Run DMC: Mar 27 1984
(The first REAL Rap Album)
What would you sacrifice food for? I’m talking three weeks, no lunch. Have you ever saved forty quarters with the intentions of making a ten dollar purchase? Prior to Run DMC’s self-titled debut, I couldn’t have imagined it. But after I made that purchase, I realized that Hip-Hop was as vital to me as any nutritious substance.
To be honest, I never thought about Rap having albums. We may have owned Kurtis Blow’s, at least Aiyetoro did, but that never registered as a proper Rap record. When I thought of an album I thought Off The Wall, Fantastic Voyage, 1999, those were albums.
The only bit of music that I bought was the 45 to Patrice Rushen’s “Haven’t You Heard” (I really loved that song). But Rap? Rap was something that I heard on the radio and recorded to cassette. Wasn’t nobody thinking about no Rap albums. I was twelve. Back when twelve meant you were fresh out of playing with action figures and into Atari 2600. When twelve meant you were still a child. The concept of buying anything aside from comics just wasn’t a reality.
Run DMC was different.
I think I’ve written in enough places how “Sucker MC’s” had me completely enthralled so I don’t have to write it here. Needless to say, the summer before seventh grade, I heard “Jam-Master Jay” for the first time. So dope. Fit in with songs like “It’s Yours” and was nestled on my cassette somewhere around “Five Minutes of Funk” and “Closer (to the Edit).”
School started and we separated into tribes: jocks with jocks, the studious types with the studious types, new wave folk with new wave folk, and us B-boys found each other, writers with writers, rappers with rappers, and people who could really boogie (meaning, not me) with other breakers.
But all of us B-Boys compared tapes. I had never heard “Hollis Crew” before but it was on my brother Richie Mendoza’s cassette. They ain’t play it on Power 99, so I was miffed. Where did that come from? When I found out it was on an album, I grew resolute. I was going to get that album.
So I saved. My dad gave us fifty cents for lunch each day (yes, reader, $.50, two quarters — this a correction on a previous memory. my Dad laughed at the thought of giving us $2 for lunch). I decided I would hold on to that money. If I had asked my Dad for a “hip hoppity bebop” tape (as he called it), after my Dad was done laughing at me, he would have hit me with a resounding NO. Well, he ended up buying it anyways, two quarters at a time.
And I had to be slick about it. I was twelve. I couldn’t just pop up with a tape. I waited til we went to the BX, asked if I could go look at games (we had the Commodore 64), bought the cassette, opened it, disposed of the plastic, pocketed it, he never knew.
The subterfuge took away from the initial excitement but once home, it was on. Run DMC was the first Rap album that I flipped — not because I liked every song either — I didn’t, it was mostly because it was all of these songs that I had recorded on various tapes AND songs that I had never heard before on one single cassette.
Once I had it, I wanted more…but there was no other Rap albums out there, aside from the Fat Boys, Whodini, and Kurtis Blow — I ain’t want any of them. So it came to pass that the only Rap album I would buy in 1984 was Run DMC…everything else I recorded off of Power 99 and Lady B’s Street Beat.
Of course Run DMC would go on to be wildly successful filling the Profile coffers with millions and it would pave the way for more ambitious albums that would mark the beginning of the modern era of Recorded Rap. It was my first Rap album, over the next five years I would buy HUNDREDS more, but like anything else, you never forget your first.
