Beating the Rap

Eyeing a gold Jacuzzi in his $750-a-night suite at the Stouffer airport hotel in Los Angeles, Run, the deffest rapper in the world, exclaims, "Me go to Michael Jackson's for dinner? I just don't know if I'm going. Shit! Who cares? Why should I go? Is his thing really mine?"

Run (Joe Simmons), D.M.C. (Darryl McDaniels, also known as D) and Jam Master Jay (Jason Mizell) — the trio that has recently injected rap into the American mainstream with its double-platinum album 'Raising Hell'-are blasting the white-gloved Jackson and other glitzy pop stars.

"Kids can look up to us," yells Run, so named because of his motor mouth. "We don't do any dumb shit."

"We don't paint our faces neither," says Jay, 21.

Run, 22, who is careful to distance his group from Boy George and "homo-assed drug takers," says, "Michael wants us to make a record with him, and we don't really want to make a record with Michael. We really dig Barry White." The rappers have discussed collaborating with White, the rotund soul man who had a string of sexy hits in the Seventies.

"Michael's not really us," says Jay.

"He doesn't fit the program," says Darryl, 22. "Michael? If I met Michael Jackson and he had that thing on his face [Jackson's famed surgical mask], I'd rip it off. I've got no germs, man."

"Michael doesn't feel the way I feel," snaps Run, a native of Hollis, a middle-class neighborhood in Queens, New York. "He wants us on his next album. He wants to make a record about crack. We have good rhymes about it because we still see it, we live in the neighborhood still. I've made a lot of money, but I still live in Hollis. It's so funny. I don't have a big mansion and beautiful clothes. I see the crack on the corner. I need to get rid of this thing. Michael probably would like me to lay some of this on his album. Michael writes lyrics, but I write what I think. I see and feel all day."

While their remarks have the same uncompromising grittiness as their music, the tension behind their words reveals that Run-D.M.C. is now at a crossroads. Having broken through to white radio with "Walk This Way," its collaboration with the hard-rock group Aerosmith, Run-D.M.C. must decide how to be pop and streetwise at the same time. Run-D.M.C. also faces another crisis. As its fame has increased, the trio has consistently been associated with violence. A riot between two youth gangs at the Long Beach Arena last August left forty-two people injured. It was the fifth time this past summer that a Run-D.M.C. concert led to mass arrests or serious injuries. Bloody incidents also plagued some theaters showing Krush Groove, the 1985 film in which the group appeared, leading Parents' Music Resource Center spokeswoman Tipper Gore to claim that rappers tell fans, "It's all right to beat people up." While promoters have canceled Run-D.M.C. shows or added to the hysteria with talk of hiring extra security guards for concerts, more dispassionate observers have suggested that the group is getting a bum rap.

Yet the image has stuck. To much of white America, rap means mayhem and bloodletting.

So as Run leaves his penthouse suite to collect a rented black Corvette at the hotel's carport, he looks concerned. He insists that he, D and Jay have come to Los Angeles to promote a truce among warring "gang-bangers," not simply to clean up their image. As Run explains, the group will take phone calls at KDAY, a local radio station, "just so a small beginning can be made to stop gangs, stop drugs. If only one kid turns away from gangs or drugs, we've been successful."

That squeaky-clean image is reinforced outside the hotel when Run encounters a black deputy marshal from the L.A. municipal court. Moving through a group of well-dressed businesswomen to shake Run's hand, the marshal says, "Boy, is my son a fan of yours! All because of you he wants to be a DJ. I just bought him a mixer."