from you for five years, you’re the best.'”

“I be believing,” Run counters, “when we ain’t there, they telling LL, ‘Them boys is over, you’re the new king.'”

“You wanna go to the store with me, man?” he asks me. When I tell him I’m ready to split, disappointment crosses his face.

“Got a brand new Cadillac with a brand new 40 in the back,” he laments. “See, you’d be my excuse to get this quart of beer.”

He gets some money from his mother; D.M.C.’s parents control all his money, and give him an allowance. But there’s money to be made.

On a three-day stint in California this summer, they expect to clear $60,000 apiece. Raising Hell may sell more than a million copies. On the street, people constantly approach them for autographs; in Burger King, one of the guys behind the counter slipped them a tape. MTV sent a crew to cover the “Walk This Way” recording session. They may be on the verge of an unprecedented crossover success, but they built their careers proselytizing an image of regular Joe b-boys, eating Chicken Tenders at Burger King, and greasy chicken sandwiches on Wonder Bread with ketchup from Chung King. An old hip-hop club on the corner has turned into a “place for adults,” D.M.C. tells me. “We can’t go there no more. I don’t go anywhere new now that I’m famous.”

Dream sequence:

D.M.C.: “I had a dream there was about five parties going on in New York, and I was broke.”

https://hiphopdx.com/interviews/id.2941/title.does-run-dmc-have-the-first-classic-album-darryl-mcdaniels-weighs-in

Recent Interviews

Does Run-DMC Have The First Classic Album? Darryl McDaniels Weighs In

by Trent Clark

August 2, 2016 

HipHopDX.com

Words like “classic” and “legend” get passed all too easy in Hip Hop debates on the Internet (just take a look at the latest Facebook rap game) but the test of time tells no lies. 

Run-DMC, the Kings from Queens, had their legacy widely respected from both rock and rap publications, as they rewrote the G-code with every new single, album and music video they released throughout the 1980s. Today, the group’s name is synonymous with a myriad of cultural appreciation such as fashion (adidas® Shell Toe; leather jackets), remembrance (R.I.P. to Jam Master Jay and the basic art of deejaying) and quintessential rhymes (“I won’t stop rockin’ till I retire!”). 

Darry McDaniels recently found his way back into the news when he opened up about his battle with depression that almost cost him his life — by his own doing. Since those dark days nearly two decades ago, he has been a beacon for peace and light and is currently promoting his new memoir, Ten Ways Not to Commit Suicide, whose title is self-explanatory.

When chopping it up with HipHopDX, DMC got extremely animated just mentally reliving the days when his crew was on top of the rap game as it was being formed underneath their adidas, culturally and commercially. 

Read along as DMC ponders on the possibility of creating the blueprint of all blueprints when it comes to the rap game. A true legend. 

HipHopDX: How do you feel about Run-DMC [the album]? If you look back at The Source archives, that is the first 5 mic-rated album chronologically speaking. Looking back at the album’s legacy, do you guys feel like you made the first classic album? How do you feel to hear people say you have the first classic album?

DMC: Do I feel like I made the first classic album?

HipHopDX: Yeah, I mean it’s the oldest album to ever get 5 mics on The Source so some people say it’s the oldest classic album.

DMC: Wow! I think Raising Hell is more classic than our first one. The first album would’ve been doper if “Here We Go (Live At The Funhouse)” was on there. Then I would consider it classic because then it would have that classic four sixteen, Cold Crush score, Fantastic Five routine thing on there. I guess it’s a classic because having “Sucker MC’s” on it. “Sucker MC’s” was like a live cassette tape of MC’s in the park you know or up at Harlem World or something. 

HipHopDX: It just created a lot of history.

DMC: It was the catalyst of…even though we’re old school, it was the catalyst from the true school, into the old next metamorphosis of what Hip Hop was going to become with Public Enemy, and De La Soul, and Kool G Rap, and Eric B. and Rakim and them. It changed… It’s definitely classic because we have been involved from the Sugarhill era. That’s the significance of that album.

HipHopDX: Absolutely. I have to agree. I can go back to it and still get that vibe, that feeling to when you guys created it and see why people gravitated to it. 

DMC: It’s funny that you say that because when I do my lectures in high schools or middle schools, I tell the kids you can’t get it twisted; all school is in a time period. It’s a consciousness, it’s a feeling! These kids you know. When I read comments on YouTube, and a kid wrote I’m 12-years-old, and he’s listening to “Rock Box” and he’s like ‘I hate all Hip Hop now! Why wasn’t I alive? Why couldn’t this be coming out now!’ Like oh wow! It’s funny you say that. That’s what a classic means. When you say classic rock, classic rock doesn’t mean old rock n’ roll. Classic rock means the rock n’ roll that will be always forever better than everything that comes out after it for eternity. Same thing with the old school. You could throw “Peter Piper” on right now and it will buzz, it will have that same energy that it had 30-years-ago. 

It’s funny because there was this young guy at my gym that works behind the counter at my gym and he heard of Run-DMC but I guess he never listened to it. One day, I’ve been going to the gym for two-three years but one day, I come in, and this kid who’s probably still in high school, 17, 16 or 17, he comes running up to me saying ‘Oh my god! I knew you was who they said you was but I never knew what you did! Man when I heard that “Peter Piper” dog, that’s the best record I ever heard!’ I was like wow! I’m laughing ‘cause I made that record 29-years-ago. It’s funny you say that because that’s what music is supposed to do. In the year 2080, when you throw on that “Rock Box” song, or you throw on that “Peter Piper” song, what was created in that studio that day we created will be there eternally. Even to the point where even Travis Barker who I’ve worked with and he’s working with me on my music for my new stuff, when I met him he came up to me and said “Yo D, most people jumped on the bandwagon with ‘Walk This Way,’ but I was there since “‘Rock Box.'” Man when I heard that I knew I wanted to be a rock star. I was like dad you got to get me some drums and I want to put a band together.’ I was like, wow! 

HipHopDX: That is incredible!

DMC: And that’s the beautiful thing! It was always about the feeling that you get when you hear that great rap song or that great Hip Hop song. 

HipHopDX: Definitely. That’s why I was so surprised and that’s why I wanted to holler at you. I know everybody goes through it — you know depression and dark times — but I was surprised to see how immense you had actually went into it to the part where you were actually to the point where you were talking about suicide because Run-DMC is the hardest, non-gangsta Hip Hop act ever. 

DMC: Ever!

HipHopDX: You guys never rapped about blasting people or anything, ain’t no one snatching y’all’s chain. How did you get that low?

DMC: It physically sent a message when I lost my voice. But before that, and it wasn’t until I went to therapy and rehab. Therapy is something that men think is all for sissies. But to black men? Talking about therapy and doing something that is making you vulnerable and exposing yourself? I came up with this saying now that when I speak about therapy women applaud me and get excited. When I start speaking about therapy I get funny looks from dudes and stuff like that. With men, especially black men, they don’t realize that therapy is gangsta! It powers you, it makes you the most powerful force on the face of the earth. What had happened was my feelings and my emotions that were depressing me started manifesting me when I started losing my voice. First thing that happened to me was I lost my voice. So I’m dealing with that. 

The very thing that I thought was the complete purpose of my existence is now being taking away from me. To put the icing on the cake, Jam Master Jay gets shot and killed. Now, Run-DMC is over. I was losing my voice, Jam Master Jay got shot and killed, and everybody left. That’s what happened. Nobody did nothing to me. Here’s what happened; I lost my voice, Jay got shot and killed, and everybody left. Then right after that, I found out that I was adopted because my father died. That’s what was going through. Once I decided to get clean and sober and go to therapy, I was able to identify with this feeling and then go back to when you know when did you first start feeling like that? For me, the depression probably first manifested itself maybe during Tougher Than Leather, and then the Back from Hell years. But I had no time to identify it.

Tune in this Friday for part two of the interview where DMC breaks down his breaking point and why comic books matter to him.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/run-d-m-c-call-it-quits-248895/ 

Home Music Music News

 

 

November 6, 2002 

Run-D.M.C. Call It Quits

Search for DJ’s killer, fund-raising efforts continue

Run-D.M.C. is officially retired,” Joseph “Run” Simmons announced today at a Manhattan hotel, where some of hip-hop’s most influential figures came together to rally support for the widow and children of Run-D.M.C.’s pioneering DJ, Jam Master Jay. “We can’t perform anymore. I can’t find a way to do it without three members.” 

Jay, born Jason Mizell, was shot and killed October 30th in his Queens, New York, recording studio. Police have yet to make any arrests in the case.

P. Diddy, Busta Rhymes, Chuck D, Russell Simmons, the Beastie Boys, Doug E. Fresh, Foxy Brown and Ed Lover were among those who gathered to demonstrate their commitment not only to Mizell’s family but also to what many of them called the larger “hip-hop family.”

“This murder has nothing to do with rap music,” Run insisted, refuting media reports that Jay’s killing was motivated by insulting lyrics, or that it was only another episode in the East Coast-West Coast feud that may have claimed the lives of rappers Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G.

“The profanity is not in the music,” Russell Simmons, the group’s longtime producer, added. “The profanity is in the poverty and the lack of opportunity that people in our neighborhoods face.” The Simmons brothers grew up alongside Mizell in Hollis, Queens — a neighborhood Mizell never left and remained committed to until his death. “Jason is not dead for any reason except that he turned back to his community,” said Simmons, who also heads the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, a music and community advocacy group. “He was at risk for the same reasons everyone else in the community was. People get killed every day, and most of the killers aren’t found. We just don’t hear about it because they’re not ‘newsworthy.'”

Jay, along with his band mates, was an advocate for positive messages — as opposed to guns and drugs and gangs — in rap. Each artist who spoke in his memory expressed determination to ensure his murder becomes a fulcrum for change in the industry and culture. Veteran DJ Ed Lover, whose show Yo! MTV Raps was in large part responsible for taking rap music mainstream, held back his emotions to say, “We have to put some love in this music . . . This has to be the catalyst to turn this whole business around.”

Chuck D, one of rap’s most overtly political figures as frontman for Public Enemy, also challenged fellow MCs to accept greater responsibility for their lyrics and music: “We have no room for people who rap so well but don’t speak to the people. We have the ear of the people — and we need to be men and women.”

An equally high priority at the meeting was establishing a coalition to raise money to benefit Mizell’s widow Terri and their three children — artists including Eminem, Busta Rhymes, Irv Gotti, Jay-Z, Kid Rock and Aerosmith have already contributed — and aid the investigation of his murder. Mizell’s tax and personal debts have been widely, if not specifically, reported, and Run said that the group’s inability to continue their tour this winter with Kid Rock and Aerosmith as planned has contributed to that “financial problem.” “We’re not going to discuss his personal finances in detail,” Run said, “but as a family we’re going to make sure right there is no debt. We’re not going to let Terri go through any insecurity.”

One hundred thousand posters featuring Mizell’s image will go up around New York City today asking anyone with any information about the shooting to come forward. Terri Mizell emphasized that the police had so far been “very, very good to the family,” and that they shouldn’t be blamed for not yet finding her husband’s killer. “Vengeance is not for us to take care of,” she said. “God will take care of that. We don’t want a Hollis war going on.”

So far, police have issued only a vague description of the person they say killed Mizell and also shot his friend Uriel Rincon in the leg while the two played a video game: a black man, about six feet tall and 180 pounds, wearing a black sweatsuit and black hat. Other leads, including the Saturday shooting death of a promoter who also worked with Mizell’s protege 50 Cent — whose lyrics mock other gangsta rappers — have also failed to turn up a suspect.

The number for the tip line is (800) 577-TIPS. A $50,000 reward fund has been set up for anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest of the killer.

THE MUSIC OF RUN-DMC: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH RUN-DMC

RUN-DMC - King Of Rock (Official Video)

RUN DMC - It's Tricky (Video)

 

RUN DMC - Walk This Way (Video) ft. Aerosmith

 

Run DMC - Its Like That (Original)

 

RUN DMC - Rock Box (Video)

RUN DMC - Run's House (Official Video)

 

 

RUN-DMC - My Adidas

 

 

Its Tricky- RUN DMC

 

Run-DMC Peter Piper

 

 

Run DMC - King of Rock - YouTube

RUN DMC - You Talk Too Much (Video)

Run DMC - It's Tricky - YouTube

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-DMC

Run-DMC

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Run-DMC in a promotional shot. From left to right: Jason Mizell, Darryl McDaniels, and Joseph Simmons.

 

Run-DMC was an American hip hop group from Hollis, Queens, New York, founded in 1981 by Joseph Simmons, Darryl McDaniels, and Jason Mizell. Run-DMC is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential acts in the history of hip hop culture and one of the most famous hip hop acts of the 1980s. Along with LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, and Public Enemy, the group pioneered new school hip hop music. Run-DMC was the first group in the genre to have an album certified gold (Run–D.M.C., 1984) and to be nominated for a Grammy Award.^[2] They were the first to earn a platinum record (King of Rock, 1985), the first to earn a multi-platinum certification (Raising Hell, 1986), the first to have their music videos broadcast on MTV, and the first to appear on American Bandstand and the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.^[3] Run-DMC was the only hip hop act to perform at the U.S. Live Aid concert in 1985.

The group was among the first to highlight the importance of the MC and DJ relationship.^[4][5] In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked them #48 in their list of the greatest musical artists of all time.^[5] In 2007, Run-DMC was named "The Greatest Hip Hop Group of All Time" by MTV.com^[6] and "Greatest Hip Hop Artist of All Time" by VH1.^[7] In 2009, Run-DMC became the second hip hop group to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.^[8] In 2016, Run-DMC received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.^[9]

History

Early career

 

A poster for a Southern California concert starring the group in 1984

The three members of Run-DMC grew up in Hollis, Queens.^[5] As a teenager, Joseph Simmons was recruited into hip hop by his older brother, Russell, who was then an up-and-coming hip hop promoter. Simmons appeared onstage as a DJ for solo rapper Kurtis Blow, who was managed by Russell. Known as "DJ Run, Son of Kurtis Blow", Simmons soon began performing with Kurtis Blow.^[10] Previously, McDaniels had been more focused on athletics than music, but soon began to DJ after purchasing a set of turntables. Simmons convinced McDaniels to start rapping, and though McDaniels would not perform in public, he soon began writing rhymes and was known as "Easy D." 

Simmons and McDaniels started hanging around Two-Fifths Park in Hollis in the late-1970s, hoping to rap for the local DJs who performed and competed there, and the most popular one known to frequent the park was Jason Mizell, then known as "Jazzy Jase". Mizell was known for his flashy wardrobe and b-boy attitude, which led to minor legal troubles as a teen. Thereafter, he decided to pursue music fame and began entertaining in the park soon after. Eventually, Simmons and McDaniels rapped in front of Mizell at the park, and the three became friends. Following Russell's success managing Kurtis Blow, he helped Run record his first single, a song called "Street Kid." The song went unnoticed, but despite the single's failure, Run's enthusiasm for hip hop was growing. Simmons soon wanted to record again—-this time with McDaniels, but Russell refused, citing a dislike for D's rhyming style.^[10] After they graduated from high school and started college in 1982, Simmons and McDaniels finally convinced Russell to let them record as a duo, and they recruited Mizell (who was now known as Jam Master Jay) to be their official DJ. The following year, in 1983, Russell agreed to help them record a new single and land a record deal, but only after he changed McDaniels' stage name to his favourite car company, Delorean Motor Company 'DMC' and marketed the group as "Run-D.M.C.", a name which, incidentally, the group hated at first. DMC said later, "We wanted to be the Dynamic Two, the Treacherous Two — when we heard that shit we was like, 'We're gonna be ruined!' "^[11]

 

A ticket for a 1984 concert in Oakland, California

After signing with Profile Records, Run-DMC released their debut single "It's Like That/Sucker MCs", in late-1983. The single was well received, peaking at #15 on the R&B charts.^[12] The trio performed the single on the New York Hot Tracks video show in 1983. Emboldened by their success, Run-DMC released their eponymous debut album Run-D.M.C. in 1984. Hit singles such as "Jam-Master Jay" and "Hard Times" proved that the group were more than a one-hit wonder, and the landmark single "Rock Box" was a groundbreaking fusion of raw hip hop and hard rock that would become a cornerstone of the group's sound and paved the way for the rap rock subgenre movement of the 1990s.

Run-DMC's swift ascension to the forefront of rap with a new sound and style meant that old-school hip hop artists were becoming outdated. Along with pushing rap into a new direction musically, Run-DMC changed the entire aesthetic of hip hop music and culture. Old school rappers like Afrika Bambaataa and Melle Mel of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five tended to dress in the flashy attire that was commonly attributed to glam rock and disco acts of the era: tight leather, chest-baring shirts, gloves and hats with rhinestones and spikes, leather boots, etc. Run-DMC discarded the more glam aspects of early hip hop fashion (which ironically, was later readopted in 1990 by more "pop" rappers like MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice) and incorporated a more "street" sense of style such as Kangol hats, leather jackets, and unlaced Adidas shoes.^[2] The group's look had been heavily influenced by Mizell's own personal style. When Russell Simmons saw Jay's flashy, yet street b-boy style; he insisted the entire group follow suit.^[13] Run said later: 

“

There were guys that wore hats like those and sneakers with no shoestrings. It was a very street thing to wear, extremely rough. They couldn't wear shoelaces in jail and we took it as a fashion statement. The reason they couldn't have shoelaces in jail was that they might hang themselves. That's why DMC says 'My Adidas only bring good news and they are not used as felon shoes.'[14]

”

That embrace of the look and style of the street would define the next 25 years of hip hop fashion. 

King of Rock, Raising Hell and mainstream success

 

After the success of their first album, Run-DMC looked to branch out on their follow-up. The release of King of Rock in 1985 saw the group furthering their rap rock fusion on songs like "Can You Rock It Like This" and the title track; while "Roots, Rap, Reggae" was one of the first rap/dancehall hybrids. The music video for the single "Rock Box" was the first ever hip hop music video to be broadcast on MTV and received heavy rotation from the channel. The song was the group's most popular hit at that point and the album was certified platinum. Run-DMC performed at the legendary Live Aid benefit shortly after Rock Box was released. 

In late-1985, Run-DMC were featured in the hip hop film Krush Groove, a fictionalized retelling of Russell Simmons' rise as a hip hop entrepreneur and his struggles to get his own label, Def Jam Recordings, off the ground. The film featured a young Blair Underwood as Russell, along with appearances by old-school legend Kurtis Blow, The Fat Boys, teen pop act New Edition, LL Cool J, Prince protegee Sheila E., and hip hop's first successful White rap group, the Beastie Boys, who were signed to Simmons' Def Jam label. The film was a hit in cinemas and was further proof of hip hop's continued mainstream visibility. 

Returning to the studio in 1986, the group teamed with producer Rick Rubin for their third album. Rubin had just produced LL Cool J's debut album Radio. They later released their third album, titled Raising Hell, which became the group's most successful album and one of the best-selling rap albums of all-time. The album was certified double-platinum and peaked at number three on the charts.

Album cover for the group's single "My Adidas"

They were almost done with the album, but Rubin thought that it needed an element that would appeal to rock fans as well. This spurred the lead single "Walk This Way", a cover of the classic hard rock song by Aerosmith. The original intention was to just rap over a sample of the song, but Rubin and Jay insisted on doing a complete cover version. Aerosmith's Steven Tyler and Joe Perry were called to join Run-DMC in the studio to add vocals and lead guitar, respectively. The song and video became one of the biggest hits of the 1980s, reaching #4 on the Hot 100, and cemented Run-DMC's crossover status. It also resurrected Aerosmith's career.^[15] The single "My Adidas" led to the group signing a $1,600,000 endorsement deal with athletic apparel brand Adidas. Adidas formed a long-term relationship with Run-DMC and hip hop.^[16]

The success of Raising Hell is often credited with kick-starting hip hop's golden age, when rap music's visibility, variety, and commercial viability exploded onto the national stage and became a global phenomenon. Their success paved the way for acts like LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys. The group toured in the wake of the album's success, but the Raising Hell Tour was marred by violence, particularly fights between rival street gangs in places like Los Angeles. Though Run-DMC's lyrics had been angry, confrontational and aggressive, they typically denounced crime and ignorance, but the media began to blame the group for the incidents. In the wake of the violence, Run-DMC would call for a day of peace between the gangs in Los Angeles. 

In 1987, following on from the Raising Hell Tour, Run-D.M.C embarked on the Together Forever Tour with the Beastie Boys. 

Tougher Than Leather, changing times

 

After spending 1987 on tour supporting Raising Hell, Run-DMC released Tougher Than Leather in 1988. The album saw the group discarding much of their rap rock leanings for a grittier, more sample-heavy sound. Despite not selling as well as its predecessor, the album boasted several strong singles, including: "Run's House", "Beats to the Rhyme", and "Mary Mary." Though at the time considered a disappointing follow-up to the blockbuster Raising Hell, the album has grown in stature. In the 2000 liner notes for the album's re-release, Chuck D. of Public Enemy would call the album "...a spectacular performance against all odds and expectations."^[17]

Later in 1988, the group made their second film appearance in Tougher Than Leather, a would-be crime caper that was directed by Rick Rubin and featured special guest performances by the Beastie Boys and Slick Rick. The film bombed at the box office, but strengthened the indirect relationship between Run-DMC and the Def Jam label. Though the group itself was never signed to the label, they were managed by Russell Simmons, produced by Rick Rubin (who was a co-founder of Def Jam, along with Simmons), and often shared concert tour spotlight with acts on the label's roster. 

A test pressing release for the single "Faces" from the album Back from Hell

Amidst the changing times and sliding sales, Run-DMC released Back from Hell in 1990. The album was the worst-reviewed of their career, as the group tried to re-create itself musically with ill-advised forays into new jack swing (a then-popular style of production that sonically merged hip hop and contemporary R&B) and sometimes-preachy lyrical content. The two singles released, the anti-drug, anti-crime song "Pause" and street narrative "The Ave", had little success, and the group began to look outdated. Reeling from their first taste of failure, personal problems began to surface for the trio. McDaniels, who had been a heavy drinker in recent years, was losing control to alcoholism. Jay was involved in a life-threatening car accident and survived two gunshot wounds after an incident in 1990. In 1991, Simmons was charged with raping a college student in Ohio, though the charges were later dropped.^[18]

With so much personal chaos and professional uncertainty, the members turned to faith to try to steady their lives. Both Simmons and McDaniels joined the church, with Run becoming especially devoted following his legal troubles and the toll it took on his finances.^[19]

After a three-year hiatus that seemingly saw rap music move on without them, the rejuvenated Run-DMC returned in 1993 with Down with the King. Building on the gritty sound of Tougher Than Leather, and adding some subtle religious references, the album featured guest appearances and production by several hip hop notables (including Pete Rock & CL Smooth and Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest). Buoyed by the title track and first single, the album entered the charts at #1 and #7 on the pop charts.^[15]

Even though the album went platinum, the song proved to be their last hit. Jam Master Jay also found success on his own; he had founded his own label JMJ Records, and discovered and produced the group Onyx, which had tremendous success in 1993 following the release of their hit single, "Slam." Later that same year, Run became an ordained minister, and in 1995 the iconic group appeared in The Show, a Def Jam-produced documentary that featured several of hip hop's biggest acts discussing the lifestyle and sacrifices of the industry. 

Later years, Mizell's murder and break-up

 

Over the next few years, the group did very little recording. Mizell produced and mentored up and coming artists, including Onyx and 50 Cent, who he eventually signed to the JMJ label. Simmons got divorced, remarried, and began to focus on his spiritual and philanthropic endeavors by becoming a reverend. He also wrote a book alongside his brother Russell.^[2] McDaniels, also married, made an appearance on the Notorious B.I.G.'s 1997 double-album Life After Death, and focused on raising his family.

Though the group continued to tour around the world, over a decade of living a rap superstar lifestyle was beginning to take a toll on McDaniels. He was beginning to tire of Run-DMC, and there was increased friction between him and Simmons, who was eager to return to recording (Simmons had at this time adopted the moniker Rev Run in light of his religious conversion). While on tour in Europe in 1997, McDaniels' ongoing battle with substance abuse led to a bout of severe depression, which spurred an addiction to prescription drugs. McDaniels' depression continued for years, so much so that he contemplated suicide.^[20]

In 1997, producer and remixer Jason Nevins remixed "It's Tricky" and "It's Like That". Nevins' remix of "It's Like That" hit number 1 in the United Kingdom, Germany, and many other European countries. A video was made for "It's Like That", although no new footage of Run-DMC appeared in it. In 1999, Run-DMC recorded the theme song for WWF wrestling stable D-Generation X entitled "The Kings", which appeared on the WWF Aggression album. They also made an appearance in a rare version of the music video "Bodyrock" by Moby.

Soon after, the group finally returned to the studio, but in an increasingly tense environment, as Simmons and McDaniels' differences had begun to show. In the wake of the exploding popularity of rap-rock artists like Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Kid Rock, Simmons wanted to return to the aggressive, hard rock-tinged sound that made the group famous. McDaniels — who had become a fan of thoughtful singer-songwriters like John Lennon, Harry Chapin, and Sarah McLachlan — wanted to go in a more introspective direction. Appearing on VH1's documentary series Behind the Music in early 2000, McDaniels confirmed that he was creatively frustrated and highlighted some songs that he was recording on his own. The continued friction led to McDaniels sitting out most of the group's recording sessions in protest.^{[citation needed]}

 

A single from Run-DMC's final album Crown Royal

Simmons, in defiance, recorded material anyway, inviting several guest stars such as Kid Rock, Jermaine Dupri, Adrian Burley, Tony Fredianelli and Stephan Jenkins of Third Eye Blind, Method Man, and fellow Queens MCs Nas and Prodigy of Mobb Deep to contribute to the project. The resulting album, Crown Royal, was delayed due to the personal problems, and when it was finally released in 2001, it featured only three appearances by DMC. Despite no major singles, the album initially sold well. However, many critics^[who?] blasted the lack of DMC's involvement. Some positive reviews were published: Entertainment Weekly noted that "on this hip hop roast, new schoolers Nas and Fat Joe pay their respects with sparkling grooves...Run's rhymes are still limber."^[21]

After Crown Royal, the group embarked on a worldwide tour with their "Walk This Way" compatriots, Aerosmith. The tour was a rousing success, celebrating the collaboration between the two acts and acknowledging the innumerable rap and rock acts that had been influenced by their seminal hit 15 years prior.^{[citation needed]} Even though he had little to do with the album, McDaniels was relishing the stage; he had been suffering from an inoperable vocal disorder that had rendered his once-booming voice a strained mumble. Performing allowed McDaniels to come out of his depression and he appeared revitalized on the tour. There was even talk of Run-DMC finally signing with Def Jam, which by then was no longer held by its original founders.^{[citation needed]} Simmons, however, had been growing increasingly tired of hip hop. His family was growing, and he was assisting with his brother Russell's Phat Farm clothing imprint, making Run-DMC less of a priority. Despite the success of the tour and Aerosmith consequently discussing adding additional dates, Simmons abruptly announced that he was quitting.^[22]

On October 30, 2002, Mizell was shot and killed at his recording studio in Queens.^[23] Fans and friends set up a memorial outside the studio with Adidas sneakers, albums, and flowers. In the aftermath, Simmons and McDaniels announced the official disbanding of the group.^[24] Mizell's murder remains unsolved. 

Post-breakup

 

In 2004, Run-DMC was one of the first acts honored on the first annual VH1 Hip Hop Honors, alongside legends like 2Pac and The Sugarhill Gang. The Beastie Boys paid tribute. Simmons did not attend the show; he was recording his first solo album, Distortion. McDaniels also released a solo album, Checks Thugs and Rock n Roll. He had recently discovered that he was adopted, which led him to be the center of the VH1 program My Adoption Journey, a documentary chronicling his re-connection with his biological family. McDaniels was also featured in the 2008 video game, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, making appearances in the songs "Walk this Way" and "King of Rock". He frequently contributed to VH1 programs such as the I Love The... series, and he released the song "Rock Show" featuring singer Stephan Jenkins. Simmons also turned to television, starring in Run's House, a reality show that followed his life as a father and husband.

In June 2007, McDaniels appeared with Aerosmith performing "Walk This Way" for their encore at the Hard Rock Calling festival in London. Simmons joined Kid Rock's 2008 Rock N Roll Revival Tour, performing "It's Like That", "It's Tricky", "You Be Illin'", "Run's House", "Here We Go", "King of Rock" and "Walk This Way" with Kid Rock. They also covered "For What It's Worth" at the end of the show. In 2007, Mizell's wife, Terry, Simmons, and McDaniels also launched the J.A.M. Awards in Jay's memory. Jay's vision for social Justice, Arts and Music was promoted by many recording artists, including Snoop Dogg, LL Cool J, Raekwon, Jim Jones, M.O.P., Papoose, Everlast, DJ Muggs, Kid Capri, De La Soul, Mobb Deep, EPMD, Dead Prez, Biz Markie and Marley Marl. In October 2008, Mizell's one-time protege 50 Cent announced plans to produce a documentary about his fallen mentor.^[25] In 2008 Run-DMC was nominated for 2009 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

On January 14, 2009, it was confirmed that Run-DMC would be one of the five inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.^[26] On April 3, 2009, Run-DMC became the second rap act to be awarded the honor (after Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, who were inducted in 2007).^[27] The group reunited at Jay-Z's Made In America Festival in September 2012. Simmons and McDaniels then reunited again for Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin, Texas in November 2012, and again in June 2013 and August 2014 for a summer concerts in Atlanta, Georgia.^[28]

Following the success of Notorious, it was announced in 2009 that a Run-DMC biopic was in the works, with the screenplay by Notorious writer Cheo Hodari Coker. The film was rumored to depict the life and story of the group beginning from their inception in Hollis, Queens, and leading up to the 2002 murder of Jam Master Jay.^[29] However, the project has yet to go into production. 

Legacy

 

Adidas sneakers with the Run-DMC logo

Stephen Thomas Erlewine, editor of AllMusic, has written: "More than any other hip hop group, Run-D.M.C. are responsible for the sound and style of the [hip-hop] music."^[30] Musically, they moved hip hop and rap music away from the funk and disco-oriented sound of its beginnings, into an altogether new and unique sonic imprint. Their sound is directly responsible for intentionally transforming rap music from dance-and club-oriented funk grooves like "Rapper's Delight" and "The Breaks" to an aggressive, less-danceable approach. Characterized by sparse, hard-hitting beats—as typified on hits like "It's Like That", and "Peter Piper"—this would form the foundation of hardcore hip hop (particularly hardcore East Coast hip hop). As such, Run-DMC is considered the originators of the style, and hardcore hip hop would dominate the next two decades of rap music, from the bombastic, noisy sound of Public Enemy and stripped minimalism of Boogie Down Productions to the thump of early Wu-Tang Clan and Nas. Their influence was not limited to the East Coast, however. Los Angeles' N.W.A, on their landmark 1988 album Straight Outta Compton, showed heavy influences from Tougher Than Leather-era Run-DMC, and Chicano rap act Cypress Hill were definitely influenced by Run-DMC's fusion of rap and rock.

Early on, the group rarely sampled and rarely looped anything over their skeletal beats, and the funky minimalism of major producers, such as Timbaland and The Neptunes, is drawn from Run-DMC's fundamental sound.^{[citation needed]} Rap rock fusion proved to be influential among rock artists, with '80s bands like Faith No More, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers adding elements of rap to alternative rock and heavy metal. Most notably, the rap rock genre became popular in the late 1990s, with bands like Urban Dance Squad, Rage Against the Machine, KoRn, Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park. Aesthetically, they changed the way rappers presented themselves. Onstage, old school rappers had previously performed in flashy attire and colorful costumes, typically had a live band and, in the case of acts like Whodini, had background dancers. Run-DMC performed with only Run and DMC out front, and Jam-Master Jay on the turntables behind them, in what is now considered the 'classic' hip hop stage setup: two turntables and microphones. They embraced the look and style of the street by wearing jeans, lace-less Adidas sneakers, and their trademark black fedoras. The group shunned both the over-the-top wardrobe of previous rap stars like the Furious Five and Afrika Bambaataa, and the silk-shirted, jheri curled, ladies' man look of rappers like Kurtis Blow and Spoonie Gee. Followers of their style included LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys; seemingly overnight, rappers were wearing jeans and sneakers instead of rhinestones and leather outfits. From Adidas tracksuits and rope chains to baggy jeans and Timberland footwear, hip hop's look remained married to the styles of the street. According to the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll: 

“

Run-D.M.C. took hardcore hip-hop from an underground street sensation to a pop-culture phenomenon. Although earlier artists, such as Grandmaster Flash and The Sugarhill Gang, made rap's initial strides on the airwaves, it was Run-D.M.C. that introduced hats, gold chains, and untied sneakers to youth culture's most stubborn demographic group: young white male suburban rock fans. In the process, the trio helped change the course of popular music, paving the way for rap's second generation.[12]

”

In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked them number 48 in their list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time".^[5] In 2007, Run-DMC was named "The Greatest Hip Hop Group of All Time" by MTV.com and "Greatest Hip Hop Artist of All Time" by VH1.^[31][6] In 2009, Run-DMC became the second hip hop group to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.^[32] In 2016, Run-DMC received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.^[9]

Historically, the group achieved a number of notable firsts in hip hop music and are credited with being the act most responsible for pushing hip hop into mainstream popular music, initiating its musical and artistic evolution and enabling its growth as a global phenomenon. Run-DMC is the first rap act to have reached a number of major accomplishments:^[33]

 

• A No. 1 R&B charting hip hop album
• The second hip hop act to appear on American Bandstand (the Sugar Hill Gang appeared first on the program in 1981)
• The first hip hop act to chart in the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100 more than once
• The first hip hop artist with a Top 10 pop charting rap album
• One of the first hip hop artists with gold, platinum, and multi-platinum albums
• The first hip hop act to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine
• One of the first hip hop acts to receive a Grammy Award nomination
• The first hip hop act to make a video appearance on MTV
• The first hip hop act to perform at a major arena
• Signed to a major product endorsement deal (Adidas)
• The second hip hop act to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

 

Discography

 

Main article: Run-DMC discography

• Run-D.M.C. (1984)
• King of Rock (1985)
• Raising Hell (1986)
• Tougher Than Leather (1988)
• Back from Hell (1990)
• Down with the King (1993)
• Crown Royal (2001)

Filmography

• Krush Groove (1985)
• Big Fun In The Big Town (1986)
• Tougher Than Leather (1988)
• Who's the Man? (1993)
• Lip Sync Battle (2015) – Episode: "Joseph Gordon-Levitt vs. Anthony Mackie"

Music videos

 

• Rock Box (1984)
• King of Rock (1985)
• It's Tricky (1986)
• My Adidas (1986)
• Proud to Be Black (1986)
• Walk This Way (feat. Aerosmith) (1986)
• Mary, Mary (1988)
• Beats to the Rhyme (live) (1988)
• Christmas in Hollis (1988)
• Run's House (1988)
• Pause (1990)
• Down with the King (1993)
• Let's Stay Together (Together Forever) (feat. Jagged Edge) (2001)

 

References

Augustin K. Sedgewick (November 6, 2002). "Run-D.M.C. Call It Quits". RollingStone. Retrieved April 9, 2015.

Winning, B (November 2006). "Run-DMC: 'It's like that". REMIX, Electronic • Urban. 8 (11).

Together Forever: Greatest Hits 1983–1991 (Compact disc liner). Run-D.M.C. New York, New York: Profile Records. 1991. PCD-1419.

"The 50 albums that changed music", No. 40: Run D.M.C.: Run D.M.C. (1984), The Observer, July 16, 2006.

"Music News: Latest and Breaking Music News". Rolling Stone. Retrieved September 29, 2013.

"MTV News: The Greatest Hip-Hop Groups Of All Time". Mtv.com. March 9, 2006. Retrieved December 7, 2009.

"VH1: 50 Greatest Hip Hop Artists". Rock On The Net. Retrieved December 7, 2009.

"Run-DMC". Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Retrieved January 21, 2018.

Legaspi, Althea; Legaspi, Althea (January 14, 2016). "Run-D.M.C. to Receive GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award". Rolling Stone. Retrieved March 13, 2019.

Run D.M.C. at oldschoolhiphop.com

Weiner, Jonah. "Run-DMC Record 'It's Like That/Sucker MCs'" Archived June 30, 2006, at the Wayback Machine, Blender, 15 September 2004.

"Biography of Run-DMC". Rolling Stone.com. Retrieved February 11, 2015.

Vineyard, Jennifer (November 4, 2002). "DMC Speaks On Jam Master Jay's Role In The Run-DMC Legacy". MTV.com. Retrieved December 7, 2009.

Run DMC Slammed The 1980's

"Hall of Fame: Run-DMC bring rap to the masses". REMIX, Electronic • Urban.

EVENT REPORT   03.09.05 12:00 AM. "Adidas Promotes Shoes With Run DMC Charity". BizBash. Retrieved December 7, 2009.

"HIPHOPINJESMOEL – "Tougher Than Leather" Liner Notes by Chuck D". Hiphopinjesmoel.com. Archived from the original on July 2, 2007. Retrieved December 7, 2009.

Pringle, Gill. "Reverend Run: Pray this way", The Independent, 7 June 2006.

Millner, Denene. "He's Rev. Run — For His New Life Rapper's Delight Now Religion", New York Daily News, 10 October 2000.

Wells, Christina. "'DMC: My Adoption Journey' Documentary Nominated for Emmy Award" at his official website, 25 July 2007.

Browne, David. "Music Capsule Review: Run-DMC: Crown Royal (Arista)", Entertainment Weekly, 6 April 2001, p.120.

Raising Hell: The Reign, Ruin, and Redemption of Run-D.M.C. and Jam Master Jay, 2005. ISBN 0-06-078195-5

"Run-DMC DJ slain in recording studio - Nov. 1, 2002". CNN.com. Retrieved September 29, 2013.

McShane, Jamie; Murphey, Chris (November 6, 2002). "Surviving Run-DMC members retire group". CNN. Archived from the original on November 5, 2007. Retrieved November 6, 2002.

Jason. "50 Cent Produces Jam Master Jay Documentary", rapbasement.com, 28 October 2008.

Vozick-Levinson, Simon (January 14, 2009). "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees '09: Metallica, Run-D.M.C., and more". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved February 11, 2015.

Rock Hall Nominations, USA Today, 22 September 2008.

"Braves Summer Concert Series - Run DMC | braves.com: Tickets". Atlanta.braves.mlb.com. May 24, 2013. Retrieved September 29, 2013.

"Run-DMC Biopic Heading to the Big Screen With Help of Notorious Writer | Music News". Rolling Stone. January 29, 2009. Retrieved September 29, 2013.

Erlewine, Stephen Thomas. Run-D.M.C. Biography at Allmusic.com

"VH1: 50 Greatest Hip Hop Artists". Rock On The Net. Retrieved December 7, 2009.

"Run-DMC". Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Retrieved January 21, 2018.

33. https://web.archive.org/web/20090129154558/http://www.rundmc.com/index.cfm/pk/content/pid/400092. Archived from the original on January 29, 2009. Retrieved May 28, 2009. Missing or empty |title= (help)

 

Notes

 

• Appiah, Kwame Anthony and Gates, David Turner Arts and Letters: An A-to-Z Reference of Writers, Musicians, and Artists of the African American Experience. Running Press: Philadelphia: 2004. ISBN 0-7624-2042-1

 

Further reading

 

• Adler, Bill (1987). Tougher Than Leather: The Authorized Biography of Run-DMC. New American Library. ISBN 0965653560.
• Brown, Terrell, "Reverend Run (Run-DMC)," Mason Crest Publishers, 2008.
• Joseph Simmons, Daryl McDaniels and Amy Linden,"Niggas With Beatitude," Transition, 1993
• McDaniels, Darryl (with Haring, Bruce), "King of Rock: Respect, Responsibility, and My Life with Run-DMC," Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2001.
• Reverend Run, The (with Taylor, Curtis L.), "It's Like That: A Spiritual Memoir," St. Martin's Press, 2000.
• Ro, Ronin, "Raising Hell: The Reign, Ruin, and Redemption of Run-DMC and Jam Master Jay," Amistad, 2005.
• Thigpen, David E. (2003). Jam Master Jay: The Heart of Hip-Hop. Pocket Books. ISBN 0743476948.

 

External links

 

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Run–D.M.C..

• Official website
• Run-DMC at Curlie
• Run-DMC discography at Discogs