#471: Run-DMC - Raising Hell (1986)

Zack: I’m pretty well versed in hip-hop history, so I know the incredible role that Run-DMC played in its development, popularization, and commercialization. And yet while I can recognize the significance, I also have trouble appreciating the music. It’s just so one-note and dated. I feel bad saying that because Run-DMC have a very similar sound to the Beastie Boys, whom I love, but I just don’t feel the same energy that radiates off Licensed to Ill (the Beastie Boys debut album that came out 6 months after Raising Hell, Run-DMC’s third). I feel like I should probably be more laudatory to the band that influenced the Beastie Boys (and who were more….authentic to hip-hop at the time), but I just have a hard time getting excited for songs like Perfection and Dumb Girl. For me, listening to Raising Hell is a strictly academic enterprise. I wish I liked the music more, but it just doesn’t hit me with enough force.

Favorite Tracks: Raising Hell; It’s Tricky; Walk This Way

Emily: Run-DMC helped to both create modern hip-hop and to bring it into the mainstream with this album. This is particularly true for the Aerosmith collaboration Walk This Way (which has been preserved by the Library of Congress!), which I think is the song that best holds up after 30+ years. They may not have been the first to merge rap with rock, and they certainly weren't the last, but they may have done it best. Something about the thumping beat, the rhythmic rhymes, and Steven Tyler's signature screech-singing just harmoniously works together. Though Run-DMC's popularity waned by the '90s until their breakup, after which Run became a pastor and had a slew of reality shows about his family and DMC appeared on a bunch of Vh1 nostalgia shows with his trademark wide-brimmed hat (yes, of course this is how I best know both of them), their influence lives on in any rock verse on a rap song and every pair of Stan Smiths on a hip-hop artist's feet. 

Favorite Tracks: Walk This Way; It's Tricky; You Be Illin'

#470: The Go-Go's - Beauty and the Beat (1981)

Zack: Emily kept insisting that this album would actually be good, and I am shocked to announce that she was right. I was dubious because, while I do know the song We Got the Beat and think it’s catchy, we’ve been burned a lot by New Wave albums that we picked because that one song is good (see: Cell, Soft). But the entire album is just poppy songs with great hooks. It kind of sounds like the feeling of jumping on a trampoline. It’s an album made almost entirely of songs to set movie montages to. As a result, while this certainly will not go down as my favorite album from this batch of 100, it definitely won’t be making the least favorite list, and for a New Wave album that’s about all that you can ask.

Favorite Tracks: Our Lips Are Sealed; We Got the Beat; How Much More

Emily: After a long hiatus (and two months of nearly non-stop work on one case), I'm back on my album-listening grind. And what a lovely way to jump back in with The Go-Go's. It's a super fun, positive jaunt that, as Zack described, feels like it would fit perfectly in any prom-night-getting-ready or windows-down-car-singalong montage in a teen movie from 1981 to today. That's particularly true for the iconic singles We Got the Beat, featured on the Jimmy Neutron soundtrack, the staple of my childhood that I've mentioned here many times before, and Our Lips Are Sealed, which for my '90s-'00s generation had both an eponymous Mary-Kate and Ashley movie and a Hilary and Haylie Duff cover. I'm pretty sure anyone alive since 1981 knows both of those songs, and most of them probably know the words well enough to bust them out at karaoke. Sometimes you just need a burst of fun from your music, and Beauty and the Beat certainly has delivered that for almost 40 years and counting.

Favorite Tracks: Our Lips Are Sealed; We Got the Beat; Tonite