Run-D.M.C.

Certain Songs #2138: Run-D.M.C. – “It’s Tricky”

June 30, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Raising Hell
Year: 1986

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It was probably inevitable that Run-D.M.C. would hook up with Rick Rubin, and even without the massive success of “Walk This Way” to spur it, Raising Hell might have been their biggest album, as songs like “You Be Illin,” “My Adidas,” “Peter Piper” showed yet another leap in both song-making and execution.

My favorite — and probably my favorite Run-D.M.C. song period — was the self-referential “It’s Tricky,” which features a chorus where Joseph Simmons and Darryl McDaniels are practically singing harmonies.

Certain Songs #2137: Run-D.M.C. – “Walk This Way”

June 29, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Raising Hell
Year: 1986

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Here’s a thing you should probably know before we get into this: Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic was one of the very first albums I bought with my own money, and I probably know every single note of it by heart. But I bought Toys in The Attic not because of “Walk This Way,” but despite it.

Then, now and forevermore, it’s “Sweet Emotion” that is the highlight of that album, followed narrowly by the title track. “Walk This Way” is like, my fifth or sixth favorite song on that album.

Certain Songs #2136: Run-D.M.C – “King of Rock”

June 28, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: King of Rock
Year: 1985

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If “Rock Box” was basically an experiment that worked out better than anybody could have imagined, then the follow-up, 1985’s “King of Rock,” was both a refinement of that experiment and an epic troll towards the people for whom merging rock and rap was anathema.

I wasn’t one of those people: I just wished they’d used punk guitar instead of metal guitar, a distinction that seems silly all these years later, I know. And still, if I couldn’t quite initially wrap my head around the first Run-D.M.C. album — though I do have a memory of Jay dancing around the KFSR studio to “Jam-Master Jay,” — “King of Rock” blew me away from the moment Darryl McDaniels screamed:

Certain Songs #2135: Run-D.M.C. – “Rock Box”

June 25, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Run-D.M.C.
Year: 1984

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As revolutionary as “It’s Like That” was, it on their third single where Run-D.M.C. created a new form of music, an unholy hybrid of metal guitar, massive beats, and of course, Run and D.M.C.’s shouted raps.

Even at the time, “Rock Box” felt as inevitable as it felt groundbreaking, and if the riffs and solos played by guitarist Eddie Martinez were maybe just the tiniest bit rote, it didn’t matter because the context was so shocking.