DMC Says It’s the ‘Perfect Time’ for ‘Kings From Queens: The Run DMC Story’ (Exclusive)

Hip-hop fans started February with a treat as Kings from Queens: The Run DMC Story premiered on Peacock. DMC said he believes the series is something fans have been craving for. PopCulture.com spoke to the energetic member of Run-D.M.C. and explained why the series is coming at the “perfect time.”

“We’ve proven we could sell records and make some money and do all of that stuff.” DMC (real name Darryl McDaniels) told PopCulture. “In our communities, as a culture in our societies, in the educational system, there’s a lot of things you could look at and see what Run DMC inspired and motivated and all the people that’s going to be talking about Run-D.M.C. and Jam Master Jay. What that diverse collection of people and individuals was able to do. We need to start doing that again so that we can have that rebirth and renaissance of advancement for our culture. A lot of people think hip-hop just created rappers. Eminem, when he inducted us in the Rock Roll of Fame, he looked at me and Run and said, ‘Nobody will ever do what you, Run and D did, because you were the first to do it in the music business.’”

Run-D.M.C. rose to fame in the 1980s and proved that hip-hop wasn’t a fad with hits like “My Addidas,” “King of Rock” and “Walk This Way” with Aerosmith. The docuseries shows the group being asked about the future of hip-hop, which seems a little strange looking at it now considering it has grown into one of the top music genres in the country. 

“Disco had died,” DMC said when talking about Run-D.M.C.’s rise during the 1980s. “It’s funny. Now, I could never critique another person’s creativity. But over the last 30 years, I would say, when hip hop, after the gangster rap craze, when hip hop started to change, now they got mumble rap. They got all these titles for it. I was speaking at a high school in the Bronx and the kid asked me, ‘Yo, Mr. DMC,’ because I’m 59 years old now, if I was 20 or 21 or 18, it would’ve said, ‘Yo DMC.’ But it was ‘Mr. DMC. What do you think about mumble rap?’ Right? So the kids were asking me this, I’m in the high school class in the Bronx, so they want me at 59 years old to turn and be the old whipper snapper, ‘You young whipper snapper, you don’t know nothing about hip hop.’”

“I didn’t do that. I said, ‘I could relate to mumble rap.’ And they was like, “What do you mean? How could you say?’ Now they wanted me to hate and be old like I am. But I said, ‘The only difference between my generation and your generation is this. When they criticized us, we did something about it.’ They said the same thing about us. They said, ‘You ain’t saying nothing. Hip hop the hippie, the hippie. They credit, right? And it’s true. But when they did that, we stopped the music and we wrote, ‘It’s Like That.’ We wrote ‘Planet Rock.’ We wrote ‘The Message.’ We wrote Problems, problems of the world today. Go back and look at the array of records that had just must importance as a Bob Dylan song or Curtis Mayfield song that we people who said, ‘You’re just a fad, it’s not going to last.’”

All three episodes of Kings from Queens: The Run DMC Story are now streaming on Peacock.