Twenty-five years later, Run-DMC’s “My Adidas” still remains one of Hip Hop’s most iconic songs, a fact that isn’t lost on group member DMC.
“It was a song that was about our sneakers, but it was bigger than just talking about how many pairs of sneakers we had,” explained DMC in an interview with MTV News. “It came from the place of people would look at the b-boys, the b-girls and go, ‘Oh, those are the people that cause all the problems in here.’ And, ‘Those young people are nothing but troublemakers and those young people don’t know nothing.’ So they was judging the book by its cover, without seeing what was inside of it.”
The impact of the song was evident to the group, DMC said. “It was scary. We was going through Detroit, through Boston, through Chicago, through LA, through Virginia; every city we went to on the ‘Raising Hell’ Tour, we would look out the back of the tour bus and everybody had the Adidas [track] suits from head to toe. The Cazals, the hats, the Kangols, and they had those Adidas on. You would think we would sit in the back of the bus and go, ‘Yo, we gonna get paid!'”
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“Me, Run and Jay, we sat back and said, ‘We gotta watch what we do and we gotta watch what we say,'” he added. “Because the music, the image, the concepts was so powerful, if they’re going to wear Adidas because we say it’s cool, that means they would drink, abuse, fight because of this. We got nervous. I always remember Jay said, ‘Yo, this Hip Hop stuff is really powerful, man. We gotta watch what we say and what we present to the world.'”
Watch the interview below:
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