CHAPTER 4
, Rick Rubin and Run-DMC were tight on a personal level. “Through my friendship with Russell, I started hanging out with Run and D and Jay,” explained Rubin to AV
Club. “We just became friends, and when it was time to make their
next album, they really loved what I was doing with LL and with the Beastie Boys, so they asked me to help.” Run felt Rubin was “a multi- talent deserving of acclaim.”
Talking to vh1 in 2002, Rubin described the group’s process for developing songs: “They always had live routines that would start as a freestyle routine, and they would evolve into the kernel of an idea that would become a song. It was always good when they were out on the road, because Run would say one thing one night, then he and dmc would look at each other and think, ‘Put that in the catalog!’ The next night, he might expand upon it. It was stuff written through improvisation in front of an audience. . . . Sometimes there would be a lyrical hook or a particular sample or break that we liked. We’d try to create a new song using that element. Raising Hell was one of the
first albums to create a montage of existing bits of music together to make something new.”
Rubin’s vision for the album sonically and conceptually was to capture something “raw, musical, and ferocious. It’s very stripped down but there’s more music going on than on anyone else’s records at the time. It’s ‘less is more’ — but it’s the right less! It’s easy for a hip hop album to start sounding very same-y, because you don’t have the advantage of melody. We were drawing from all different styles of music — from James Brown’s funky drumming to new wave — but there was a concerted effort for each track to stand on its own. The music that we liked in the clubs didn’t sound glossy and shiny. It sounded rough and raw. So part of what made this album special was we recorded it at a really crummy studio. The drum machine was supposed to sound like a crummy drum machine. We wanted sounds that sounded like crummy toys with soul. That was more important than making it sound pretty or perfect. It was raw, like a documentary.”
Once production on the lp was nearly wrapped, Rubin had one more idea up his sleeve that he felt would be “a nice little kicker to the album.” He suggested to the rap group that they pair with rock legends Aerosmith for a re-imagining of the band’s 1975 song “Walk This Way,” which a decade earlier had hit #10 on the Billboard Hot 100. Initially Run-DMC just wanted to sample the song. “They all each had two copies of the record but had never heard past the first seven seconds of the song. That intro beat was the part that always got played. Their idea was ‘Okay, well, let’s use the beat but write a new Run-DMC song using the beat.’ I felt like the whole purpose of exposing this music to a greater audience had to do with the familiarity of the song,” Rubin told vh1. Russell Simmons recalled the genesis of the idea, “We were gonna cut the beat back and forth, that’s how we gonna make this record. It’s not gonna be any singing or any of that crap. Rick Rubin was like, ‘No, let’s call up Aerosmith.’ I said, ‘Who?’ ‘Aerosmith.’ ‘Who are they?’ ‘That’s the people from Toys in the Attic; that’s the band.’ Run and dmc were not for the idea. I was a little more in the middle about it, ‘Are you gonna rap those lyrics?’ But we had a lot of fun making it.” Convincing Aerosmith to do the collaboration was relatively easy. The
former supergroup was at a low point in their career, having recently released an unsuccessful album. More accessible to the upstart pro- ducer, Aerosmith were also keen to participate as they had always been fans and supporters of r&b and black music.
Rubin sold both groups on the idea, and once they were together, “it was interesting because it was two very different cultures. We were all kids but Aerosmith was already Aerosmith. They carried themselves in a different way than we did ’cause they were real rock stars and we were like college students. It was an awe-inspiring experience for me because I grew up on Aerosmith and loved them. I also knew how great they were, so I became fairly demanding with what I asked them to play and contribute. . . . Both sides didn’t really know what to make of it.”
Run-DMC with Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons at The Ritz in New York City on January 28, 1988. (© Ebet Roberts/Getty Images)
While many people at the time were staunch believers that “rap wasn’t music,” Rubin saw a natural musical compati- bility between the two genres of rock and rap, and his production of “Walk This Way” helped the general public “open their eyes to hip hop.” Rubin elaborated, “The idea of covering ‘Walk This Way’ was to give hip hop a context. It would show people outside of the really small hip hop community that if you saw it in a different light maybe you could discover the music’s secret. . . . It was a shortcut to get people to see it.” It was a move that would complete Run-DMC’s launch into the pop-culture stratosphere and revitalize Aerosmith’s career in the process.
Rubin described the album’s overall stylistic vibe to AV Club: “It wasn’t slick, and it wasn’t mainstream, but it was alternative, edgy, raw music. There’s a homemade and handmade quality to it.” The ground- breaking album had a great impact on hip hop as a genre commercially, pushing further the traditional pop song structure that Run-DMC had begun experimenting with in King of Rock. Far from the “old school” six- to nine-minute 12-inch singles, the songs on Raising Hell took hip hop into unchartered territory.
The album reached #3 on the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart on September 20, 1986. It was the first hip hop album to reach Billboard’s Top 10 and the first to garner a five-star review from Rolling Stone; the magazine called the lp “the first truly consistent rap album,” declaring that Run-DMC “transcend the limitations of their genre,” and that “for every outrageous boast and randy pun, these mcs have an angry insight and a wicked rhyme, while dj Jam Master Jay works the turnta- bles like a brain surgeon turned mad scientist.”
Looking back close to 20 years later, Rick Rubin shared his perspec- tive on the seminal nature of the album: “Raising Hell was like a Coasters album. People don’t like to say that, but Raising Hell fused what was great about hip hop with a deeper understanding of song
structure. That’s why it crossed those boundaries. The timing was also critical. Run-DMC was the most credible hip hop group in the world. Before the record came out, they were already the Beatles of hip hop. Hip hop had already been around for a couple of years, so it was less alien to people. And they’re great songs: they transcend genre. It’s bigger than hip hop.”
Raising Hell secured Rubin’s position as the hottest producer in hip
hop. Given that he had already produced a hit lp for LL Cool J, the
Village Voice, in a November 1986 feature on Def Jam, hailed Rubin as
the King of Rap. That title would be further validated with Def Jam’s next release, arguably Rubin’s most successful and groundbreaking production of the 1980s: the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill.
, Licensed to Ill marked his opportunity to further blend rock and rap, picking up where he left off with Run-DMC’s Raising Hell. Recorded at Chung King Studios over the summer and fall of 1986, Rubin and the Beastie Boys put together a seminal album, one that would establish hip hop as a commercially viable force. The incorporation of rock riff samples over hip hop beats, a fusion that Rick Rubin had first popularized, became Def Jam’s blueprint throughout the second half of the 1980s, and it made the Beastie Boys true pioneers of the rap-rock format. The break- through hip hop album by a white act, Licensed to Ill is the foundation of all the rap-rock derivatives that followed: Anthrax’s I’m the Man, Faith No More’s Epic, Limp Bizkit, and Kid Rock. It all began with the collaboration between the Beastie Boys and Rick Rubin, which also marked the final step in rap’s growth from an underground, urban genre into the mainstream and America’s suburbs. With the success of
Licensed to Ill, hip hop began its evolution into the huge industry and
pop-culture-driving phenomenon it is today.