Run

Bio

Joseph Simmons is Run. He is also Rev. Run. He is also Russell Simmons's younger brother, which is in some ways the most important fact in this bio.

Born in Hollis, Queens, in 1964, Joseph started DJing for Kurtis Blow as a teenager, billed as "DJ Run, son of Kurtis Blow," which is the kind of dramatic brother-of-the-thing positioning his older brother Russell would later turn into a business. By 1982, Run was rapping more than DJing. By 1983, he and his childhood friend Darryl "DMC" McDaniels and DMC's friend Jason "Jam Master Jay" Mizell were the three-man unit Run-DMC. Their debut single dropped that year on Profile Records, and the brashness of Run's verses became the group's signal personality.

The simplest way to describe Run's MC style is: present-tense, declarative, very loud. He raps in the front of the mix because that is where Russell Simmons and the Def Jam operation he was building put him. You do not have to remember Run's verses to recognize his voice. He is the one shouting.

Run was, by all accounts, also the most religiously alert person in the group. After Jam Master Jay was murdered in his Queens studio in 2002, Run essentially stopped rapping. He had been ordained as a minister years earlier; he leaned into it. From 2005 to 2009, MTV ran "Run's House," a reality show centered on his Saddle River, New Jersey family. The show was, of all things, gentle. He produced and starred. His wife Justine and their kids became MTV's softer mid-2000s counterpoint to the Osbournes.

He posts a tweet most mornings that is essentially "GOD IS GOOD." He sometimes captions a photo of breakfast with three exclamation points. He is, in 2026, one of the more sincere Twitter users you will find. He is, in the context of his actual contribution to recorded music, vastly under-listened-to: the early Run-DMC albums are still better than they get credit for being, mostly because critics talk about the rock crossover and not about how good Run actually sounds rapping in 1984.

Inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with Run-DMC in 2009. Still living. Still tweeting. Still Rev. Run.