Kicks by Nicholas Smith

Author:Nicholas Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2018-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

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An African American doctor named Gerald W. Deas makes one of the unlikeliest cameo appearances in sneaker history. Besides his day job as an internist at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in Queens, Deas wrote plays, poems, and songs revolving around social ills. His play tackling poor diets, titled Oh! Oh! Obesity!, was staged on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1984. In 1985, the same year the FDA gave Dr. Deas an award for his advocacy of nutrition labeling, a poem of his was turned into a rap song. “Felon Sneakers” was Deas’s take on what he saw as the troubling trend of kids wearing sneakers without laces, as prison inmates did. One couplet read, “You shoot and kill / You wearing those sneakers but you lost your will.” Deas felt that imitating the way inmates wore shoes would hold young black men back. That caught the attention of a hip-hop group called Run-DMC, who didn’t like anyone slighting the way they wore their Adidas Superstars.

By the mid-1980s, hip-hop had moved on from DJ-centric outdoor parties and jams as the music itself focused more on the MC aspect than the man behind the turntable. Grandmaster Flash saw the shift early and enlisted not one but five MCs to rap over his beats. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, along with the rival group Cold Crush Brothers, transitioned hip-hop to performances that were more concerts than neighborhood dance-a-thons.

Hip-hop groups started to appear in trendy Manhattan clubs and to sign record deals. In 1982, Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force released the electro-funk single “Planet Rock,” influenced by the German electronic band Kraftwerk, James Brown, and Sly and the Family Stone. The Zulu Nation founder performed in spacy costumes that resembled a meld of Flash Gordon and Funkadelic. That same year, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released the influential hit “The Message,” which painted a bleak, realistic portrait of inner-city poverty to the refrain “It’s like a jungle sometimes / It makes me wonder how I keep from going under.” (DJ Kool Herc, the third member of the “Holy Trinity,” by then had faded from the scene.)

Run-DMC marked another chapter in hip-hop’s evolution. The rhymes of the trio’s two MCs, Joseph “Run” Simmons and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, were harder and more rock-oriented than those of other acts, and the group’s DJ, Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell, relied on drum effects and scratching rather than the disco-adapted samples favored by the genre’s pioneers. As with “The Message,” Run-DMC sang about the world around them. “Unemployment at a record high / People coming, people going, people born to die,” the two MCs sang on their debut 1983 single “It’s Like That.”

Their stripped-down sound was what one might actually hear on the street, not produced in a studio with expensive equipment. This went for their look, too: after dropping their original geeky plaid outfits, Run-DMC adopted leather jackets, black velour hats, Adidas track suits, and gold chains—something fans might see on their native

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