Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Raising Hell!
This speech is my recital, I think it's very vital…
This influential album was released on May 15, 1986.
This is an image of the cover art for the album Raising Hell by Run-DMC. Copyright Profile Records.
Raising Hell is the third studio album by Run-DMC. It was produced by Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin and is notable for being the first Platinum and multi-Platinum Hip-Hop record. Raising Hell peaked at No. 1 on Billboard's Top R&B Albums chart as the first Hip-Hop/Rap album to do so, and at No. 3 on the Billboard 200. The album’s fourth track, “Walk This Way", is the group's most famous single. It was a groundbreaking Rap Rock cover of the Aerosmith classic from 1975. “Walk This Way” is considered to be the first Rap Rock collaboration that also brought Hip-Hop into the mainstream and was the first song by a Hip-Hop act to reach the top 5 of the Billboard Hot 100. Raising Hell is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most important albums in the history of Hip-Hop music and culture. It is credited with heralding the golden age of Hip-Hop as well as Hip-Hop's album era, helping the genre achieve an unprecedented level of recognition among critics and mainstream audiences. Public Enemy's Chuck D considers Raising Hell to be the greatest Hip-Hop album of all-time, and the reason he chose to sign with Def Jam Records. "It paved the way for so many bands," he explained, "and opened minds." In Hip Hop Connection, he ranked the album at number one in his top ten (which also included Tougher Than Leather) and said: "It was the first record that made me realize this was an album-oriented genre." In 2017, Raising Hell was inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Source: Wikipedia.org
Heralding the golden age of Hip-Hop…
Dec. 10, 1984: Run-DMC's Joseph "Run" Simmons and Darryl "D.M.C." McDaniels performing at the Long Beach Arena
Photo Credit: Ian Dryden, Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
While I remembered Run-DMC from the movie Krush Groove, I did not connect with their rhythms and rhymes until the Summer between seventh and eighth grade. Their legendary 1986 album Raising Hell further cemented my love for ‘80s Rap and Hip-Hop. "It's Tricky", "My Adidas", “Peter Piper”, "Walk This Way", and "You Be Illin'" all take me right back to the beginning of my teenage years.
