Rappers Chuck D, Professor Griff, Flavor Flav and DJ Terminator X of Public Enemy in 1988
Photo: Raymond Boyd/Getty Images
feature
Aug. 11, 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. To honor the legacy and influence of this now global culture, GRAMMY.com presents a timeline marking the genre's biggest moments.
Mosi Reeves
|GRAMMYs/Aug 11, 2023 - 02:28 pm
This year marks the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, a cultural movement that rose from humble beginnings in New York to fuel a worldwide phenomenon.
Scholars may debate whether its roots precede Aug. 11, 1973, when DJ Kool Herc debuted his "merry-go-round" technique of playing funk breaks back-to-back to a roomful of teenagers in the Bronx. However, there’s little doubt that this event sparked a flowering of activity throughout the borough, inspiring DJs, breakdancers, graffiti artists, and, eventually, pioneering MCs like Coke La Rock and Cowboy.
The music industry eventually caught wind of the scene, leading to formative 1979 singles like the Fatback Band’s "King Tim III" — the funk band featured MC and hypeman Timothy "King Tim III" Washington — and the big one: the Sugarhill Gang’s "Rapper’s Delight."
Today, rap music is the most popular genre of music, led by superstars such as Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Future, Eminem, and many others. Despite its massive success, many artists retain their strong ties to communities of color, reflecting the genre’s origins as a form rooted in the streets.
To mark hip-hop’s 50th anniversary, press play on the playlist below, or head to Amazon Music, Apple Music and Pandora for a crash course in this quintessential stateside artform — further proof of the genius of Black American music.
At the 65th Annual GRAMMY Awards, the Recording Academy showcased the breadth of hip-hop's influence via a star-studded, generation-spanning performance. Curated by Questlove and featuring legends such as Grandmaster Flash, Run-D.M.C., Ice-T, Jay-Z, Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliott, Nelly, and GloRilla, the 2023 GRAMMYs' hip-hop tribute showed that hip-hop remains one of the most exciting music cultures — and will likely remain so for the next 50 years.
Loading...
A Timeline Of Hip-Hop's Development
1973 – On Aug. 11, 1973, Clive "Kool Herc" Campbell DJs a back-to-school party organized by his sister, Cindy Campbell, in the rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, New York. The event is widely considered to be the beginning of hip-hop culture.
1979 – Longtime R&B star and producer Sylvia Robinson launches Sugar Hill Records with her husband, Joe. She discovers their first act in New Jersey, a trio of rapping teenagers — Wonder Mike, Big Bank Hank, and Master Gee — and brands the Sugarhill Gang. The Gang’s first single, "Rapper’s Delight," sells millions of copies and becomes the first global rap hit.
1982 – Co-written by Duke Bootee and Melle Mel and produced by Clifton "Jiggs" Chase, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s hit single "The Message" becomes a turning point in the genre. Bootee and Melle Mel’s stark descriptions of poverty signal to fans and critics that hip-hop is capable of more than just party music.
1984 – Russell Simmons’ Rush Management organizes Fresh Fest, a groundbreaking arena tour featuring hot rap acts like Run-D.M.C., Whodini, Kurtis Blow, the Fat Boys, and Newcleus as well as b-boy crews such as the Dynamic Breakers. Held during the next two years, it signifies hip-hop’s growing popularity.
1986 – After bringing frat-boy chaos as the opening act on Madonna’s Virgin Tour, Def Jam understudies the Beastie Boys collaborate with producer Rick Rubin on Licensed to Ill. Spawning the hit single "Fight for Your Right," the album is certified diamond in 2015.
Beastie Boys in 1987 | Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images
1987 – Thanks to a remix by the late DJ/producer Cameron Paul, rap trio Salt-N-Pepa get teens everywhere twerking — and worry parents and school administrators — with the electro-bass classic, "Push It."
1988 – Public Enemy release their second album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Reportedly featuring over 100 samples and focused on Chuck D, Flavor Flav and Professor Griff’s revolutionary lyrics, it’s often cited as one of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time.
1989 – win the first hip-hop GRAMMY Award for Best Rap Performance for their 1988 hit single, "Parents Just Don’t Understand."
1988 – Thanks to lyrics criticizing law enforcement and depicting raw life in Compton, California, N.W.A spark national controversy with their influential second album, Straight Outta Compton.
1991 – Ice-T appears in New Jack City, becoming one of the first rappers to headline a major Hollywood film. That same year, he appears on the Lollapalooza tour with his metal group, Body Count, and performs an early version of "Cop Killer." The song becomes a flashpoint in the 1992 presidential election.
1993 – Wu-Tang Clan release their debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). With nine members led by rapper/producer the RZA, the highly unique Staten Island-based collective spawned dozens of solo albums and affiliated acts over the following decades.
1996 – Naughty by Nature earn the first GRAMMY Award for Best Rap Album with their third album, Poverty’s Paradise. The 1995 set includes a major radio hit in "Feel Me Flow."
1996 – After dominating most of 1996 with his fourth album, the diamond-certified double album All Eyez on Me, 2Pac is killed in Las Vegas. The unsolved murder of one of the greatest rappers of all time remains a watershed moment in music culture.
1997 – Days before the release of his diamond-certified second album, Life After Death, the Notorious B.I.G. is killed in Los Angeles. The slaying of two of hip-hop’s biggest artists prompts soul-searching across the music industry and inspired Biggie’s friend, Puff Daddy, to release the GRAMMY Award-winning hit, "I'll Be Missing You."
1997 – After writing and producing hits for MC Lyte and Aaliyah, Missy Elliott debuts as a solo artist with Supa Dupa Fly. With production help from Timbaland and kinetic music videos, Elliott establishes herself as one of the most innovative acts of the era.
Missy Elliott | Paul Drinkwater/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
1998 – After scoring multi-platinum hits with the Fugees, Lauryn Hill strikes out on her own with The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. The diamond-certified album earns her several GRAMMY Awards, including Album Of The Year.
1999 – Dr. Dre releases 2001, cementing his legacy as one of the most influential rap producers ever. The album features numerous collaborators, including longtime homie Snoop Dogg and rising lyricist Eminem.
2001 – On Sept. 11, Jay-Z releases his sixth album, The Blueprint. It becomes a career highlight for the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame rapper, and a breakout moment for rising producers Just Blaze and Kanye West.
2003 – Hit-making duo OutKast split their double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below into separate sides for Big Boi and Andre 3000 — the latter focusing on singing instead of rapping. Their fresh approach results in a diamond-certified project and a GRAMMY for Album Of The Year.
2008 – Lil Wayne mania peaks with Tha Carter III, which sells over 1 million copies in its first week and earns him a GRAMMY for Best Rap Album.
2010 – Nicki Minaj releases Pink Friday. The hit album makes her a rare female rap star during a dearth of prominent women voices in the genre.
2017 – By landing a Top 10 Billboard hit with "XO Tour Llif3" and topping the Billboard 200 with Luv Is Rage 2, Lil Uzi Vert signifies the rise of internet-fueled trends like "SoundCloud rap" and "emo rap."
2017 – With his fourth album Damn., Kendrick Lamar not only wins a GRAMMY for Best Rap Album, but he also becomes the first rap artist to win a Pulitzer Prize for Music, leading to the fanciful nickname "Pulitzer Kenny."
2018 – Cardi B releases her debut album Invasion of Privacy, scoring Billboard No. 1 hits such as "Bodak Yellow" and "I Like It." As the best-selling female rap album of the 2010s, the LP won Best Rap Album at the 61st GRAMMY Awards in 2019, making Cardi the first solo female rapper to win the Category.
Cardi B at the 61st GRAMMY Awards | Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
2020 – In early 2020, rising star Pop Smoke is killed in Los Angeles. Months later, his posthumous debut album, Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon, tops the charts, signifying the rise of drill as a major force in hip-hop culture.
2021 – At the 63rd Annual GRAMMY Awards in 2021, the Recording Academy introduced the Best Melodic Rap Performance Category, formerly known as the Best Rap/Sung Performance Category, to "represent the inclusivity of the growing hybrid performance trends within the rap genre."
2023 - At the 2023 GRAMMY Awards, seven-time GRAMMY winner Dr. Dre became the recipient of the inaugural Dr. Dre Global Impact Award for his multitude of achievements through his innovative, multi-decade career. Dre was first presented with the award at the Black Music Collective's Recording Academy Honors ceremony.
2024 Quinn Coleman Memorial Scholarship
Image courtesy of the Recording Academy
news
The program is designed to empower the next generation of music creators through a robust internship program and professional development opportunities. Application opens on Sept. 18, and will close on Oct. 25.
Nina Frazier
|GRAMMYs/Sep 18, 2024 - 07:04 pm
In partnership with the GRAMMY Museum, the Recording Academy is excited to announce the launch of the third annual Quinn Coleman Memorial Scholarship.
This program intends to uplift the next generation of Black and brown music creators through a comprehensive internship and professional development opportunities. Established in 2021, the scholarship was named in honor of the late music executive and DJ Quinn Coleman, who tragically passed away in 2020.
The Quinn Coleman Memorial Scholarship aims to continue eliminating barriers within the music industry by providing Black and brown college students with professional development experiences that will better prepare them for careers in the music industry.
Five selected students will each be awarded two $1,000 scholarships for tuition, a $500 stipend for interview preparation, two $250 stipends for books and equipment, and access to financial and emotional wellness seminars. Furthermore, students will be awarded a spring internship at the Recording Academy or Latin Recording Academy.
The Recording Academy's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team will judiciously select applications from currently enrolled college students across the country who aim to pursue careers in the music industry or other related creative fields.
The scholarship application opens on Wednesday, Sept. 18, and will close on Friday, Oct. 25. To apply for the scholarship, visit here. More information about the Quinn Coleman scholarship program, visit the GRAMMY Museum's website.
Latest Recording Academy News & Initiatives
Graphic courtesy of the Recording Academy
news
Offset will discuss his creative journey and collaboration on his sophomore album, 'SET IT OFF,' at a GRAMMY U "Unwrapped" event on September 20 at the Ray Charles Performing Arts Center in Atlanta.
Jenia Viles
|GRAMMYs/Sep 10, 2024 - 04:46 pm
Offset's solo career continues to soar following the release of his sophomore album, SET IT OFF. To share his vision and inspirations behind the release, the three-time GRAMMY nominee is set to return to his home state of Georgia for GRAMMY U "Unwrapped" held at the Ray Charles Performing Arts Center in Atlanta on Friday, September 20.
In collaboration with the Recording Academy Atlanta Chapter and the Black Music Collective, GRAMMY U members will have the opportunity to join a panel conversation with Offset as he talks through his production techniques and concepts behind SET IT OFF. Offset will provide valuable tips highlighting how he explores creative processes in both solo and collaborative settings.
Offset gained fame as a member of the rap trio Migos, alongside Quavo and the late Takeoff. Together, the group achieved significant success with chart-topping hits like "Bad and Boujee" featuring Lil Uzi Vert, "Walk It Talk It" featuring Drake, and "Stir Fry." At the 2018 GRAMMYs, Migos received two GRAMMY nominations: Best Rap Album for Culture and Best Rap Performance for "Bad and Boujee." At the 2020 GRAMMYs, Offset earned his first solo GRAMMY nomination for Best Rap Performance for "Clout" featuring his wife Cardi B.
Read more:
SET IT OFF includes collaborations with industry giants Future, Don Toliver, and Travis Scott, with the lead track "SAY MY GRACE" featuring Travis Scott amassing nearly 135 million streams on Spotify alone.
Ahead of the Unwrapped event with Offset, the Recording Academy and GRAMMY U members are hyped. On August 24, the Recording Academy Philadelphia Chapter hosted an exclusive meet and greet with Offset at a local restaurant, where Recording Academy Voting and Professional Members and fans were able to converse and ask questions about his career.
Recording Academy Philadelphia Chapter Members with Offset |Photo Courtesy of the Recording Academy
Offset's journey from Migos to his solo career showcases a powerful example of artistic evolution, which will inspire GRAMMY U attendees. As one example of many great artist productions that GRAMMY U Unwrapped aims to showcase, this event will offer insights into maintaining authenticity and crafting a unique path in the music industry.
Event Details
This event is open to GRAMMY U members only.
Date and Time: Friday, September 20, 2024, at 8:00 p.m. EST (doors open at 7:00 p.m. EST)
Location : Ray Charles Performing Arts Center, Atlanta, GA
RSVP: By Tuesday, September 17, 2024. Space is limited, and RSVPs are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. Confirmation email required for admission.
This GRAMMY U session is an exclusive opportunity for members to gain firsthand knowledge from one of the music industry's influential figures in a setting that fosters learning and growth. A special thank you to our participating sponsors, Mastercard and Amazon Music for supporting the development of emerging music industry professionals.
Learn More About GRAMMY U
Kurtis Blow
Photo: Theo Wargo/Getty Images
interview
More than 40 years after he became hip-hop's first commercial breakout star, Kurtis Blow is still moving the culture forward. The rapper and OG B-boy reflects on hip-hop’s rich history, and the impact of seeing hip-hop represented at the 2024 Paris Games.
Bernadette Giacomazzo
|GRAMMYs/Aug 22, 2024 - 06:18 pm
On the eve of the first-ever Olympic breakdancing competition, hip-hop legend Kurtis Blow was thrilled. It was the first time one of the core elements of hip-hop culture had reached such a global stage.
Alongside DJ Kool Herc (whose breaks provided the soundtrack for B-boys and girls), Blow is credited with popularizing breakdancing. The rapper began breaking as a teenager in the early 1970s, as part of the Hill Boys breaking crew — named for the Sugar Hill area of Harlem where Malcolm X first started his galvanizing pro-Black movement —
And while the International Olympic Committee decided to remove breakdancing from the 2028 Olympics, Blow is unbothered. As far as he’s concerned, his legacy and the legacy of breaking itself is all but set in stone.
"It was definitely something special," Blow tells GRAMMY.com. "And I wasn’t the only one who realized it at the moment it was happening."
Born Kurtis Walker, the Harlem-based Blow began DJing when he was just seven years old. In 1979, the 20-year-old's "Christmas Rappin’" sold over 400,000 copies and turned the up-and-comer into a household name. But it was his follow-up single, 1980’s "The Breaks," that helped launch a whole new genre: rap music. "The Breaks" became the first hip-hop album to receive a gold certification from the RIAA, and proved that Blow wasn’t just a one-trick pony.
Kurtis Blow proved to be immediately influential on the then-nascent rap scene. When Rev. Run of Run-D.M.C. started his career, he billed himself as "The Son of Kurtis Blow" to give him an air of credibility that helped propel the hip-hop trio into the pop culture stratosphere. But Blow's influence didn’t begin and end with his "adopted son": Everyone from Russell Simmons to Wyclef Jean has worked with Blow, and he has been sampled by Nas ("If I Ruled The World" is all but an interpolation of Kurtis Blow’s song of the same name), KRS-One and many others. In fact, more than 100 songs have used samples from "The Breaks," and nearly 1,500 songs have used a sample or an interpolation from Blow’s discography.
Learn more:
Kurtis Blow was also one of the first rappers to sign to a major label (Mercury Records) and was the first rapper to be a multihyphenate (in addition to his music, Blow worked as an actor on films like In a Dark Place and California Dreamers, and was the musical coordinator for the legendary hip-hop film Krush Groove). Blow continues to work steadily in hip-hop today, though he eschews the legendary breaking parties in favor of cultural events that offer a new glimpse into the culture he helped create.
To wit, Blow is performing with The Hip Hop Nutcracker, in which Tchaikovsky’s classic score is set to breakdancing and modern hip-hop dance; the emcee will perform a brief set to kick off each show. A nationwide tour kicks off in Southern California in November and concludes at the end of December in Durham, North Carolina.
Kurtis Blow spoke with GRAMMY.com about the importance of bringing breaking to the Olympics, reconciling his ministry with modern hip-hop’s message, and his four-decade legacy.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Breakdancing has been a huge part of hip-hop culture for many, many years — and it’s long overdue to be recognized on a global scale like the Olympics. What are your thoughts about seeing this movement that you started getting this kind of recognition?
This whole culture that we call hip-hop started back in the 1960s. With the Civil Rights movement, community organizers, and government officials all debating about something so basic: the right to all be seen as equal and free. It was a traumatic time, you know? But we had music that was so relevant to the whole movement.
By the time the late 1970s and early 1980s came along, everyone was trying to escape all of the traumatic racism that was still going on. And music became our escapism. That’s where breaking came in: everyone was just trying to mimic James Brown on the dance floor. You’d see one guy doing his thing, and everyone would form a circle around him. Pretty soon, someone else would join the circle and challenge him. And before you knew it, there was a whole competition — and whoever won became the most popular in the club.
That kicked it all off. To see it recognized on such a large scale just reaffirms, to me, that this hip-hop culture of ours was made with love.
There were breaking films such as 1985's 'Krush Groove' that were completely revolutionary in that it gave everyone — not just those within the culture — a view into the world of hip-hop, and suggested what it could become. At the time, you were becoming the first commercially successful rapper and one of the pillars of what would become the New York sound. Were you aware that you were on the precipice of something revolutionary?
I don’t want to call myself a visionary or anything like that, but I did know that this was something special, because I saw how quickly it spread around different boroughs in New York City.
From Harlem and the Bronx, and then over into Queens, Brooklyn, and even New Jersey, it was amazing to see everyone just gel around that whole hip-hop scene. As I said before, we all needed that escapism, you know? Forget about your troubles, just come and dance.
With me being in Harlem, right down the block from the Cotton Club and that whole mindset around dancing becoming America’s pastime — just coming from that era, where we had to go to the parties to have a good time — [I knew] that we had created something that would outlast us.
Not only did you attend divinity school, but you are also an ordained minister. How do you bridge those two aspects of your life and how do you reconcile being a rapper with being a minister?
That is such a great question, and thank you for asking.
It’s very simple: God is the Creator. God created hip-hop. We have to start with that, right here. God gave us the talent to perform the music; he gave us the passion to want to spread the music to the masses. He gave us the desire to say, "Hey, come take a look at me! God has blessed me with this — can you do this?"
Now, when you talk about the actual elements of hip-hop — that is, the emcees, and the message that we bring — it’s crucial to understand that we are commanded by God to uplift our community and to show them love. This is the actual essence of hip-hop: peace, unity, love, and just having safe fun.
My mission is to believe in the faith that God is real, and God is in the miracle business. I have seen nothing but miracles for the last 45-50 years in this thing called hip-hop. And it’s important to understand that God is in the mix, and we are all blessed by the common denominator known as hip-hop. It should be our mission to get that back.
As for what’s going on today — the nature of the lyrics, the gangster rap, and all the violence — it didn’t really start out that way, did it? And if we can inspire the future for our youth, then we’ve made a difference. Because the future is in their hands, and we need to inspire them.
But, as a counterpoint, times are different today. And what these men and women are speaking to may not necessarily be destructive — rather, there could be a case made where they’re merely being street poets, and telling the reality of life as they see it. What advice would you give to those people who are telling a different story than the one you told all those years ago?
We are called to be these soldiers, warriors, servants, and communicators. So I understand their reality is different, you know? The world is upside down. The kids out there are just telling it like it is. They’re communicating their reality.
But I think that we should not only communicate how it is, but how it could be. And how it should be.
Think of how different it would be if they also gave some inspiration for a positive future: "Yeah, we goin’ through this, we goin’ through that, but with God, you can overcome all of that. With prayer, you can have miracles, and blessings, come down."
Even if you just understand the nature of the reality that we’re going into right now — things like mass incarceration, the drug epidemic, gun violence, the war profiteering off of Black and brown bodies — it falls upon the shoulders of the elders of this community, this hip-hop movement, to inspire and communicate the possibilities to the younger up-and-comers.
They need to understand that they are the product of royalty. They are the descendants of kings and queens of Africa. They need to honor themselves and honor their ancestors, accordingly.
The culture of hip-hop isn’t just about the music. It’s about fashion, slang, cars, the sports — if you think about it, anthropologically, hip-hop is a civilization onto itself. But, as with all things, so much of it has been co-opted and mainstreamed. How do we bridge the divide between the originators and the colonizers?
Only love can bridge that gap between the ages, the races, our government — the diversity of all these different countries — you know, it needs to be all love.
This is what it’s going to have to take for us to change our present reality. And I feel that in hip-hop, that is the key to that future. The OG’s had the right mindset: peace, love, unity, and having safe fun. We need to get back to that.
When you look back on your career and the legacy you leave behind, how do you want to be remembered?
I remember being in divinity school at Nyack College in New York, and the professor asked the whole class the same thing. And I thought about it for a while, you know? I thought about being remembered as a pioneer of hip-hop — an OG breakdancer — a DJ when I was just seven years old — and an incredible educator.
But what stuck with me was being known as a man of God. That’s it. Because that encompasses everything that I have been through and survived. All of my success, and everything you know about me, comes from God — and to God be the glory.
Latest In Rap Music, News & Videos
Run-DMC
Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
feature
Forty years ago, Run-DMC released their groundbreaking self-titled album, which would undeniably change the course of hip-hop. Here's how three guys from Queens, New York, defined what it meant to be "old school" with a record that remains influential.
Shawn Setaro
|GRAMMYs/Mar 27, 2024 - 03:49 pm
"You don't know that people are going to 40 years later call you up and say, ‘Can you talk about this record from 40 years ago?’"
That was Cory Robbins, former president of Profile Records, reaction to speaking to Grammy.com about one of the first albums his then-fledgling label released. Run-DMC’s self-titled debut made its way into the world four decades ago this week on March 27, 1984 and established the group, in Robbins’ words, "the Beatles of hip-hop."
Rarely in music, or anything else, is there a clear demarcation between old and new. Styles change gradually, and artistic movements usually get contextualized, and often even named, after they’ve already passed from the scene. But Run-DMC the album, and the singles that led up to it, were a definitive breaking point. Rap before it instantly, and eternally, became “old school.” And three guys from Hollis, Queens — Joseph "Run" Simmons, Jason "Jam Master Jay" Mizell, Darryl "D.M.C." McDaniels — helped turn a burgeoning genre on its head.
What exactly was different about Run-DMC? Some of the answers can be glimpsed by a look at the record’s opening song. "Hard Times" is a cover of a Kurtis Blow track from his 1980 debut album. The connection makes sense. Kurtis and Run’s older brother Russell Simmons met in college, and Russell quickly became the rapper’s manager. That led to Run working as Kurtis’ DJ. Larry Smith, who produced Run-DMC, even played on Kurtis’ original version of the song.
But despite those tie-ins, the two takes on "Hard Times" are night and day. Kurtis Blow’s is exactly what rap music was in its earliest recorded form: a full band playing something familiar (in this case, a James Brown-esque groove, bridge and percussion breakdown inclusive.)
What Run-DMC does with it is entirely different. The song is stripped down to its bare essence. There’s a drum machine, a sole repeated keyboard stab, vocals, and… well, that’s about it. No solos, no guitar, no band at all. Run and DMC are trading off lines in an aggressive near-shout. It’s simple and ruthlessly effective, a throwback to the then-fading culture of live park jams. But it was so starkly different from other rap recordings of the time, which were pretty much all in the style of Blow’s record, that it felt new and vital.
"Production-wise, Sugar Hill [the record label that released many key early rap singles] built themselves on the model of Motown, which is to say, they had their own production studios and they had a house band and they recorded on the premises," explains Bill Adler, who handled PR for Run-DMC and other key rap acts at the time.
"They made magnificent records, but that’s not how rap was performed in parks," he continues. "It’s not how it was performed live by the kids who were actually making the music."
Run-DMC’s musical aesthetic was, in some ways, a lucky accident. Larry Smith, the musician who produced the album, had worked with a band previously. In fact, the reason two of the songs on the album bear the subtitle "Krush Groove" is because the drum patterns are taken from his band Orange Krush’s song “Action.”
Read more:
But by the time sessions for Run-DMC came around, the money had run out and, despite his desire to have the music done by a full band, Smith was forced to go without them and rely on a drum machine.
His artistic partner on the production side was Russell Simmons. Simmons, who has been accused over the past seven years of numerous instances of sexual assault dating back decades, was back in 1983-4 the person providing the creative vision to match Smith’s musical knowledge.
Orange Krush’s drummer Trevor Gale remembered the dynamic like this (as quoted in Geoff Edgers’ Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song that Changed American Music Forever): “Larry was the guy who said, 'Play four bars, stop on the fifth bar, come back in on the fourth beat of the fifth bar.' Russell was the guy that was there that said, ‘I don’t like how that feels. Make it sound like mashed potato with gravy on it.’”
Explore The Artists Who Changed Hip-Hop
It wasn’t just the music that set Run-DMC apart from its predecessors. Their look was also starkly different, and that influenced everything about the group, including the way their audience viewed them.
Most of the first generation of recorded rappers were, Bill Adler remembers, influenced visually by either Michael Jackson or George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic. Run-DMC was different.
"Their fashion sense was very street oriented," Adler explains. "And that was something that emanated from Jam Master Jay. Jason just always had a ton of style. He got a lot of his sartorial style from his older brother, Marvin Thompson. Jay looked up to his older brother and kind of dressed the way that Marvin did, including the Stetson hat.
"When Run and D told Russ, Jason is going to be our deejay, Russell got one look at Jay and said, ‘Okay, from now on, you guys are going to dress like him.’"
Run, DMC, and Jay looked like their audience. That not only set them apart from the costumed likes of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, it also cemented the group’s relationship with their listeners.
"When you saw Run-DMC, you didn’t see celebrity. You saw yourself," DMC said in the group’s recent docuseries.
Read more: 20 Iconic Hip-Hop Style Moments: From Run-D.M.C. To Runways
Another thing that set Run-DMC (the album) and Run-DMC (the group) apart from what came before was the fact that they released a cohesive rap album. Nine songs that all belonged together, not just a collection of already-released singles and some novelties. Rappers had released albums prior to Run-DMC, but that’s exactly what they were: hits and some other stuff — sung love ballads or rock and roll covers, or other experiments rightfully near-forgotten.
"There were a few [rap] albums [at the time], but they were pretty crappy. They were usually just a bunch of singles thrown together," Cory Robbins recalls.
Not this album. It set a template that lasted for years: Some social commentary, some bragging, a song or two to show off the DJ. A balance of records aimed at the radio and at the hard-core fans. You can still see traces of Run-DMC in pretty much every rap album released today.
Listeners and critics reacted. The album got a four-star review in Rolling Stone with “the music…that backs these tracks is surprisingly varied, for all its bare bones” and an A minus from Robert Christgau who claimed “It's easily the canniest and most formally sustained rap album ever.” Just nine months after its release, Run-DMC was certified gold, the first rap LP ever to earn that honor. "Rock Box" also single-handedly invented rap-rock, thanks to Eddie Martinez’s loud guitars.
There is another major way in which the record was revolutionary. The video for "Rock Box" was the first rap video to ever get into regular rotation on MTV and, the first true rap video ever played on the channel at all, period. Run-DMC’s rise to MTV fame represented a significant moment in breaking racial barriers in mainstream music broadcasting.
"There’s no overstating the importance of that video," Adler tells me. vIt broke through the color line at MTV and opened the door to a cataclysmic change."
"Everybody watched MTV forty years ago," Robbins agrees. "It was a phenomenal thing nationwide. Even if we got three or four plays a week of ‘Rock Box’ on MTV, that did move the needle."
All of this: the new musical style, the relatable image, the MTV pathbreaking, and the attendant critical love and huge sales (well over 10 times what their label head was expecting when he commissioned the album from a reluctant Russell Simmons — "I hoping it would sell thirty or forty thousand," Robbins says now): all of it contributed to making Run-DMC what it is: a game-changer.
"It was the first serious rap album," Robbins tells me. And while you could well accuse him of bias — the group making an album at all was his idea in the first place — he’s absolutely right.
Run-DMC changed everything. It split the rap world into old school and new school, and things would never be the same.
Perhaps the record’s only flaw is one that wouldn’t be discovered for years. As we’re about to get off the phone, Robbins tells me about a mistake on the cover, one he didn’t notice until the record was printed and it was too late.
There was something (Robbins doesn’t quite recall what) between Run and DMC in the cover photo. The art director didn’t like it and proceeded to airbrush it out. But he missed something. On the vinyl, if you look between the letters "M" and "C,", you can see DMC’s disembodied left hand, floating ghost-like in mid-air. While it was an oversight, it’s hard not to see this as a sign, a sort of premonition that the album itself would hang over all of hip-hop, with an influence that might be hard to see at first, but that never goes away.
A Guide To New York Hip-Hop: Unpacking The Sound Of Rap's Birthplace From The Bronx To Staten Island