It's like that: Jam Master Jay
Jan. 21, 1965-Oct. 30, 2002.
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It's like that: Jam Master Jay

Jan. 21, 1965-Oct. 30, 2002

'START AT 3 , end at 6 / Jam Master Jay is on the mix," Run-DMC chanted on "Darryl and Joe (Krush Groove 3)." I didn't know if this was a promise or a boast, since I was only 10 years old at the time and too young to see them in concert.

For me, Run-DMC were larger-than-life icons, superheros whose names were emblazoned on T-shirts and spray-painted on the back of jean jackets. They blared out of boom box tape decks around East O'Keefe Street in East Palo Alto where I grew up –a refreshing antidote to the lush R&B being broadcast from KSOL-FM in 1985. Their straightforward rap style expressed emotions that vocalists like Lionel Richie couldn't convey.

There were other popular rap acts, too, like Whodini, Whistle, and UTFO. I guess Run-DMC didn't really become the number-one group until they released their third album, Raising Hell, the next year. On that album Jason "Jam Master Jay" Mizell took center stage, using two turntables to beat juggle and scratch up a recording of Bob James's "Take Me to the Mardi Gras," slicing up the vinyl so fast it sounded like a chainsaw cutting through a forest. The band's sound, which had previously consisted of minimalist electro jams, had now become stark and pungent, vacillating between Rick Rubin's production and Jam Master Jay's turntable techniques. But at the time, I didn't like that album's hard rock-rap hybrid, plus the MTV omnipresence of "Walk This Way," their top-10 hit single with Aerosmith, annoyed me to no end.

Then the next year, LL Cool J released his Bigger and Deffer, and my friends and I took to memorizing LL's rhymes, forgetting how Run-DMC had captured our imaginations only a year before.

In retrospect, the three years between Run-DMC's first national hit, It's Like That, in 1983 and the 1986 triple-platinum smash Raising Hell didn't seem that long. But in that span of time, our worlds had changed. By winning over inner-city youth, rock critics, and even older people who learned to appreciate Run and DMC's clever raps and Jam Master Jay's nimble scratches on "Peter Piper," Run-DMC had helped legitimize hip-hop culture in mainstream America, bridging its development from a fad no one thought would last to a fledgling, if still controversial, art form.

Central to that process was accepting Jam Master Jay, as an accomplished musician on par with U2 bassist Adam Clayton or Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry. Jam Master Jay, as Run-DMC so eloquently put it on King of Rock, "rocked without a band."

Mosi Reeves