Run-D.M.C. is released

Why it matters

Run-D.M.C., the debut LP from Run-D.M.C., came out on Profile Records on March 27, 1984. It is the album that ended the old school and started everything that came after, and you can hear the change happen on the wax in real time. What the album does that nothing before it had done is strip the funk band out of rap. No live bass. No live drums. No house horn section. Just a Roland TR-808, two turntables, two voices, and a rock guitar when the song called for it. "Rock Box," the closing track, features Eddie Martinez on guitar and becomes the first rap song MTV puts in heavy rotation, which is an impossibility you have to remind yourself was an impossibility before it happened. By the next summer the album was gold. By 1986 Run-D.M.C. were running the genre. None of the next twenty years happens without this LP. That is not me being dramatic. That is just the schedule.