We Make a Mean Team

You shouldn’t trust people who say they’ve invented something. In hip-hop, as in life, everyone is a transitional figure, a tenuous tie between the past and the future. The elevator pitch on Run-DMC is that they mutated rap from the primordial, neo-disco ooze of its early recorded days into something sparer, tighter, more sinister, and kinetic. And if you browsed Tower Records a couple times a year (or internalized the tidy narratives of countless books and documentaries) you would be forgiven for thinking so. It’s a nice story.