Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [63]
The first rap song widely sold on vinyl was the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979, the start of a four-year run for an independent label that included some of the most significant rap music made: Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel,” and “White Lines,” as well as old-schoolers such as the “love rapper” Spoonie Gee and “Body Rock” by the Treacherous Three. “Rapper’s Delight” sold more than two million copies worldwide, hit number four on the R&B charts and number thirty-six on the pop charts. It was rap’s first commercial boom, all in one song; one that took many music execs, who were still pushing disco, by surprise.
The new and improved second wave of rap hit in the eighties. Kurtis Blow got the party started with a fantastic rap jam, “The Breaks,” which sold gold as a twelve-inch in 1980. Kurtis’s party-hearty vibe married to pointed lyrics slipped onto the radar of punk and New Wave fans to reach the Top 30 in the U.K. Kurtis, in turn, opened up for reggae legend Bob Marley at Madison Square Garden, and toured with New Wave giants Blondie in Britain.
But whereas Kurtis was barely known to pop audiences, Run-D.M.C. broke into the mainstream with their first twelve-inch “It’s Like That/Sucker MCs,” in 1983. While the Aside is amazing in its own right, on the B-side, rap evolved to a whole new level in just one song. “Sucker MCs” was a vision of rap to come; it is minimal, featuring only a drum machine and turntable scratches and the MCs overlapping delivery in which they finish each other’s sentences. Run-D.M.C.’s influence can’t be overestimated: They were the first group to fully cross over to pop and rock audiences, the first to integrate guitar riffs into their music, and the first to forgo the funk superhero gear and hyperbolic ganglike names in favor of b-boy sportswear. The members of Run-D.M.C. were closer to the street in image and attitude; they were the first rappers to “keep it real.” They were also middle-class kids who grew up in Hollis, Queens, and were managed by Joseph “Run” Simmons’s brother, mogul-in-the-making Russell. Run-D.M.C. ran with the rap ball, driving into the pop lane via the fledgling MTV. On the Music Television network, hip-hop had always played a bit part. Blondie’s “Rapture” brought proto-rapping and Fab Five Freddy’s name to the upper echelon (number one) of the pop charts, but true hip-hop culture first walked into the land of crossover on the robot legs of Herbie Hancock’s electro-monster “Rockit,” in 1983. The next year brought Chaka Khan’s Prince-penned pop and R&B hit, “I Feel for You,” featuring the low, smooth stylings of Grandmaster Melle Mel (of the Furious Five). These were inklings, but Run-D.M.C. changed it all with “Rock Box” in 1984, the third single to drop before their gold-selling eponymous debut was released the same year. “Rock Box” was the first real rap video, and it set the low-fi production values that seemed to stick until late in that decade. It was also, like Breakin’, the first that many American suburban teens saw of this thing called hip-hop.
Run-D.M.C. may have opened the rap gates to the mainstream, but in the real world, eighties economics were laying waste to urban life in a way that would fuel the next wave of hip-hop. With more employment opportunities in post–Civil Rights corporate America, more African-Americans left for the suburbs, leaving what were once fully developed working-class urban communities behind. In Ronald Reagan’s America, the urban landscape became a gangland of drugs. Crack epitomized the rampant capitalism of the times: the narcotic equivalent of the turn of the decade. Where cocaine’s status symbol and social sniffing epitomized disco glamour, crack was its fast-food counterpart—a quick, intense high packaged for the masses. It was supremely capitalistic;