I turned 50 years old this year. One of the things I like best about being born in 1968 was that I was a kid in the seventies, a teen in the eighties, a young adult in the nineties, a dad in the aughts, and now a grandpa in the tweens. I've seen a lot of remarkable changes that my kids and grandkids take for granted without a second thought.
One of those changes in the pop music arena is rap. It's ubiquitous on pop radio stations today, and for me, quite infuriating in most cases. The lyrics are mumbled over a monotonous, repetitive, computer-generated beat. This is what passes for music, and for my two youngest kids, rap and hip-hop are all they listen to.
I'm so old I can remember before rap was even heard of, much less commonly listened to. Like most new music forms, it was hated by my parents as much as I hate my own kids' music today (some things never change...). But in the eighties, it was new, something we had never heard before, and one of the pioneering voices of this new music was Run-DMC.
They were big enough by 1987 to warrant a spot on the first A Very Special Christmas album with this original song about Christmas time in their childhood neighborhood of Hollis, Queens, in New York City. Like all good art, we find something that either appeals to us or that we can relate to. They sing about the anticipation of presents, Mom's awesome holiday cooking, snow, fellowship...it's actually the perfect Christmas carol. The completely cheesy eighties video is an extra present!
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