"My Adidas" is released

Why it matters

"My Adidas" came out May 15, 1986, as a track on Run-DMC's Raising Hell album. The song is, as advertised, about the group's sneakers. Specifically Adidas Superstars, the white-with-three-black-stripes shell-toes Run, DMC, and Jam Master Jay had been wearing without laces (a prison-aesthetic move) since the early 80s. The song is a love letter to the shoe. What "My Adidas" did, beyond being a great song, is trigger the first major-brand endorsement deal in rap. The summer after the album dropped, Run-DMC played Madison Square Garden and at the climax of "My Adidas" had everyone in the building hold up their sneakers. Three thousand pairs of Adidas went up. An Adidas executive named Angelo Anastasio was in the audience. He went back to Germany and got the group a million-dollar deal. The deal was signed in 1986. It is still in effect. Every rap-and-sneaker collaboration that has happened since (Run-DMC Superstar reissues, Jay-Z's S. Carter, the Yeezys, Travis Scott's Jordans, the entire economy of it) is downstream of one song about a shoe. You can hear it on Raising Hell. You can hear what changed.