Credit: Kim Metso

The evolution of hip-hop in the late 1970s wasn’t all that different from when the birth of rock and roll got going in the late 1950s. They had both started off as offshoots of genres that came before, but once the tone shifted on ‘Johnny B Goode’ or ‘Rapper’s Delight’, there was a feeling that something had changed the minute those songs were over. If Sugarhill Gang was equivalent to Chuck Berry at the time, Chuck D thought that Run-DMC did for hip-hop what The Beatles did for rock and roll.

If you think about it, is there any group more influential in hip-hop than Run-DMC? There had still been artists willing to push the envelope and discuss serious topics on record, like Grandmaster Flash, but once fans saw the Adidas sneakers and the gold chains come out on MTV, they knew that they had found a group that represented the next phase of music.

It wasn’t just in the presentation, though. Run and DMC were joined at the hip the same way John Lennon and Paul McCartney were, occasionally even finishing each other’s sentences midway through rapping. Compared to the synergy that the Fab Four had, the kind of chemistry that the rap duo had on tracks like ‘It’s Tricky’ is so seamless you’d be fooled to think they could read each other’s mind.

More than anything, Run-DMC should be among the greatest of all time for just how much ground they covered first. They did pull a fair bit from the rock crowd, but getting a rap album to number one in the charts and having the first platinum hip-hop record to their name let everyone know that this was more than just a fluke. This was here to stay, and Chuck D may as well have seen the future of music when he heard them.

When breaking down the lineage of hip-hop, the Public Enemy frontman still thought Run-DMC towered above everyone who ever touched a mic, telling Rolling Stone, “Run-DMC were the Beatles of hip-hop — Run and DMC were Lennon and McCartney, and Jam Master Jay was George and Ringo rolled into one. Everyone in hip-hop today can be traced back to Run-DMC.”

Then again, putting Jam Master Jay in the same conversation as George Harrison and Ringo Starr feels slightly off. Considering how much power he had with just a set of turntables, what he did for Run-DMC was a lot closer to what John Bonham laid down in Led Zeppelin, always laying it back and giving Run and DMC some of the best beats that anyone had ever heard.

There’s even a case to be made that their start at Def Jam was comparable to what The Beatles had done at Apple. Just like Lennon and McCartney were signing new acts like James Taylor and Badfinger, some of the acts that came in after Run-DMC would become massive hitmakers in their own right like Beastie Boys’ wise-guy approach to the genre or LL Cool J getting his first hits off the album Radio.

Chuck D may have brought a far more militant slant to the genre when Public Enemy, but it’s hard to think of him having the drive to do it had Run-DMC not come first. It was bound to be a struggle for any rap artist to break through in the 1980s, but once the hats came out and radios started bumping ‘The King of Rock’, a whole new movement wasn’t far behind them.