Run-DMC

Bio

Run-DMC is the first hip-hop act that matters to people who do not otherwise care about hip-hop. If your parents know one hip-hop song, it is probably "Walk This Way." Before Run-DMC, hip-hop is a New York thing. After Run-DMC, hip-hop is a worldwide thing. The pivot is them.

The trio is Joseph "Run" Simmons (the brash MC), Darryl "DMC" McDaniels (the deeper-voiced everyman MC), and Jason "Jam Master Jay" Mizell (the DJ who held the architecture together). All three grew up in Hollis, Queens. None of them are from the Bronx, where hip-hop got invented. This matters. They are the first generation that received hip-hop as something already in motion, and then took it and rebuilt it.

Their debut single, "It's Like That" / "Sucker MCs," drops in 1983. The B-side is the document. "Sucker MCs" is just a 808 drum and Run and DMC trading verses. No melody. No samples. No band. Just rapping and a beat. This was a deliberate stripping-away. Producers Russell Simmons (Run's older brother) and Larry Smith took out everything that had been making hip-hop sound like disco-with-rapping. What was left was the form.

Then Raising Hell, 1986, the album that breaks hip-hop into the mainstream. It contains "Walk This Way," the Aerosmith collaboration that Rick Rubin pushed and Run-DMC initially resisted. The video gets played on MTV, in rotation, alongside videos by white rock acts. The album sells over three million copies. Then comes the Adidas thing. After Run-DMC performed "My Adidas" at Madison Square Garden and 20,000 kids held up their own Adidas in the air, Adidas signed Run-DMC to a $1.5 million endorsement deal. It is the first major endorsement in hip-hop history. Every Cash Money / Roc-A-Fella / Bad Boy executive deal that came after traces back to that one.

On October 30, 2002, Jam Master Jay was murdered in his Queens studio. Run-DMC stopped. Run became a pastor. DMC struggled openly with alcoholism and depression and his own paternity. The group's career as a unit ended that day. The legacy did not. They were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2009, the second hip-hop act in (after Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five). The album-rock-rotation precedent, the endorsement deal, the streetwear-as-hip-hop convention: all of it starts here.