I heard "Rapper's Delight" on the radio some time in the early 80's. I'm sure of it. But it's difficult to trace exactly what it might have meant to me. At that time, I didn't differentiate between rap (this, and not "hip-hop," was the preferred term back then) and any other pop music on the radio. The rhythmic sing-song way of vocalizing appealed to me for the same reason I enjoyed singing "Green Grow the Rushes" (not the R.E.M. song) at summer camp: these songs had rhythm, they rhymed, and the words were spoken forcefully. There was no mystery to rap for kids who could remember being on a playground. I can't say any of the rap I heard between 1980 and 1989 represented any kind of paradigm shift for me.

I probably didn't even think of rap as its own genre until 1985 or so. During that winter, I kept statistics for my high school's JV basketball team. I noticed that the kids on the team were always debating whether to listen to rap or rock on the boom box (or, as we called it then, the "ghetto blaster") during warm up. Not surprisingly, that debate pretty much broke down along racial lines. While most of the white kids on the team liked Run-DMC and the Fat Boys just fine, but they also wanted to shoot baskets to Dire Straits, Tears for Fears, and Huey Lewis. The black kids on the team weren't having any of it.

That was perhaps Run-DMC's biggest contribution to rap: they broke it for white people by combining it with rock, a revolution already in motion before "Walk This Way." If dorky kids in my suburban Midwest town were grooving to "You Talk Too Much" in 1985, you know the impact was huge. The Executive Producers of Crown Royal, Run-DMC's attempt at a comeback, were obviously well aware of this fact. Like so many rap full-lengths, this one is jammed with guest stars, with all but two tracks featuring collaborations. But check out some of their choices: Fred Durst, Kid Rock, Everlast, Sugar Ray, and Stephan Jenkins from Third Eye Blind. Worse, these guys appear on five tracks in a row!

In case you were wondering, the Aerosmith lightening did not strike twice, and all five of these rock-flavored tracks are weak. The "highlight" of this sequence is probably the cover of Steve Miller's "Take the Money and Run," with Everlast handling the choruses. It's nothing special, to be sure, but it was a smart choice for a rap/rock cover, considering how much time Miller vinyl has spent on hip-hop DJs' turntables. The less said about the other collaborations the better.

Somewhat more interesting is hearing Run-DMC mixing up with present-day MCs. (Or, to be more accurate, to see how Run mixes it up. Darryl "DMC" McDaniels didn't see eye-to-eye with the rest of the group on this record, and he only makes a couple of brief appearances.) Run generally does a nice job of adapting his old-school style to this contemporary setting. He switches his rhythm up to sound more like the rap on the radio now, and he gives his lyrics a large injection of internal rhyme, another technique that became widespread long after Run-DMC's style was established. Run sounds great on "It's Over," a track with Jermaine Dupri guesting, showing that his sense of flow is still there regardless of the technique. The sorta-cover of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" gives him another chance to stretch out on the faster, clipped style.

Unfortunately, these few small pleasures don't even come close to making this an interesting record. With only Run rapping most of the time, Run-DMC wind up overwhelmed by the guest stars and the schizophrenic nature of the production. The biggest sin of all is that, despite all the high-powered types involved, there just aren't many hooks on Crown Royal. And after "Simmons Incorporated," (featuring Method Man) finally fades out and the record comes to a close, only one question remains: where the hell was Santana?

-Mark Richard-San