Anniversaries — July 9, 2026
Run-DMC on 40 Years of Raising Hell: 'The Sgt. Pepper's of Hip-Hop'
Rev Run and DMC look back on the 1986 album that dragged rap out of the clubs and onto MTV.
Forty years on from Raising Hell, Run and DMC sat down with Billboard to talk through what the album did to music. DMC's framing was blunt: it is the Sgt. Pepper's of hip-hop, the prototype and the blueprint, the record that set the bar every album after it had to clear.
According to DMC, the group was not chasing an industry record. They were making a hip-hop record — taking the beat from the street and putting it on television for the world to see. That distinction is why the album still reads as authentic rather than engineered.
Rev Run remembered how fast it moved. Coming off King of Rock, Rock Box and Sucker MCs, they already had momentum, but Raising Hell exceeded even his expectations — audiences knew every word within days of release. The Aerosmith collaboration on Walk This Way pushed the rock-rap fusion they had been circling since Rock Box all the way into the mainstream, and My Adidas turned a group's footwear into a business model the whole culture later copied.
DMC's line about the moment sums up how unlikely it all felt at the time: they were the OGs in 1986, and nobody knew how long the rain could last. Forty years, it turns out.