Bill Adler: I think of Run-DMC as the first group to be born into the culture -- more or less pure products of hip-hop culture in a way that everybody who preceded them was not. Looking back, you think of Kurt, you think of Melle Mel and the Furious Five, you think of Bambaataa. They're only five years, seven years older than the guys in Run-DMC, but they'd grown up in an era of funk and disco and rock and roll, and they were very influenced by all of that stuff -- not just in their music, but also in their stage apparel

Run-DMC really took more of their cues from the street and from the club scene and from the parks. There had been a generation of young people of color in New York who'd developed their own style. It was a musical style and a fashion sense and a language of their own, and Run-DMC absorbed and reflected all of that