Run-DMC

INNOVATORS. ORIGINATORS. RUN DMC’s influence on the music of the new millennium goes every bit as deep as that of Elvis Presley or the Beatles. With the release of CROWN ROYAL on Arista, the seminal rap trio is returning to a stage they set not only for themselves, but for an industry – and a generation.

CROWN ROYAL’s list of multi-platinum guest artists proves the lasting and universal force exerted by RUN DMC on the front line of hip-hop, rock and R&B. The first street urban single and video, “It’s Over,” co-stars hitmaking producer/performer Jermaine Dupri. The simultaneously released Modern Rock single and video, “Rock Show,” teams the band with Third Eye Blind’s Stephan Jenkins, who co-produced the track with Jason Carmer. And, inevitably, the biggest fans and beneficiaries of RUN DMC’s historic fusion of rock and rap come to the party: Kid Rock, reminiscing about “The School of Old” and Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, joining on the straight-up hip-hop “Them Girls.”

Also sharing the mic on the album are the group’s peers in hip-hop, Nas and Prodigy of Mobb Deep, celebrating “Queen’s Day,” and Method Man, in “Simmons Incorporated.” House of Pain rapper-turned-folkie Everlast grooves on a Steve Miller sample in “Take the Money and Run,” and R&B group Jagged Edge recall the vintage R&B of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” Sugar Ray pays tribute to a RUN DMC classic in “Here We Go 2001.” Primary producers on the album include Jam Master Jay and Randy Allen with assistance from Run; DJ Lethal, Dante Ross and John Gamble, and DJ Homicide. In all, it’s a wide-ranging match of visionaries ready to define another new decade, with the musicians they themselves inspired.

Few artists ever provided as complete a musical and stylistic blueprint for their musical successors as RUN DMC (Joseph “DJ Run” Simmons, Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell). Managed by Run’s older brother, the future entrepreneur Russell Simmons, they roared out of Hollis, Queens, with 1983’s “It’s Like That”/”Sucker MCs,” transforming R&B party funk with a new combination of sparse beats, hard production textures and an obvious disdain for pretension of any sort. Within a year, they took another giant step by combining monster rock guitar with hip-hop in the single and video “Rock Box.” The huge popularity of RUN DMC produced rap’s first gold album (RUN-DMC, 1983) and its first platinum album (King of Rock, 1985). Every one of their early singles are the primary source material of hip-hop, “Hard Times,” “Jam Master Jay,” “Together Forever” and “Here We Go” notable among them.

And even this was a prelude an even more massive cross-cultural explosion triggered by 1986’s Raising Hell. Its first single was a double-sided hard-core hip-hop classic, “My Adidas”/”Peter Piper,” one of the hottest and most important pieces of vinyl ever pressed. Its second was “Walk This Way,” the remake and collaboration that redefined genre boundaries out of existence, relaunched the career of co-stars Aerosmith, put rap in the Billboard pop top 10 for the first time ever, and drove an eventual 3 million in album sales. Pop music had touched the third rail, and was changed forever. Scanning the charts in 2001, it hardly need be repeated that there’s a direct line that goes from RUN DMC’s early work to each and every artist you see lounging this afternoon on MTV’s TRL. Their eclectic sound, their studio technology, their iconic look, their groundbreaking videos and their massively successful arena tours had brought the authentic style of the urban inner city to the middle American suburb. The ripple effects touched everyone’s music, from every living hip-hopper and metal-rapper, to Limp Bizkit, N’Sync and Christina Aguilera.

But all of RUN DMC’s career milestones have been milestones for rap itself: the first rappers to appear on MTV, American Bandstand, Saturday Night Live and the cover of Rolling Stone magazine; the first rap act signed to a product endorsement deal; the first rap act nominated for a Grammy Award (Best R&B Vocal Performance by a Group, 1986 for Raising Hell). It wasn’t only their career that zoomed, either: their visibility and 20 million album sales proved that rap would spawn mega-selling album artists. That fact single-handedly revived the independent record industry, and paved the way to today’s era of black entrepreneurship in music.

The successes of RUN DMC resounded through rap, rock, R&B and, eventually, international pop of every kind. They changed an industry and they did it by speaking directly to youth, without the advice or support of anyone in the mainstream media or industry. Along the way, life went on: Run was ordained a minister, DMC transformed his lifestyle and wrote a book about it, and Jay launched a successful record label. All became husbands and fathers. But they never lost their following: the most recent album, 1993’s gold-certified Down With the King, was greeted with a No. 7 chart debut, and in 1998, another of their admirers, New York techno/dance producer Jason Nevins, remixed their first hit, “It’s Like That,” into a world-wide chartbuster and a 4 million-selling single.

Now, having altered the landscape of music irreversibly, RUN DMC is more visible than ever, as hip-hop is finally acknowledged as the force it’s always been in music, sports, fashion, marketing and pop culture overall. Their “Christmas In Hollis” banged through the White House in the 1999 “A Very Special Christmas” live event and in the Sony ad campaign of holiday 2000. The Gap, World Wrestling Federation and the National Basketball Association all tapped into RUN DMC as defining figures to people in every walk of life. Their appearance on MTV’s 1999 Video Music Awards with Aerosmith and Kid Rock was one of the events of the year. Run-DMC Bio continued

In the twentieth year of an astounding career, RUN DMC turns in CROWN ROYAL to show how it all began, how it’s going to be, and how it’s done best.