Darryl “DMC” McDaniels concisely wrapped, or should that be rapped, up the Park City Song Summit’s “Dignity in Dialogue” lab that discussed how people can find similarities through their differences.
“The responsibility is to communicate, conversate and collaborate — I didn’t even mean this to rhyme — so we can all elevate,” he said.
The line came at the end of Saturday’s discussion, which was moderated by Derek Johnson of Stand Together Music, at the Pendry Park City’s Pendry Room.
The discussion aligned with Stand Together Music’s mission that strives to make changes in social impact, addiction recovery and educational reform, and it began when Johnson asked McDaniels, known as the “King of Rock,” to recount the birth of hip-hop.
“In the beginning, we were watching people coming to New York City to go to Studio 54,” McDaniels said. “Hollywood was leaving L.A. and coming to New York, and what you saw in the media was money and wealth and movie stars and CEOs, Rolls Royces and fur coats.”
McDaniels and his friends watched these celebrities with awe and despair.
“We were on the outside because, one, we were too young, and two, we didn’t have the wealth,” he said, “We thought we didn’t have the characteristics and capabilities to be included because to us, it looked like heaven, and we were looking from the point of death, darkness and destruction.”
After a while, it dawned on McDaniels that he could do some of the same things these stars were doing at Studio 54.
“We saw them getting together and dancing to music, and while we didn’t have the resources — money or real estate — we had ideas,” he said. “Since the DJ plays the music with the records, we were going to do that in the streets of New York, and our motivation was to be better. We wanted to change our conditions because it appeared the people in places of power weren’t going to do it for us.”
Once McDaniels and his friends — Joseph “Run” Simmons and Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizzell — formed the hip-hop group Run-D.M.C. and began doing their own thing, they felt a surge of excitement and power.
“The main motivation was to feel good for a minute, and once we experienced that, we realized it was up to us to change our conditions,” he said. “We had to find dignity in ourselves and in our situations.”
To do that, McDaniels knew he had to speak his truth, and the group tapped into existing music.
“We would use rock, folk, punk and the blues and even classical and jazz,” he said. “We were using records from James Brown to Stevie Wonder to the Rolling Stones to Queen, but we changed the conversation. And once we started speaking up, we realized we weren’t speaking for people in New York City or people in the ghetto. We realized we were speaking for people all over the globe, and we realized we were having the right conversation, which brought a community of people that we didn’t think we could connect with.”
One of those communities was punk rock that was comprised of people who had the same ideas as the hip-hoppers, McDaniels said.
“A good friend of mine is Tim Armstrong from the punk band Rancid, and I was in L.A. one day with him and having a discussion,” he said. “Tim said, ‘Before hip-hop came along, punk rock — those white kids in America and Europe — held one middle finger up to the establishment who was trying to divide us by giving out false information.’ Then he said, ‘When this thing called hip-hop came out of New York, it put two middle fingers up to the establishment.’”
The fusion of punk and hip-hop first hit the Top 40 with a song called “Rapture” by a group called Blondie, a band fronted by Deborah Harry that cut its teeth playing at the famous punk venue, CBGB’s in the late 1970s.
“Debbie was able to (do that song) because she was connected with those hip-hop people,” he said. “If you were to walk into a club in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s, you saw artists, journalists, writers. You saw musicians. You saw hip-hoppers. You saw graffiti artists. And she was connected with those people.”
Through these exchanges of ideas, seemingly different artists found similarities, according to McDaniels, who asked the lab’s attendees if they remembered the Beastie Boys.
“Before Eminem, they were the greatest white rappers ever, and they were a white, Jewish punk rock group from New York City and then there was us, Run D.M.C., these black hip-hoppers from New York City,” he said. “Both of us were working in a studio that recorded metal — Slayer and Anthrax.”
The bridge of these genres came through Rick Rubin, a white, Jewish producer and DJ, who was producing the Beastie Boys.
“It took Rick to not be afraid to stick his head in the studio and say, ‘Hi, Jam Master Jay,’ and it took Jay to say, ‘Come on in,’” McDaniels said. “They talked about their differences, and by having that conversation, they realized the white, punk rock group likes all the same music as the black rappers liked.”
Out of that conversation and connection came the hip-hop and rock collaboration between Run D.M.C. and Aerosmith, McDaniels said.
Their version of “Walk This Way,” was released in 1986 and peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The video, directed by John Small, featured Run D.M.C. and Aerosmith’s guitarist Joe Perry and vocalist Steven Tyler in a room divided by a wall, McDaniels said.
“In the video Steven Tyler took a microphone stand and broke down the wall,” he said. “But this wasn’t something new. It was something that people refused to pay attention to, because haven’t black people and white people been jamming together all the while. (I mean), when you talk with Joe Perry and Steven Tyler about Aerosmith, they will talk about the black blues players that influenced them.”
A year after “Walk This Way,” Run D.M.C. decided to tour with the Beastie Boys, McDaniels said.
“People told us that was a bad idea and that there was no way these white Jewish punk rock kids would get with these black hip-hoppers,” he said. “But we toured the world without incident.”
These collaborations showed the world that hip-hop and punk rock could coexist and nurture each other in a bigger picture, and that sparked the imagination in other musicians to create bands such as Rage Against the Machine, Limp Bizkit, Blink 182 and Korn, McDaniels said.
“The same way we do that with music, the arts succeed where politics and religion fails,” he said. “It takes the writers, the musicians, the playwright, the novelist to create the play, the music and sounds and sculpture of what can really be done now. And the only thing that comes out bad from discussing our differences is when you take it upon yourself — physically, spiritually and mentally — to say this other person, entity, community or nation is wrong because they are not who I am.”
McDaniels addresses that in his children’s book, “Darryl’s Dream,” which is about him being teased and bullied while he was in the third grade.
McDaniels uses examples in the book to talk with kids in kindergarten through fifth grade about how to deal in a positive way with differences.
“If she’s got dreadlocks, and you’ve got curly blond hair, isn’t that still hair?” he said.”If you’ve got on Adidas, and they got on Jordans, aren’t Adidas and Jordans still sneakers? Negativity is a false sense of power, so if we take away the wrongness of somebody or who and what they are, you can get past all of the pollution and smoke.”
To do that takes “guts,” McDaniels said.
“But we also have to do it in a way that is not derogatory or disrespecting to somebody else,” he said. “You have to do it in a way where you can remove your name and your religion so that when they put in their names, it works.”
For information about the 2024 Park City Song Summit, visit parkcitysongsummit.com.