King of Rock is released

Why it matters

King of Rock came out January 21, 1985, on Profile. It is Run-DMC's second LP and it is the album where they doubled down on the rock-guitar thing. The title track has Eddie Martinez on guitar again. "You Talk Too Much" has guitar. The cover art is the group standing in front of a giant marquee that says, simply, KING OF ROCK. The move was deliberate. Run-DMC had figured out that rap MTV could play was rap that had guitars on it, and that rap radio could play was rap that had hooks on it. They built King of Rock to have both. The album hit platinum, which made it the first platinum rap album. By 1986 they would supersede this themselves with Raising Hell, which is the bigger record by every measure, but King of Rock is the album where the rock-rap crossover stops being an experiment and starts being a plan. You can see Walk This Way coming from a mile away if you are listening to this album in the right order.