REVISED: The Academic Conversation of Run-D.M.C. by Run-D.M.C

This week I am throwing it back to some of the pioneers of hip-hop. By this I mean Joseph “Rev Run” Simmons, Darryl “Darryl McDaniels “DMC”, Jam Master Jay and their group Run-D.M.C. Before Run-D.M.C. artists like Kool DJ Herc and Grand Master Flash made huge contributions to the development of rap, but they stayed more on the local scene. Hip hop was strictly urban music, but with Run-D.M.C, all of this changed. The group brought hip-hop to the mainstream.  They became the first hip hop group to have a gold album, be nominated for a Grammy Award, and to have videos on MTV. Their self titled album Run-D.M.C. was the start to all this success, which made it one of the most influential albums in all of hip hops’ history.

The influence of this album wasn’t just in its contributions to the genre, but also in the messages it sent to its audience. Run-D.M.C is all about being a positive influence on society as a whole. Whether it is about being pro-voting, pro-education, anti-gang, or bringing cultures together it is all about making the world a better place and wanting people to coexist no matter what the color of their skin is. Their message isn’t just something towards African Americans; it is for everyone. Of course this album isn’t all just about social issues and their views on society. They are never short on time to tell people that they are the “masters of a mic.” This is still a bad ass album with its political and economic messages hidden behind the playful, yet hard hitting beats of the song. Their rapid back and forth rapping creates constant energy throughout the album and has become the core of who they are as a hip-hop group.

The album starts out a little slow with “Hard Times.” Although there is nothing special about the sound or delivery of this song, it gives a hint at what the message of the rest of the album will be. The beat created by Jam Master Jay is very simple and has a positive feel to it. Despite the name of the song, “Hard Times”, the song actually has an uplifting sense and message, which is consistent with the rest of the album. The idea of the song may seem simple. Basically it says don’t let the hard times keep you down; instead, work hard, keep your head up and fight through it. This wasn’t just an empty suggestion, the people Run-D.M.C. were rapping for truly needed this advice. Rachel Jones performed a studying showing that, “Being poor decreases the odds of indicating that working hard is one of the most important qualities that a child should develop.” A lot of these people living in poverty or close to it are just simply not as motivated and are more likely to give up when the times get tough. This song is for them. The members of Run-D.M.C. were not always successful people, but they worked hard when the times were tough. They say, “Hard times is nothing new on me/I’m gonna use my strong mentality.” What Run-D.M.C. does is that they discuss cultural problems without making it the focus of their music. They are promoting the importance of education to their audience who has a history of not valuing education. The group is still focused on making good music with cool, inventive sonic elements to them, but they throw in positive messages in hope to have their mentality spread to their audience. 

With the song “Rock Box” the true musical identity of Run-D.M.C starts to come out. Listening to this song is a completely different experience then you would expect from a hip hop album. The song starts with a typical Run-D.M.C. sound with sparse, slightly funk sounding beats. Then an electric guitar comes in, then drums, and before you know it you have a hip-hop song and a hard rock song mashed together. This song in particular is what set Run-D.M.C. apart from the rest and brought them into the mainstream. The song is about integrating cultures through music. The lyrics itself do not do this, but rather the sound of the song. Main stream music was dominated by white music and hip hop was still mostly confined to local urban areas. They thought that by bringing two types of music belonging to two different cultures that they could achieve an assimilation of the cultures. The cultures gained common ground through their music. A cultural study of society performed by J.W. Berry shows that “when society seeks the objective of unity, this encourages the strategy of assimilation.” This cultural assimilation can be seen in the official music video of the song. The video goes out of its way to show the opposite race enjoying the opposite musical sounds. Shots of a group of black men nodding their heads to the guitar solo and a white suburban kid running to listen to Run and DMC rap shows how the song was intended to bring the cultures together. Run-D.M.C. nonverbally made the audience appreciate music that they did not typically listen to. Music was the common ground that brought people of all different cultural backgrounds together.

After all these hard hitting, solid songs, the album reaches “It’s Like That.” Unlike the rest of the album that has hard hitting beats and changing rhythms throughout each song, the beat is very repetitive and there is real no change of pace during the entire song. This song is the least musically complex and enjoyable to listen to on the whole album; however, I have grown to respect it more than any other song on the album. This is the one song on the album where you can tell Run-D.M.C. wants the audience to fully hear what they have to say. The whole song is addressing society and its problems. The best part about it is that there isn’t hostility in anything they are saying. Groups like N.W.A. worked to discuss the problems in their city, but ended up coming off threatening, turning off a lot of the countries audience. Run-D.M.C on the other hand addressing unemployment, struggles to make ends meet, under paying of employees, killing of innocents, education issues, and prejudice, yet there is no anger in lyrics or their voices when they rap. The whole song seems very philosophical. Every verse ends with “Its like that, and that’s the way it is”. Problems with society are being put out there and Run-D.M.C is letting the audience make what they want of it. The seems intended to have the audience reflect on why things are in the world. They want people to question the way the world is and trying to enact change through their audience.  They are sending a positive message, but letting the audience figure out what they want to get out of the song. No other hip hop group can pull this off like they can.

This ideology of unity continues as the album goes on to “Wake up.”  Focused around a funk baseline that Run-D.M.C. is known for and the hard hitting sound, the song is used to bring people together and work for a united society. Run and D.M.C really show their style to the fullest extent in this song. They switch of singing every few words and then end come together to emphasize the most important lines. The idea of unity is felt just by the way they sing. The song starts, “When I woke up this morning and got out the bed/I had some really fresh thoughts going through my head/They were thoughts that came from a wonderful dream/It was the vision of a world working as a team.” As it goes on there is a verse that states, “Everyone was treated on an equal basis/No matter what colors, religions or races/We weren’t afragiht to show our faces/It was cool to chill in foreign places.” I think we can all agree that the idea of a peaceful planet, where everyone works for the betterment of society is a good idea, but I also think we can agree that it is a bit far-fetched. The world is full of genocide, wars, and fear and there is no sign of this changing. Run-D.M.C acknowledges this with the repetition of “Wake up.” Every verse they rap, they follow it up with “[it was] just a dream, wake up” which reassures the fact that the ideas are far out of reach. With this they are also saying that there is potential for improvement of society and the fact that it is what people are dreaming infers that it is what they desire. 

This album was just the start to Run-D.M.C.’s explosion into the mainstream. Even with all of their success as a group and the positive messages they sent to their audience, their biggest influence had to do with what they did for the genre. They were the group responsible for the hardcore sound that encompassed hip-hop genre for the next decade. This album started it all. There is no N.W.A. without Run-D.M.C. There is no Public Enemy without Run-D.M.C. Someone had to be the ones to transform hip hop from a casual disco sound to a more hardcore sound. This was the album; this was the group. They gave hip hop the energy everyone knows and loves “And that’s the way it is.”

REVISED: Cultural Criticism "Straight Outta Compton"

The album that I am looking at this week is very different from anything else I have looked at. This album is Straight Outta Compton by N.W.A. Before this group, there was just hip-hop. After the release of this album the hip-hop world split apart into two parts: east coast hip-hop and west coast hip-hop. While east coast hip-hop features mostly jazz samples and utilize wordplay to produce heartfelt music about their struggle growing up in a tough environment, west coast hip-hop features mostly funk samples and often has utilizes more direct lyrics to glorify the gang environment they live in while reflecting on it emotionally.  N.W.A was not the first group to have this west coast style, but they were the group that forced a distinction between the types of hip-hop then popularized it. This is the group and the album that brought hip-hop to the national stage.

Before going into the dynamics of this album, I want to say something. For the most part, I can not relate on a personal level to most of the content of the songs. I grew up in an extremely safe community where the biggest crime was a teenager getting caught smoking marijuana.  The album was obviously not directed towards people like me; it is about black people living in urban areas. I think that even with this the album had a huge impact on its white audience. Ice Cube once said that thirty to forty percent of the people who own this album are actually white. This album allowed people who are unfamiliar with the urban lifestyle to get outside of their specific community. Music critics, like Matthew Duerston, have even gone as far to say that N.W.A. “supplied tantalizing fantasies of urban sleaze and violence to millions of white suburban teens.” With this album anyone and everyone can get a glimpse at the life of a black urban community and what they live through each and every day.

This album starts off with a bang! “Straight Outta Compton” not only sets the tone for the album, but has become on of the most iconic songs for the genre as a whole. The quick and powerful beat combined with the aggressive tone of the rap gives the music as a whole a very confrontational tone. The funk sound gives off an urban feel which works in unison with the lyrics about urban life. While listening to this, I quickly caught myself singing along, “When I’m called off, I got a sawed-off/squeeze the trigger and the bodies are hauled off.” I was literally getting into a song about shooting and killing people with a shotgun, yet I didn’t care. The music is that good. The song also uses a constant repetition of the phrase “Straight Outta Compton.” The group made up of Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Mc Ren, DJ Yella, and Arabian Prince were a product of Compton. The Compton way of life became their perception of how people lived. This song, however, isn’t just about the neighborhood they grew up on; it is much bigger than that. It is “Straight Outta Compton” and not “Straight Into Compton” for a reason. The music, the lifestyle, the problems are bigger than just the 10.12 square miles that is Compton. This song is an anthem to the black urban lifestyle as a whole.

“Straight Outta Compton” talks about violence, but “Fuck the Police” takes it many steps further. It isn’t enough for them to rap about how they hate the police or how people shouldn’t let them take advantage of them, but they say how they want to kill the police. In fact, the phrase “Fuck Tha Police” was repeated 21 times in the song! Although N.W.A claims they were just describing existing social problems in urban neighborhoods, there is no doubt that this song was provoking violence towards police. N.W.A. became the most popular group in the Los Angeles area and with this comes influence. These hip hop stars are saying things like “Without a gun and a badge, what do ya got?/A sucker in a uniform waiting to get shot” and “a young nigga on the warpath/And when I’m finished, its gonna be a bloodbath”, it had to have an influence on the audience. This music created a society of people that wanted to disrespect police, fight police, and even kill police. It is not enough to say law enforcement felt threatened by this song. In a letter from the FBI to the record label of N.W.A., Priority Records, they expressed their distaste for this song saying “advocating violence and assault is wrong.” They even go as far as hinting that the release of this song in 1988 caused an increase the number of murdered police officers since there were more violent crime and police officers slain then any of the previous years. Along with this, some concert venues forbid the group from performing this song and when they didn’t comply they arrested them. I know I have made the officers seem like victims in this, but that wasn’t completely the case. Officers were getting away with endless counts of police brutality and unlawful search and seizures just because the color of the person’s skin. This song wasn’t just talking to the urban communities, but it was a message to the police force that they were not going to let this happen anymore. They were speaking up for the rights of people all across the urban community. This song was rallying point for fighting back for their rights.

With these two bold songs, the album takes a slight turn. Instead of confrontational tone to the songs, the group is more focused on “telling it as it is” as Ice Cube would say. The songs utilize similar beats, but the vocals don’t sound as aggressive leading to a completely different listening experience. A lot of what these songs do is explain how things work in an urban community and show some misconceptions about them. People all across the country would see the urban areas such as Compton on the news. They have a huge crack cocaine problem and gangs murder each other. These songs were there to say basically “yea, this is how we live, but it doesn’t mean our whole culture is about this”.

In the middle of all of this, N.W.A. throws the audience a curveball in “Express Yourself’. This song does not fit the album at all. There is no profanity and the song as a much more upbeat, playful feel to it. This song seemingly has the same message as the rest of the album, but just is the PG version rather than the NC-17 version. If any of the songs on this album were made with the thought of getting national radio play, it would be this song. A closer look at the lyrics shows that the focus is still on urban culture; however, this song is much more relatable for the rest of the country. It is a message to all people that they should not let society and expectations hold them from doing what they want to do or who they truly are. Its all about expressing who you are and not conforming. Dre sums it up in one line: “Its crazy to see people be/What society wants them to be, but not me.”