How Run-D.M.C. Revolutionized Hip-Hop in 1984
Looking back on 40 years of the rap trio’s seminal debut
Run-D.M.C. didn’t invent hip-hop.
But, for all intents and purposes, they perfected it on their stunning self-titled debut, which was released 40 years ago this week.
The album may have only reached number 53 on the official Billboard charts, but it completely reset the musical landscape in so many ways. The trio of Joseph Simmons, Daryl McDaniels and Jason Mizell – along with producers Russell Simmons and Larry Smith (who DJ Premier would describe as the greatest hip-hop producer of all time) – went into the studio with the intention of, essentially, removing the studio from the equation. According to historian Nelson George, Russell, who’d had chart success with Kurtis Blow, wasn’t satisfied with the direction of those hits: George quotes him as saying he wanted “less music” in the grooves.
He got it.
With a few exceptions, Run-D.M.C. takes hip-hop out of the clubs and transports and back to its real roots – the parks and rec rooms of New York’s outer boroughs. They did it by stripping things back to one essential – the beat, rendered hard and relentlessly by Jam Master Jay and the Roland TR-808 drum machine that drew much of the neighborhood into his orbit when he set up in Hollis Park years before. Those acolytes included Joe Simmons and Daryl McDaniels, who later admitted that they’d jockeyed for position to catch the ear of Jay, who was pretty much the musical pope in the area, with a long line of guys lined up for an audience.
The three found common ground with the help of Run’s brother, Russell Simmons, a cagey City College of New York grad with a preternatural grasp on youth culture, as much as music alone. Decked out in tracksuits and sporting gold chains (Run would later admit that Jay’s was the only solid-gold one in their closets at the time), they disassembled old-school thought and sound and established a new-school that would inspire crews from coast-to-coast.
It wasn’t just the unrelenting beats, either. They swore off party themes in favor of an almost journalistic depiction of life in their ‘hood and those of their friends. Songs like “Hard Times” and “30 Days” weren’t gangsta-styled threats, they were more like journal entries, detailed so well that Jimmy Breslin would have been proud. The manner of delivery was just as important. Instead of swapping verses a la the Furious Five and other earlier acts, Run and DMC all but played tug-o-war with the mic, each jumping into a space as soon as it opened up. But rather than come across as chaotic, the mix proved cathartic, like listening to a heated conversation at a bodega or a bar.
That intensity fit the New York City of the time. The city was simmering, waiting for something to happen. Yes, the crime rate was high – much higher than it is now, no matter what the pearl-clutchers would have people believe – but things on the street hadn’t gotten ugly, as they would a couple of years later with the modern-day lynchings of unarmed young Black men like Michael Griffith and Yusuf Hawkins and the riots in the ethnically mixed neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Run-D.M.C. looked at that atmosphere as something of a challenge: “Before us,” Jam-Master Jay told SPIN in 1986, “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.”
This was a group intent on giving meaning to just about everything. There’d be no smiling in promo photos, there’d be no shiny designer suits, just matching tracksuits and Kangol hats – something taken from Russell Simmons’ advice to “dress like your audience.” Oddly, that advice would lead to having an audience that dressed like them, and not just in neighborhoods like the one they grew up in. Admittedly, Hollis was a special case, even in NYC, split down the middle into two distinct communities. One, with large homes on sprawling lots, was home to moneyed folks like the Cuomo political dynasty, the other – hardscrabble, but not quite ghetto – housed the new generation of rap.
That proximity had a lot to do with the creation of Run-D.M.C.’s most lasting track, “Rock Box.” That tune changed the game entirely by introducing the idea of integrating hard rock and hard beats into a sonic package that tapped into the pumped-up – but not angry – zeitgeist of hormonally-charged youth, regardless of race. Larry Smith’s concrete-hard production provided a magnificently rough canvas, which guitarist Eddie Martinez – who’d played with acts as varied as Blondie and David Lee Roth – slashed through with one of the ‘80s most memorable guitar solos.
Martinez told Ultimate Guitar that “Rock Box” was really a blank slate for him, saying “That day when I went to the studio, I had no idea what was coming. When I got to the studio that day, all there was, was a DMX drum machine beat, Larry’s bass line, and I think they had a couple of scratch raps on it.” The combo was clearly a massive success – clear to everyone, that is, except the two rappers in Run D.M.C. Martinez went on to recall “I knew Larry and Russell dug it, I dug the shit out of it. We were all on board. But Run and DMC came in and they didn’t get it. They really didn’t get it. They just didn’t understand this big, enormous rock guitar thing that was happening and weaving in between their raps.”
VIDEO: Run-DMC “Rock Box”
They got over that and incorporated rock tactics regularly going forward, most notably by collaborating with Aerosmith on a cover of “Walk This Way” – considered a triumph by some, a jump-the-shark moment by others. They’d hit the pinnacle in terms of popularity, but in terms of interpersonal relations, things weren’t quite as rosy.
In a New Jersey Arts interview, McDaniels admitted that he basically thought the group ran its course in the late 1980s, saying “I knew it was over after Tougher Than Leather because Run and Jay started asking to see my rhymes. They had never done that in the five years we’d been together. Jay would just put the music on and I would say what I wanted to say, but then it got to a point where they said, “D, your rhyming about lollipops isn’t going to go with what we are doing today.”
They stuck together, unhappily, for a while longer, even weathering the tsunami of bad reviews that greeted their Tougher Than Leather film – which could charitably be called the Glitter of hip-hop. But the albums that followed never quite captured the magic of their early days, in part because they often sounded like older dudes trying to recapture their glory days, particularly on the muddled Back From Hell. While Simmons’ recasting himself as Rev Run for some dips into preaching over Mizell’s still-sturdy beats made for some interesting moments, particularly 1993’s “Down With The King,” the magic was clearly gone.
The curtain came down for real when Mizell was murdered at his studio in Queens on October 30, 2002, a crime that would not be solved until this year – when it was revealed that Jay’s involvement in drug dealing led to his death at the hands of his godson and an accomplice.
There won’t be another act. “People got to understand this—is Dave Grohl still running around trying to be Nirvana?” McDaniels asks in Rock the Bells. “Is Sting still running around trying to be The Police? Are Paul and Ringo running around trying to be The Beatles? There’s enough life left for both of us. We can’t be Run-D.M.C. without Jay. People laugh and say, ‘OK, we get it.’ But seriously, Run-D.M.C. will get back together when The Beatles get back together. Run-D.M.C., as a performing and touring entity, we can’t do it without Jay.”
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