Run-DMC inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Why it matters

April 4, 2009. Run-DMC was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, becoming the second hip-hop act ever inducted (after Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five in 2007). Eminem gave the induction speech. The induction came six and a half years after Jam Master Jay had been murdered in his Jamaica, Queens studio. This is the harder kind of Hall of Fame induction. Run and DMC accepted the honor without their third member, who could not be there because he had been killed. Eminem talked, in his speech, about getting hold of a Raising Hell tape in middle school in Detroit and not letting it out of his Walkman for a year. That story is one a lot of mid-1980s and early 1990s rappers can tell some version of. Run-DMC's catalog (the self-titled debut, King of Rock, Raising Hell, Tougher Than Leather) is the catalog the rest of the genre was built on top of for at least a decade. The Hall of Fame ceremony does not change that. The ceremony just admits it on the record. You can argue the Hall should have called Run-DMC sooner. Run-DMC are too gracious to argue.