DMC

Bio

Darryl McDaniels writes most of the lyrics. He is the one who reads. If you separate the Run-DMC catalog into "wrote these verses" piles, Darryl's pile is the bigger one. He just does not stand at the front of the stage. That is Run's job. Darryl's job is to come in second, with the deeper voice, and ground whatever Run was just shouting.

He was born in Hollis, Queens, in 1964. He went to St. John's University. He read comic books. He was the kid in the group most likely to have been on the honor roll. Run was the kid in the group most likely to have been told to sit down. The dynamic is everywhere in their early records.

"DMC" — Darryl Mac, Devastating Mic Controller, doctorate in microphones, depending on which interview — became one of the most-imitated MCs of the 1980s precisely because he made it sound like rapping was something you could just decide to do. He does not sing. He does not show off. He stands flat-footed at the mic and says what he came to say. The line "I'm DMC, in the place to be" is essentially the genre's "Hello, my name is."

Then the long alcoholism. Then the diagnosis of spasmodic dysphonia, a vocal-cord disorder that essentially took his rapping voice from him sometime in the late 1990s. Then the depression. Then, in his thirties, the discovery (via a DNA test for a documentary) that he had been adopted, that his birth mother had been a teenager in the Bronx who gave him up. DMC has been remarkably open about all of this in subsequent interviews and in his 2016 memoir, "Ten Ways Not to Commit Suicide," which is exactly as bracing as the title suggests.

He survived. He still records. He still does spoken-word and lectures on mental health. He runs the Felix Organization with Sheila Jaffe, a nonprofit for kids in foster care. He has done the math on his life and made the unglamorous decision to spend the back half of it being useful.

Inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with Run-DMC in 2009. There is, in the long career arc, a thing he says about Jam Master Jay's death that sticks: you do not get to choose the day the band ends. You only get to choose what you do after.