Raising Hell by Run DMC

Raising Hell, Run-D.M.C.'s third album, came out on Profile on May 15, 1986, with Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin producing, and it's the sound of hip-hop kicking down the front door. Run, DMC and Jam Master Jay, the trio out of Hollis, Queens, keep it brutally lean: booming drums, scratching like a buzzsaw, and two voices trading lines like they're finishing each other's punches.

The masterstroke was "Walk This Way", a rap-rock remake of Aerosmith's 1975 song cut with Aerosmith themselves, which became the first hip-hop single to reach the Hot 100's top 5 and dragged the whole genre into the mainstream. "My Adidas", "You Be Illin'" and "It's Tricky" were hits too. It was the first hip-hop album to go platinum and then multi-platinum, the first to top the Top Black Albums chart, and it earned the group a Grammy nomination, another first for hip-hop. The Library of Congress later added it to the National Recording Registry.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.