
Regardless, every breathing man or woman between the ages of 18 and 35 still knows every word to this song.ġ991: Public Enemy rerecords “Bring the Noise” with Anthrax. No, we don’t think we could ever top that.ġ990: Vanilla Ice, a Miami rapper with a fabricated hard-knocks background, strikes gold with “Ice Ice Baby” … and, almost immediately, becomes a punch line. Atrocious misrepresentations of rap music in cinema, part one: A teen witch helps a girl in an unfortunate bonnet win a rap battle for love. Pete Nice and MC Serch), the first critically respected white hip-hop group since the Beastie Boys, debuts with The Cactus Album. It would become the industry’s top publication at its peak, landing a perfect five-mike review in The Source was one of the greatest accomplishments in hip-hop.ġ989: 3rd Bass (a.k.a. Dave Mays and Jon Schecter, two white Harvard students, create rap magazine The Source, running it at first out of their dorm rooms. He would have a hand in signing a whole bunch of acts, including Slick Rick, EPMD, and Eric B. “Cooky Puss” is not on it.ġ988: Rubin splits from Def Jam acrimoniously, and Lyor Cohen, who had been Simmons’s partner at management group Rush Entertainment, takes over as president of the label. It is a runaway smash, becoming the first No.
#3rd base cactus album sales license#
Def Jam releases the Beastie Boys’ proper debut, License to Ill. It is arguably the first-ever crossover rap hit. They initially run the operations out of Rubin’s dorm room.ġ986: Inspired by freestyle sessions done over Aerosmith’s 1975 album Toys in the Attic, Run-DMC releases a cover of “Walk This Way” done in collaboration with the band.

It is one of the first hit songs to incorporate elements of hip-hop.ġ983: The Beastie Boys, a trio of downtown hard-core kids, have an underground hit with sort-of-rap song “Cooky Puss,” a prank call to Carvel set to a hip-hop beat.ġ984: Rick Rubin, then a student at NYU, meets Russell Simmons, then a fledgling artist manager, and the two create the hip-hop label Def Jam. And it’s all here, in Vulture’s Condensed History of White People in Rap.ġ981: Blondie releases “Rapture,” a pop song featuring one rap-style verse, in which Debbie Harry makes references to Fab Five Freddy, eating cars, and execution-style murder. But that doesn’t mean hip-hop has gone post-racial in the ten years since Em broke out - just as always, the points of intersection between white people and rap music have been a head-swirling mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. These are heady times for white people in rap: This month has seen both the return of Eminem, the greatest white rapper of all time, and the debut of Asher Roth, the most commercially viable white rapper since Eminem. Clockwise from top left: Eminem, Asher Roth, Beastie Boys, Rick Rubin.
