With Twinkies and Hi-C in hand, my best grade school mate and I often snuck into his parents’ den for our forbidden fruit: mid-’80s MTV.
Among the videos that flickered rock star fantasies into our noodles was “Walk This Way,” by hip-hop pioneers Run-DMC and featuring Aerosmith.
I’d grown accustomed to guitar slinging, longhaired rock stars. What really fascinated me were these three black dudes in head to toe Adidas gear, gold chains and matching hats. Their fast delivery of lyrics over irresistible beats began my lifelong fascination with hip-hop music.
As I watched this performance, and later many more, I never paid too much attention to the guy in the back twisting knobs and manipulating … wait, what were those anyway, records?
Hopped up on goofballs in the mid-’80s, I didn’t give much thought to DJs, my future as an aspiring DJ, or one of the trailblazers of the art: Run-DMC’s Jam Master Jay.
This Halloween, sitting in the Portland airport waiting to fly to a music industry schmooze fest in the Big Apple, I stumbled across a news blip in USA Today declaring that Jam Master Jay had been murdered inside a Queens, N.Y., recording studio where he often let local artists record for free.
As tragic as this news is for Jay’s family and hip-hop lovers, it wouldn’t be horribly surprising if Jay had been involved in gang and open rivalries, which are usually marketing tools. Such as the East Coast vs. West Coast rivalry Tupac and Biggy Smalls (hip-hop’s most high-profile murders) were caught up in. But JMJ wasn’t.
Do hardcore rap lyrics have some truth to them after all? With every hip-hop related murder, people inevitably ask if hip-hop lyrics talk about filling someone with lead for some petty offenses and glorify a mafia style gangster lifestyle.
That doesn’t mean someone would do such a thing in real life, or does it?
Art imitates life imitates art.
As New York tabloid headlines declared “slayings” and “rap war,” old images of Jay jamming behind the decks with his gold chain flailing blurred in my head with all the other DJs and MCs I’ve loved. This murder didn’t make sense. Who was Jay? Everyone knew him as peace-loving family man. Hadn’t Run-DMC turned Christian? Didn’t they speak out against gang violence? Yes, in 1986 they called for a day of peace between warring street gangs in L.A.
Jay’s greatest impact on hip-hop may start now. Perhaps in the wake of this peaceful family man’s mysterious murder, people will no longer want to support the hip-hop genres that use violence, hatred, rivalry and greed to sell records. Hip-hop, rap and R&B aren’t inherently violent. Most of it encourages understanding and standing up against oppression in nonviolent ways. The violent content is sometimes all too real, but if people stop buying it, companies, managers and hip-hop dons will stop encouraging artists to create it.
Jay, whose real name was Jason Mizell, was 37 and is survived by a wife and three children.