HH50

How Dr. Dre’s ‘Still D.R.E.’ Ushered In A New Millennium Of Radio Rap

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Dre and Snoop
Getty Image/Merle Cooper

The young rapper-producer charges into corporate headquarters like a revolutionary soldier storming a state armory. This is Dr. Dre, stepping to the notoriously menacing Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight to liquidate their professional relationship. The setting of the duel could scarcely be more intimidating. Walls are painted Grim Reaper black; both the carpet and Suge’s suit match his gang affiliations: blood red.

Dre gives it straight. He wants to escape the empire his beats helped build. “I’m doing my own thing. Starting fresh. Nobody to answer to but myself. It’s time.” Lost income means nothing. As Dre has come to see things, “You can’t put a price on a piece of mind.”

That’s how the finale of the movie Straight Outta Compton tells it anyway. Dre served as a producer on the serviceable Hollywood depiction of the NWA story and scenes like the face-off with Suge call to mind a Chappelle Show joke on how making a movie about your own life brings too great a temptation to embellish. The very final line of Straight Outta Compton sees Suge ask Dre what the name of his new label will be. With dramatic pause, he utters the word “Aftermath.” It wasn’t subtle: the Good Doctor was exiting the bleakness of Death Row towards the light of Aftermath Entertainment and a better future. But in reality, was it all so simple?

As the 20th century began to fade, Dre’s ongoing relevance was not secure. In the three years since leaving Death Row, he had seen his label-launching compilation Dr. Dre Presents: The Aftermath and supergroup project The Firm’s The Album drop with a thud — two of the few obvious failures of the Comptonite’s career. Eminem’s The Slim Shady LP was a commercial success, but whether or not Aftermath’s new star could establish himself as something beyond a flash-in-the-pan gimmick was far from certain.

Needing a hit, Dre put the label on his back. In late 1999, he released “Still D.R.E.,” the lead single from his second solo album, 2001. The song immediately felt like the future. The raw, buzzing grooves of G-funk had been stripped out, replaced by pristine strings, slick drums, and that blinging piano loop. It was the ultimate in neck-snappin’ technology, visionary yet West Coast to its core, and presented with a suitably stylish Hype Williams-directed music video loaded with bouncing lowriders and hard-partying crowds shot in the filmmaker’s distinctive rich color palette. Press play 24 years later and you feel the palm trees looming over your head, the stickiest California weed enters your bloodstream, and the car you may or may not be driving automatically starts to bounce up and down from its front suspension.

“Still D.R.E.” is also the assertion of a legacy in the strongest possible terms. With his most effective cohort Snoop Dogg in the passenger’s seat to provide the hook, Dre raps about his days with the World Class Wreckin’ Cru, through to signing Eminem, his most obvious recent success. It’s one of rap’s most influential figures, 34 years old, saying goodbye to his youth and accepting elder statesman status. This can be when decline sets in, the artist is aged out of relevancy, and their comfortable surroundings cease to reflect the world that inspired their ascent. But unlike Alexander The Great, shedding tears when there were no worlds left to conquer, Dre craved to repeat what he’d done twice before, with NWA and Death Row: reinvent the West.

​​It’s common knowledge that Dre has never viewed himself as primarily a rapper, and so had no qualms about eschewing normal practice by using ghostwriters. For “Still D.R.E.,” a most esteemed emissary was brought in from the East Coast to complete the magic: Jay-Z, who in classic Jigga fashion, cooked up some steady-paced verses full of quotables for Dre’s laconic baritone.

The subject matter is simple: Years go by, but fundamentals are timeless. Dre is still making beats, still smoking chronic, and still feeling the same affinity for the streets that made him. One of the architects of “F*ck Tha Police” will never have time for cops, and perfecting his craft remains the highest priority. “They say rap’s changed,” he spits. “They wanna know how I feel about it.” But Dre doesn’t need to answer the question because “Still D.R.E.” says everything he needs to.

And yet the song almost never came to be. Dre actually thought work on 2001 was complete and “The Next Episode” would be first single until Jimmy Iovine, head of Aftermath’s distributor Interscope, butted in. Iovine dug “The Next Episode,” but insisted it wasn’t a lead cut. “I will lay down on the street in front of these trucks before we let that go first,” Iovine told Dre. History is built on such hunches.

“Still D.R.E.” came together in a flash of inspiration. The piano riff was gifted to Dre by one of his protegés, Scott Storch. The former Roots keyboardist was in the Encore studio in Burbank, vibing to a kick and snare pattern Dre had cooked up, deliberately trying to play something a little bit wonky, when he caught the doctor’s perfect ear. Charging in from a nearby kitchen, Dre shouted, “That’s it!” With Storch’s motif in place, keyboard player Camara Kambon, one of the new people Dre surrounded himself with after the Death Row split, worked on filling the instrumental out. “I came in and kinda ‘laced it,’ is what we would say,” Kambon tells me. “Adding what we would refer to as the ‘ear candy,’ some of the sweeping things, and panning things, or things that add the color that really give the track some presence.” By the end of the day, what they had had been sent to Jay-Z.

This ability to sense the pillar of a classic record before the music disappeared into the ether is part of Dre’s genius. “I was always amazed at how he could pull simple elements together and, bam, a hit,” Brian Gardner, the long-time Dre collaborator who mastered 2001, tells me in an email.

​​A fortnight after “Still D.R.E.” was released as a single, the maestro unleashed the full-length. The promo had not been a red herring. 2001 redefined West Coast rap. Dre’s pocket symphonies were a spotless mix of catchy key riffs, prominent strings and horns, smooth basslines, and a palpable sense of space. The album opens with the audio swell that accompanies the THX logo before movies in cinemas with the deluxe sound systems, asserting the album’s hi-end fidelity (Dre was reportedly sued by Lucasfilm for using the sound). What follows is one of the greatest party records of all time; despite Iovine’s notions, every song sounds like a single. Still not minded to spend too much time on the mic, Dre fills the soirée with talented friends. Established masters such as Nate Dogg, Kurupt, and King T share space with rising artists Xzibit, Knoc-turn’al, and recent Aftermath signee Hittman, who is omnipresent on the album.

2001 has a programmed, electronic quality — the beats feel immaculate and symmetrical. But Dre, as he had on first album The Chronic, deployed live musicians to ratchet up his sound. Tom Gordon worked as an assistant engineer on the album in Sierra Sonics Recording Mansion, Reno, Nevada, one of the studio’s Dre operated from during the period. He remembers guitar, keyboard, and bass players would jam, with Dre orchestrating the musicians like a ballet master. Dre’s team, meanwhile, had multiple outputs of the MPC drum machine going through their console with the live instruments. Once Dre found a groove he liked, six and a half minutes of the music were recorded to two-inch analog tape, which would later be used to create the beats.

“The fact that he could see the big picture on how these pieces could fit and make a cohesive jam was inspiring to watch,” remembers Gordon.

“He’s so precise about everything,” says bass player Preston Crump of how Dre would direct the sessions. “It wasn’t, like, super organic, you know what I mean? It’s more like [Dre would say], ‘We’re going to build this like this with these plans, and I’m going to do my magic on it.” Still, Crump found himself tripping off the sonics. “I was in awe listening to what he had and when he played how the kick drum was jumping out of the speakers. So much so that he blew a couple of sets of NS10.”

Storch’s piano on “Still D.R.E.” had a classical musical bent, evident when you see the various videos out there of classical pianists adopting it. Similarly, songs such as “Forgot About Dre” and “What’s The Difference” featured more orchestral elements than was typical of the G-funk era. In the case of “Forgot About Dre,” it was Kambon, very comfortable in this sphere from his work as an arranger and film composer, who created the strings section on his keyboard. From there, Eminem wrote lyrics intended for Dre and Snoop, but Dre liked Em’s reference track so much he opted to keep it.

“The introduction of the strings, the introduction of orchestral elements, was a very different thing from what Dre had done before,” says Kambon. “If you listen to ‘Forgot About Dre,’ for instance, the driving force of that, and what we did with Mary [J. Blige] and [her Dre-produced 2001 single] ‘Family Affair,’ what we did was this very kind of trance-induced,” he mimics the music of Mary J’s hit down the phone line, “that was consistent through a lot of the records that we did at that time. That’s classical music — that’s what that was.”

Dre’s search for samples was also tireless. Every time he came to Reno, he arrived with two crates of 200 albums and a crew to scour them for loops. Sometimes the chosen samples would be recreated or reinforced by drum machines and live instruments. “They would create this foundation with the samples inside the MPC drum machine, and play with the different elements,” explains Gordon, who confirms Dre’s reputation of being a studio perfectionist. “He would sit there as stuff was coming out of the MPC before going to tape and EQ it, noise gate it, and try to get as good a tone to tape so he didn’t have to fix it later. It was a very smart approach.”

Gordon also noted that Dre was a stickler for double track vocals being right on the money (this was pre-ProTools, so they had to be done organically), and refused to go along with a popular approach by compressing his elements to get his sound louder. “If you listen to the sonic response of that whole record, including ‘Still D.R.E.,’ there’s still a lot of clarity on the snares and the hats and the kicks that still hit you in the chest some compared to some later stuff that is louder,” says Gordon. “The fact they were keeping the levels down a touch and not following the Joneses to be the loudest record out there was admirable, and I think was a real testament to why the sonic quality of that record stood up.”

Gordon’s biggest contribution to 2001 came by accident. The 6-foot 8-inch behemoth — whose shock of dark curly hair inspired Dre and his people to give him the nickname ‘Stern,’ as in Howard — was actually a superfan of the John Carpenter movie Halloween, so much so that he owned a full Michael Myers costume. During one session, he quietly donned the ensemble and proceeded to terrorize the crew. Collaborator Mike Elizondo even threw his bass off in panic and tried to run away. In the wake of the pandemonium, a dozen or so people convened around Dre and his co-producer Mel-Man. Soon after, they’d concocted a beat using Carpenter’s famous piano music from Halloween, which would become the song “Murder Ink.” Gordon’s obsession would not fade: He later auditioned to play Myers in Rob Zombie’s 2007 Halloween reboot.

Crump suggests that Dre decamped to Reno to escape the drama in Los Angeles. He had originally wanted to title his album Chronic 2000, until Death Row opted to beat him to it by calling a compilation Suge Knight Represents: Chronic 2000 (Still Smokin’) suggested lingering bad will. Chronic 2000 became Chronic 2001, until Dre decided to abandon the reference to his first album entirely, so as not to get dragged into a copyright dispute.

2001 hit No. 2 on the U.S. Billboard 200 and has since moved twice as many units as The Chronic. There would be no more incertitude: As the new millennium dawned, Dre could still forge L.A. classics as easily as he once sold tapes out of a trunk. As a teenager, I spun my 2001 CD until it practically dissolved into dust. It was alluring to hear Dre and his crew slip into exaggerated hard-partying characters surrounded by friends, blunts, and women. As time has passed, I’ve come to realize that its misogyny was a corrosive thing to be exposed to. But Dre also maintained “Still D.R.E.”’s themes of looking back over his career with well-earned satisfaction and asserting his position at the top of hip-hop.

“For the last couple of years, there’s been a lot of talk out on the streets about whether or not I can still hold my own, whether or not I’m still good at producing,” Dre told The New York Times in 1999. “That was the ultimate motivation for me. Magazines, word of mouth, and rap tabloids were saying I didn’t have it any more. What more do I need to do? How many platinum records have I made? O.K., here’s the album — now what do you have to say?’”

2001 never received the kind of critical praise of, say, The Chronic or Snoop’s Doggystyle. Regardless, it is one of the most influential rap albums of all time. It ushered Dre into a new creative phase as he drew on the same ultra-high-end form of beatmaking when producing tunes that crushed early 2000s MTV via envoys Eve, Bilal, 50 Cent, The Game, and plenty of others. Dre’s new penchant for elements of classical music can be heard on Xzibit’s song “X.” “What’s the Difference” would become repurposed into Blu Cantrell and Sean Paul’s smash hit “Breathe,” while Erykah Badu flipped the laid back grooves of “Xxplosive” into a version of her single “Bag Lady.” In the era of super-producers like Timbaland, The Neptunes, and Kanye West, Dre was right there, forging the kind of beats you could launch a fashionable headphone brand on, which, of course, he did, with Beats by Dre. 2001 wrote a playbook that beat-making disciples like Eminem, Storch, and Nottz have extensively studied. When the spotless snap ‘n’ pop of DJ Mustard’s ratchet music emerged in the 2010s, reinventing the West once more, it was easy to trace its origins back to 2001.

Dre never needed a solo hit again. His inability to finish hi next album Detox became notorious, until he finally scrapped the record for swansong Compton in 2015. But if the legend struggled to find the same inspiration and motivation, maybe it’s because 2001 and songs like “Still D.R.E.” left no lingering uncertainties. They were large enough to secure a legacy, still and forever.

Let’s Talk About Rhymesayers’ Impact On Hip-Hop’s 50th Anniversary With Slug And Siddiq

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slug siddiq rhymesayers hip hop 50
Rhymesayers/Derrick Rossignol

For much of hip-hop’s 50-year history, lots of attention has (rightly or wrongly) been lavished on three main regions: “The East Coast” (mostly consisting of New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia), “The West Coast” (really, just LA, although the Bay Area has had moments of mainstream notoriety), and “The South” (everything from Texas to Florida, encompassing a dozen different sounds and styles). Meanwhile, since the mid-1990s, there has been an underground scene sizzling in Minnesota, just outside the national focus.

At the forefront of this culture-bending, often future-facing movement has been the Minneapolis/St. Paul-based label Rhymesayers. While multiple sources say it was founded in 1995, there’s some confusion among its own founders about when it came to be. But whenever Sean Daley, aka Slug, Anthony Davis, aka Ant (both collectively known as Atmosphere), Musab Saad (Sab The Artist), and Brent Sayers (Siddiq) officially formed Rhymesayers, they opened the door for a new paradigm in hip-hop, pioneered a novel approach to the creation and distribution of rap music, and became one of hip-hop’s longest-lasting emblems of the power of the independent label.

The impact that Rhymesayers has had on the landscape of hip-hop music and culture as a whole is often underappreciated but cannot be understated. While Siddiq and Slug, who graciously granted an interview to Uproxx to discuss their role in the past 50 years of hip-hop history, are both reluctant to posit any opinions about their importance to hip-hop, any Hip-Hop 50 celebration would be remiss to overlook their contributions. The label has been home to pillars of the indie rap scene, from Aesop Rock to MF DOOM, while producing and distributing projects from artists that pushed the boundaries of what hip-hop could be, in addition to producing the hip-hop-centric Soundset Festival, the first and longest-running of its kind.

And while Rhymesayers artists don’t often receive the same level of recognition as Golden Age pioneers like Gang Starr, NWA, Public Enemy, or Rakim & Eric B., you’d be hard-pressed to find a hardcore hip-hop head who doesn’t count at least one of the label’s artists as an influence. In this interview, Slug and Siddiq detail Rhymesayers’ rise to underground legend status, reminisce on their favorite moments in hip-hop history, and reflect on just what constitutes the forgotten sound of hip-hop’s fourth region: The Mighty Midwest.

We’re doing this on the 50-year anniversary of the official birth of hip-hop and Rhymesayers Entertainment has been a huge part of that. So Siddiq, Slug, if you could encapsulate what was Rhymesayers impact on the first 50 years of hip-hop evolution in a sentence, what would that be?

Slug: That is not fair. I’m not allowed to answer that question. Anybody that’s ever talked to me knows how I’m going to respond to a question like that. I’m going to downplay.

I’m here to be empathic. I’m here to relate in a sense of being able to observe, take it and understand it, but I know better than to give myself the agency to really speak on it. My reality is mine, and so I don’t know what our impact is on this culture that we are celebrating. I know what maybe my impact is on a specific branch of the tree if we want to talk about an impact I’ve had on a segment of MCs, or a segment of people who are attempting to do what I do.

I would say the impact I’ve had on a small portion of other advocates who have attempted to do what I do would be just I’m another one of those faces that tried to prove that you could do this yourself. That you could do it too.

Siddiq: I totally feel the same way. I mean, I think that has always kind of been part of our MO. I’ve always seen us as kind of like the working man’s addition to hip-hop in the sense of we’ve never felt entitled. I would never try to define any role I may or may not have had an impact on hip-hop because it’s had such an impact on me. I’m such a student and steward of what raised me that I can’t even wrap my head around that.

So if other people see that, if other people can glean that out of anything we’ve done, I think that’s amazing, but I don’t think I ever could. As much as I love the “you could do this too” as a sentence, it’s like I want to add all the caveats to that that I came upon because when we came up you couldn’t just do it and you had to go through some shit to be able to do it.

So yeah, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around me defining any impact we have or we have had. But I hope that we do. I hope that we have, but it’s hard for me to define that.

I would like to get your guys’ impressions of what’s changed for the better in hip-hop in the time you guys have been doing it. What’s changed for the worse? What you would like to see continue to change or evolve in the next 50 years of hip-hop?

Slug: I’m going to be one of those old heads that goes out on a limb and says, that it’s better now. When I say that, I’m not saying the quality. I remember beyond the sound, what was it about this music specifically, but also the personality and the culture of this. What was it that pulled me in and made me a true believer? And that was because, to make it humorous, it scared old white people.

It challenged the status quo. It challenged what was going on on a bunch of different levels.

And as far as I can tell, it still does that. And that’s its job. And so I don’t want to say that’s its job because I’m not here to call out anything, but I’m saying, to me, that’s a big part of what I want to see the youth have access to.

Siddiq: Yeah, I would agree. I mean, thankfully, I’ve never felt like I’ve fallen into the old-head category of just being angry at the kids. I’m very in tune with what’s going on, but I also am very connected to the Golden Era. That it was all imagination. It was all creation. There was nothing, there was no blueprint to it so everything was inventive and that was the beauty about its birth. I look at it today and I go, “Man, I don’t know that there’s ever been a more free time as someone doing this form of art in the sense of its creative energy.”

For a while, there was a box. It’s like if you wanted to be a part of hip-hop it’s like you kind of had to exist in this box. If you were outside of that box you were seen as something outside of that box. The boxes are gone. People may still want to try and debate it, but the reality is the boxes are gone. It’s a beautiful thing because, to me, it brings us back to that beginning point in some ways where you’re still here 50 years later being able to be completely innovative, and creative, and birthing new things.

How important is it to you guys to be kind of the beacon of not just independent, do-it-yourself rap, but also of those places in hip-hop that aren’t necessarily close to media centers? (This is my polite way of saying “what up with Midwestern hip-hop?”

Siddiq: In some ways our success and our existence really couldn’t have been fathomed. I mean… in some ways maybe it could because that was the spread and the impact of hip-hop. It was everywhere. There wasn’t a corner that shit didn’t seep into when we were kids, whether that was through what Breakin’ was doing, whether it was through the art form of rap, or graffiti, or whatever. These things spread across every facet of the country, the world really.

I look at the success we’ve had and I think there’s something indicative to being from a place like Minnesota, being from the Midwest, where you don’t have anything, especially not within hip-hop going on and coming out of here. You don’t have the industry per se, even though we obviously have huge musical history out of our state, whether we’re talking Flyte Tyme, or Prince, or Bob Dylan.

I think I’ve always seen it as something that allowed us to do it from a place that was authentic because we didn’t have to follow something, for one. And then two, I think also allowed us to uniquely stand out. I think being able to show that to the world and spread that across the country, I think that does then kind of relate back to that statement that Sean made earlier, “You could do this too.”

Slug: I was listening to Siddiq talk. I got to thinking about how there was a time when everybody, including myself, we all rapped like we were from New York, we had East Coast accents. Then some of us started to rap like we were from L.A. We started to kind of parrot what Freestyle Fellowship was doing, then or whatever Dre was doing.

And then down South happened. Atlanta had a sound, New Orleans got a sound, France, Paris, they were rapping in French. In Australia, they started rapping in their own accents. And as time goes on, every pocket, every scene, did finally break free from those chains of New York and Los Angeles and they started to find their own space.

This city’s no different. It did as well. I would say the main difference is that when it started to find its sound we were in the middle of that at the time. There were still plenty of groups here that sounded like they were from the South, and there were still plenty of people rapping here that sounded like they, I mean they had a New York “R.”

But you started to see a scene, a sound develop here because a couple of groups became more popular, other groups started listening, and it just does that natural thing. But I think the difference is none of the groups here ever fully, the sound never fully broke. You do see elements of the Minneapolis sound in some artists that got really big from around the country.

Over the past 50 years, we’ve all got favorite memories of what hip-hop has done for us on a professional and personal level. If you guys don’t mind sharing a couple of those, I would really love it. I would really appreciate it.

Slug: Me, it gave me identity. And that’s not to say I wouldn’t have had identity. Living in South Minneapolis and having access to this music, getting into graffiti, and socializing with other people into that stuff, gave me, I think, perspective and access to parts of my own imagination and parts of my own creativity. And I was into the Fat Boys as much as I was into Peter Gabriel “Sledgehammer.” It was all fun music when you’re nine. But as I got older, it gave me this space to go to escape from all the bullshit and get together with other people who were also escaping from all the bullshit to find ways to be creative.

Siddiq: I think the first was when I first heard “The Message,” walked down to the corner record store, bought the 12-inch, put it on, and I was like, “What the fuck is this?” I felt like I was visualizing New York in the early 1980s, and I saw everything Melle Mel was talking about. I wasn’t hearing it, I was seeing it. And I was just like… It blew my mind.

And then the other one is just completely random, but I just will never be able to get it out of my mind. I think it was Rock Steady anniversary. I don’t remember the exact year. We had went out to New York and we were just handing out CDs and stuff and MOP was playing the after-party. Okay, I… And I’m trying to remember the damn venue. It was like a second-story venue. You had to go upstairs in New York.

Just think MOP at the height of “Ante Up” in New York. It felt like we were going to fall through the floor. And like I said, it was the second floor of the venue, and you just felt the floor doing this [wobbles his hand], and I’m just… “This just don’t feel safe.” But I’ve never… Just the energy? I’d never be able to explain the energy I witnessed in that moment, in that room, to its justice. I’ll never be able to explain it and make somebody feel what I felt.

Run D.M.C.’s Iconic “Raising Hell” Turns 37

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It’s been 37 years since the release of Run DMC’s groundbreaking album, Raising Hell. The album, released on May 15, 1986, solidified the group’s reputation as pioneers in the industry and set the stage for Hip Hop’s soundscape. Hailing from Hollis, Queens, Run D.M.C. comprised Joseph Simmons, better known as Rev. Run; Darryl McDaniels, or D.M.C.; and the late Jason Mizell, known as Jam Master Jay. Their unique blend of Rock, Punk, and Hip Hop combined with their distinct fashion sense—wearing Adidas sneakers without laces, chunky gold chains, and black fedoras—created a lasting impression on music and style.

In 1986, Spin caught up with Run D.M.C. at the inception of Hip Hop culture and their careers. They were confident, and Jam Master Jay didn’t mince words about their impact. “Before us, rap records was corny,” said Jay. “Everything was soft. Nobody made no hard-beat records. Everybody just wanted to sing, but they didn’t know how to sing, so they’ll just rap on the record. There was no real meaning to a rapper. Bam[baataa] and them was getting weak. Flash was getting weak. Everybody was telling me it was a fad. And before Run-D.M.C. came along, rap music could have been a fad.”

Compared to the conflict-causing rhymes we hear in the generation of emcees that arrived after the group, calling Run D.M.C’s bars hard-hitting seems far-fetched. However, at the time, Raising Hell bred a new sound that called out the newly-developed Hip Hop status quo. The trio felt iconic, and that spirit translated to a project that remains in Rap’s elite. Let’s revisit Raising Hell and Run D.M.C.’s relentless impact on Hip Hop.

The Making Of An Iconic Album

NEW YORK – 1985: Joseph Simmons, Darryl McDaniels and Jam Master Jay of the hip-hop group “Run DMC” pose for a studio portrait session in 1985 in New York, New York. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Russell Simmons, Rev. Run’s older brother, and Rick Rubin, who later co-founded Def Jam Recordings, produced Raising Hell. The album was recorded at Chung King House of Metal in New York City. Rubin’s production skills and the group’s raw energy resulted in a sound that redefined Hip Hop.

Featuring collaborations with guitar legend Eddie Martinez and Rock icons Aerosmith, the album is a perfect example of Run D.M.C.’s innovative approach to music. The classic track “Walk This Way” is a cover of Aerosmith’s original song. It marked the first-ever collaboration between Hip Hop and Rock artists. It’s considered a milestone in music history, as it successfully bridged the gap between these two genres and paved the way for future collaborations.

Background & Success

Raising Hell became an immediate chart success. The album peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and remained on the chart for 59 weeks. The album spawned three hit singles: “My Adidas,” “It’s Tricky,” and the aforementioned “Walk This Way.” Eventually, Raising Hell earned Triple Platinum status, selling over three million copies in the United States alone.

Sonically, it seemed the inspiration behind Raising Hell was the group’s desire to push the boundaries of Hip Hop while remaining authentic to their roots. Run D.M.C. was one of the first groups to use drum machines, scratching, and sampling. These techniques have since become staples in Hip Hop production.

Influencing A Culture Of Hip Hop

Run D.M.C.’s impact on music is immeasurable. The group’s fusion of different musical styles and innovative approach to production influenced a whole generation of artists, from the Beastie Boys and LL Cool J to Public Enemy and Jay-Z. Their widespread appeal helped pave the way for Hip Hop’s mainstream success in the late ’80s and ’90s.

Response to Raising Hell from both the public and critics was overwhelmingly positive. The album’s seamless blend of genres and inventive production was hailed as revolutionary. Run D.M.C. quickly became one of their time’s most influential and successful acts. They were the first Rap group to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, the first to have a video on MTV, and the first to be nominated for a Grammy in the Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group category.

Run D.M.C. Today

A wide view of Darryl McDaniels and Joseph Simmons of Run-DMC performing onstage at the 65th Annual GRAMMY Awards held at Crypto.com Arena on February 5, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Christopher Polk/Variety via Getty Images)

Run D.M.C. earned numerous accolades throughout their career, including two Grammy Lifetime Achievement Awards and an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2009. Despite facing challenges, such as D.M.C.’s struggle with depression and the tragic murder of Jam Master Jay in 2002, the group’s legacy continues to thrive.

Today, Rev. Run is a well-known reality TV star, author, and ordained minister, while D.M.C. continues to work in music, philanthropy, and as a comic book creator. Though Jam Master Jay’s life was tragically cut short, his family and friends continue to honor his memory through the Jam Master Jay Foundation for Music, which aims to provide access to arts education for underprivileged youth.

Additionally, Rev. Run and D.M.C. reunited on the Grammy Award stage months ago. The ceremony highlighted this year’s celebration of Hip Hop’s 50th anniversary, and the Rap pioneers energized the crowd with a performance that made us feel like we needed to break out our Adidas Superstars and bucket hats. Take a walk down memory lane and jam out to Raising Hell above.

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