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"Whose House? God's House!"
An interview with DMC
Chillin' out in the brief moments before a show in Windsor, Canada, DMC gives contributors from NuBeing an earful.
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NuB1: How is hip-hop affecting your work right now? You're one of the innovators of rap... so how does that affect the style of your new stuff?
DMC: Well, the whole Old school - New school thing [is] not really old hip-hop and new hip-hop. It's just that the Old School is more of a ... way of your delivery. Snoop Dogg, he got an Old School style, "like that an' uh, like this an' uh," that's all Old School... a style that was there before they started putting it on wax.
I mean, when we first came out, it was Run-DMC and then, um, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, KRS-One, Rakim. All of us basically had the same style, it was all raw. But it's just that, you know, a group like Public Enemy, they started putting a certain identity "Awright, we gonna make pro-black music." Then Tribe Called Quest, which is an old style of rapping, like in their delivery, they came out and said "we're gonna make it this way." Smooth but rough on the vertical tip, you know what I'm saying? And then you came along with the gangsta rap or just rhyming on the player style, you know how it is. It don't affect us because we're the only constant in rap music.
When we first came out, people was like "How long do you think rap's going to last?" Run DMC represents that longevity of rap that was that question mark in the early years ... I'm not going to say the only crew, but we're the main crew right now that stick to the raw forms of rap. We still use the turntables, records, we don't use no DAT machine, we don't have no fancy clothes, no gimmicks with us. It's just Run-DMC. We rhyme, we rap. So our style has never changed and I don't think it will ever change.
We've been around so long, we've seen groups come and go. We wasn't like the Fat Boys who had a gimmck. They was good rappers, you know what I'm saying, Markie B, he'd get busy on the microphone but that gimmick would never last. When we came, we appealed to a lot of other people in the hood because ... we just put our Adidas on, our jeans and our T-shirts and we did what we did before we had a chance to make rap records. But, uh, it's not a style that changed. It's just the different types of music, different things to rap about.
Nub1: Ok, do you find that you have pressure from your record companies, and the people who put the money behind what you do, to change your style?
DMC: No ... there's more pressure on the artist that's coming out that's real, doing what he's doing, writing what he's writing, because now the companies are only going to sign what's selling. It seems like now if you ain't talking about women, you know what I'm saying, then they don't want you. That's what's different from Run - DMC ... we got a faithful following. We made a career out of this rap thing 'cause we was blessed by God to be down so long. That's why we made "Down With the King"...
For the full interview, click here to contact NuBeing International.