How do you weather the changes in a genre your band helped define? It’s tricky. Run-DMC tried to rebrand with Tougher Than Leather, the title of both an album and a film directed by their producer Rick Rubin. A tough yet strangely naive premonition of the gangsta rap years to come, it also features one of Rubin’s other proteges, The Beastie Boys, just as their career took off.
It’s got serious time capsule value, then, so it’s no wonder it prompts hosts Graham and Jeff to reflect on the odd experience of being a white hip-hop fan in the late 1980s and 90s, a time when the genre was subject to both fetishisation and moral panic from our fellow honkies. We also discuss the unexpected links this film has to movies by James Grey and Jonathan Demme, formative ‘adult’ cinema and the parallel universe where this film was directed by Spike Lee. Turns out we can, in fact, rock it like this.
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