Programme notes
RUN DMC - Run's House (Official HD Video)
Summary
A 1988 single from Tougher Than Leather, built on a hard, uncluttered drum pattern and the group's trademark trading of lines between two MCs finishing each other's sentences.
By this point the trio had already stripped rap's presentation down to its essentials — no band, no costume, plain clothes — and the record is a demonstration of how much authority that leaves in the voices.
Why it matters
Run-DMC are the group that made rap legible to a rock audience without softening it, and the two-MC interplay heard here became one of the form's standard techniques. Their influence is less about any single record than about establishing that a rap group could headline rather than support.