(Run-DMC, therefore, were not so much appropriating Aerosmith’s groove for black culture as reclaiming it.) Guitarist Joe Perry added a simple but effective hook, and Tyler came up with a lewd loss-of-innocence lyric about a schoolboy getting caught masturbating by his father, who instructs him in the ways of seduction.
The song had first been recorded for the band’s Toys in the Attic album, and was born on tour when singer Steven Tyler, who had been listening to the Meters and James Brown, asked drummer Joey Kramer to lay down something with a little funk to it. Album sales had steadily declined since their 70s peak, the band’s key members were ravaged by various addictions, and they hadn’t had a Billboard top 10 single since the original Walk This Way, a decade earlier. Their dress, unlike the extravagant leather, sequin and feather outfits of most rap acts at the time, reflected a street aesthetic to which the average b-boy on the corner could relate.”Īerosmith, meanwhile, were in a slump.
“Their attitude, like their beats, was hard. “Ultimately it took Run-DMC, with their black leather, sweats, homburgs and in-your-face attitude, to crystallise the image of toughness into rap chic,” wrote SH Fernando Jr in hip-hop history The New Beats. That track – brutally blunt by the standards of the time – and its rival-dissing flipside, Sucker MCs, blew up on rap radio and changed the game for good. But everything changed in 1983 when the trio, renamed Run-DMC and still in their teens, released their debut single, It’s Like That, on Profile. The trio had roots in that clunky prehistory: Run (Joseph Simmons), the teenage brother of Russell Simmons, had previously DJed for Kurtis Blow, before forming his own band, originally called Orange Crush, with DMC (Darryl McDaniels) and DJ Jam Master Jay (Jason Mizell). The reputation of the entire genre was rescued by Run-DMC who, in the words of British writer Neil Kulkarni in The Periodic Table of Hip Hop, “made everything that had happened before them sound old-fashioned, too slick and smarmy”. Seek out the extraordinary footage of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five on Channel 4’s The Tube performing The Message, its pioneering gritty street-level content undermined by their superfly sci-fi costumes, which looked like they’d been raided from George Clinton’s tour bus seven years earlier.
The rap records that reached radio listeners in the early years had a tendency, ever since the Sugarhill Gang’s breakthrough, Rapper’s Delight, to exude a novelty flavour, while turntablism, in real life the beating heart of the culture, tended to manifest itself only as a cheesy wikki-wikki add-on. Not that hip-hop had always been an easy sell. A new generation was turning instead towards exactly the hip-hop sounds that Rubin and Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons were selling them. The suburban white kids who had once been the Boston band’s faithful constituency had matured and moved on. Before Rubin could go into any further detail, Collins cut him off to request a little clarification: “What’s rap?”Ī more valid question, for most people in the mid-80s, might have been “What’s an Aerosmith?”. Rubin, a rock kid who’d grown up – or, rather, who hadn’t – on the gonzo kicks of AC/DC, Ted Nugent and Aerosmith themselves, wanted to talk to Collins about the idea of remaking his charges’ 1975 single Walk This Way with a rap group on his roster, Run-DMC. The voice on the other end belonged to Rick Rubin, the 22-year-old hip-hop producer and entrepreneur behind Def Jam, the fast-rising record label he had founded while still a film student at New York University. W hen Aerosmith manager Tim Collins answered his phone one day in early 1986, he was, at first, confused.