The First Time I Heard Run-DMC
Sucker MCs. 1983.
I was ten years old, sitting on the top bunk of my bunk bed, listening to the radio. what station would i have been listening to then, BLS? 92 KTU?
I used to put the sheets over my head like a tent every night, and pull the radio under there, to create a universe where there was nothing but me and the music. A song came on that I had never heard before, and it was entirely different from any other rap I'd hever heard. As if it had been dropped down from another planet.
So bare and minimalist, so gritty, so propulsive...so HARD. It just sounded so much more....serious...than any rap I'd heard before. So serious it made everything else sound like a joke. I sat there huddled in my little tent, mesmerized.
I wasn't able to really comprehend the feeling coming over me, at that time. But looking back now I know it was my first time feeling something that only comes a few times in your life, the music lover's sweetest epiphany. That moment when you hear a song and know instantly that a new horizon has been opened, a new world has been created, and music will never be the same.
I, also, would never be the same, of course. You might say that was the night I discovered who I am.