Walk This Way

The song that nobody in the room wanted to make

Here is the delicious irony at the heart of one of the most important crossover records ever made: almost nobody involved wanted to do it. Run-DMC, the hottest rap group in America in 1985, reportedly thought the lyrics of Aerosmith's 1975 hit sounded like hillbilly nonsense. Aerosmith, meanwhile, were a band in free fall, battered by addiction and lineup chaos, and had little idea who these three young men from Queens even were. The producer pushing the idea, a skinny, bearded NYU student named Rick Rubin, was one of the few people who could hear what it might become.

The result reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 in the autumn of 1986, the first time a hip hop single had climbed into the American top five. It went top ten in the UK too. And its music video, in which Steven Tyler bursts through a dividing wall between two rehearsal rooms, turned a metaphor into an image that MTV played on heavy rotation. A song about a boy fumbling his way toward adulthood became, almost by accident, the moment two musical worlds stopped pretending they lived in separate buildings.

Two bands, two cities, one drum break

To understand the 1986 record, you have to start with the 1975 original. Aerosmith were a Boston band who had clawed their way up through the clubs of New England, and by the mid-seventies they were on the verge of real stardom. During a tour stop, guitarist Joe Perry came up with a funky, stuttering riff, the kind of slinky groove that owed more to New Orleans funk than to British blues-rock. The band jammed on it, drummer Joey Kramer laid down a crisp, strutting beat, but there were no words and no title.

The title, as the story goes, came from a cinema seat. The band reportedly went to see Mel Brooks' horror parody Young Frankenstein in New York, and fell about laughing at the running gag in which the hunchbacked servant Igor tells Gene Wilder's doctor to follow him, then demonstrates a ridiculous lurching walk. That phrase stuck. Steven Tyler then had to write the lyrics, and according to band lore he lost his first draft in the back of a taxi, retreated to a stairwell at the Record Plant studio in Manhattan, and scrawled a fresh set across the wall with a pencil. The song appeared on the album Toys in the Attic and became a US top ten hit in 1977.

Meanwhile, across the decade, in the parks and community centres of New York, DJs were discovering that certain rock records had a few seconds of naked drumming at the start that could be looped endlessly. The opening of Aerosmith's track, just Kramer's drums and then Perry's guitar, became a staple breakbeat. Jam Master Jay, the DJ of Run-DMC, had been cutting that intro back and forth on his turntables for years. Joseph Simmons (Run) and Darryl McDaniels (DMC) had been rhyming over it without ever really listening to the song beyond the first few bars.

Run-DMC came from Hollis, a middle-class Black neighbourhood in Queens. By 1985 they had already made history: the first rap act with a gold album, the first on MTV, and the first to sport the stark uniform of black leather, Kangol hats, and laceless Adidas trainers that defined the look of a generation. Their manager was Run's older brother, Russell Simmons, who had co-founded Def Jam Recordings with Rubin.

When the group was working on their third album, Raising Hell, Rubin heard them rapping over the familiar break and asked whether they knew the song it came from. They did not, not really. Rubin, a rock and metal kid as much as a hip hop fan, saw an opportunity: why not make a real version, with the original artists? Run and DMC were reportedly horrified when they finally heard the full track and its sing-song lyrics. They had to be talked into it, and DMC has said in later interviews that they feared it would make them look ridiculous in front of their own audience.

Aerosmith, for their part, had reached a low point. Perry had left the band for a stretch, the members were struggling with drugs, and their record sales had dwindled. When the invitation came, Tyler and Perry agreed to come to Magic Ventures studio in Manhattan, reportedly with very little idea of what they were walking into. The session, by most accounts, was brief, a little awkward, and ultimately electric. Perry re-recorded his guitar parts, Tyler sang the choruses, and Run and DMC traded the verses in their trademark tag-team style, finishing each other's lines with a bark and a swagger.

For British readers there is a lovely footnote to all this: the song has had a second life in the UK charts. In 2007, Girls Aloud and Sugababes teamed up on a cover for Comic Relief, and that version went all the way to number one in Britain. It was a pop-glossy take on a track that had started as a funk-rock strut, proof that the song's bones are strong enough to carry almost any style.

What the song is really about

Strip away the history and the guitar heroics, and the lyrics tell a surprisingly old-fashioned coming-of-age comedy. The narrator is a teenage boy, a bit naive, a bit cocky, who has never really been with anyone. Over the course of the verses he describes a series of encounters that leave him dazzled and out of his depth.

First, he recalls being a lad who had not yet had his first proper romantic experience, until a schoolyard flirtation with a group of cheerleaders sets his imagination racing. He describes glancing at them, feeling the heat of attention, and not quite knowing what to do with it. Then comes the central episode: an older, far more experienced girl (and in some readings, a sort of neighbourhood initiation) takes him under her wing. She teaches him, quite literally, how to move. The repeated title phrase works as her instruction: copy me, follow my lead, do it the way I do.

That is where the Mel Brooks joke turns clever. In the film, following someone's walk is a slapstick misunderstanding. In the song, it becomes a sly double meaning about learning intimacy by imitation. The boy is clumsy, he is breathless, he cannot believe his luck, and Tyler delivers it all in a rapid-fire, tongue-twisting rush that makes the boy's nervous excitement audible. It is less a seduction anthem than a comic memoir of embarrassment, the kind of story a grown man tells about his teenage self with a wink and a grimace.

What Run-DMC did with those words was transformative. By chopping the verses between two voices, they turned a solo confession into a playground boast, two friends ribbing each other about a shared rite of passage. The rapid cadence that sounded like gibberish to them at first suddenly fitted rap's rhythmic logic perfectly. Tyler had, without knowing it, been writing something close to a rap verse back in 1975. In a way the song had been waiting for hip hop to discover what it really was.

There is also a meta-meaning that the 1986 version brought out. The title phrase, an instruction to follow and imitate, became an unintentional statement about the collaboration itself. Rock had been borrowing from Black music for decades without much credit. Here, finally, a Black group was taking a white rock song and remaking it in their image, on their terms, and inviting the rock stars to follow their lead.

The wall comes down

The music video, directed by Jon Small, is one of the most famous in MTV history, and its concept is gloriously blunt. Aerosmith are rehearsing in one room, Run-DMC in the next. The noise from each side irritates the other. Tyler grows so annoyed that he starts hacking at the dividing wall, eventually crashing through it with his microphone stand. By the end, both groups are on the same stage in front of a cheering crowd.

It is hard to overstate how much that image mattered. In the mid-eighties, American radio and MTV were highly segregated by genre, and in practice often by race. Rock stations rarely played rap. MTV had been criticised in its early years for neglecting Black artists. The video gave programmers a perfect Trojan horse: it was a rock song, with rock stars, so it was "safe" to play. But the voices carrying the verses belonged to rappers from Queens. Suspicious suburban audiences who had never knowingly listened to hip hop suddenly found themselves shouting along.

Raising Hell went on to become the first hip hop album to sell three million copies in the US. It helped pave the way for the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill, also produced by Rubin, and for the rap-rock fusions that would follow, from Public Enemy's collaboration with Anthrax on "Bring the Noise" to the nu-metal boom of the late nineties. Without this record, it is difficult to imagine Linkin Park, Rage Against the Machine, or Jay-Z's mash-up project with Linkin Park existing in quite the same form.

For Aerosmith, the effect was close to a resurrection. The exposure to a younger, broader audience reportedly helped convince the band to get clean and recommit. Their next album, Permanent Vacation in 1987, launched one of the most remarkable second acts in rock history, with a run of hits and stadium tours that carried them into the 1990s as bigger stars than they had ever been in the seventies. Tyler and Perry have spoken many times about how a song with rappers they had barely met gave them their careers back.

Run-DMC were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2009, only the second hip hop act to receive the honour, and "Walk This Way" is routinely cited as one of the reasons. The tragedy that hangs over their story, the 2002 murder of Jam Master Jay in a Queens studio, gives the record an added poignancy now. His turntables were where the whole thing began.

Why it still lands today

Play "Walk This Way" at a wedding, a sports stadium, or a school disco, and you will see something remarkable: grandparents, teenagers, metalheads, and hip hop heads all moving to the same beat. Few songs are so thoroughly cross-generational. The drum intro alone is instantly recognisable, a few seconds that announce fun is about to happen.

But the deeper reason it endures is that its story has become the template for how genres meet. Every time a pop star brings in a rapper, every time a country singer collaborates with a trap producer, every time a viral mash-up blends two unlikely worlds, there is a little of this record in the DNA. The idea that you can break down a wall between audiences, rather than simply sneaking across it, is now so normal that it is easy to forget it once had to be proved.

There is something human about it, too. The song is about a nervous kid learning by copying someone who knows more than he does. The collaboration was about two groups of musicians, sceptical of each other, learning to play in the same room. Both stories are about humility and nerve, about being willing to look a bit foolish in order to arrive somewhere new. That is a lesson that never quite goes out of date.

How to dive deeper

🎧 Immerse in the sound

• Raising Hell (Run-DMC, 1986) — Hear the collaboration in its natural habitat, sandwiched between "Peter Piper" and "My Adidas". The whole album is a masterclass in stripped-back drum machines and raw scratching, and it shows why Rubin thought rock and rap belonged together.
• Toys in the Attic (Aerosmith, 1975) — Go back to the original and listen closely to Joey Kramer's opening bars, the break that New York DJs looped for a decade. You will notice how funky and loose the band sounds, far closer to James Brown than to the hair metal they are sometimes lumped with.
• Licensed to Ill (Beastie Boys, 1986) — Released the same year and produced by the same man, this is the other half of the rap-rock revolution. Listen to the two albums back to back and you can hear Def Jam's vision taking shape.

📚 Follow the story

• Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song That Changed American Music Forever (Geoff Edgers) — A whole book devoted to a single recording session and everything that led to it. Edgers interviewed nearly everyone involved, and the result reads like a gripping social history of race, radio, and luck in 1980s America.
• Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith (with Stephen Davis) — The band borrowed the song's title for their candid, chaotic group memoir. It covers the excess of the seventies, the collapse, and the improbable comeback with refreshing honesty.
• Life and Def (Russell Simmons) — The Def Jam co-founder's account of building a hip hop empire from Queens. It offers the business and street-level perspective on how Run-DMC became the first rap superstars.

🌍 Visit the places

• Run-DMC JMJ Way, Hollis, Queens — A stretch of street in the group's home neighbourhood was renamed in their honour, and murals celebrating the trio have appeared nearby. Standing there, you feel how a quiet residential corner of New York produced one of the most influential groups in music history.
• 1325 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston — The Allston apartment building where Aerosmith lived and rehearsed in their hungry early days. Fans still make the pilgrimage, and it is a reminder that every stadium band starts out cramped in a shared flat.
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland — Both Aerosmith and Run-DMC are inductees, and the museum often features memorabilia from each. It is the perfect place to reflect on how a single crossover record helped redraw the boundaries of what counts as rock and roll.

🎸 Experience it yourself

• Learn the drum intro — Sit behind a kit or a drum pad and try Kramer's opening pattern. It is deceptively simple, and nailing its swing gives you a hands-on sense of why DJs fell in love with it.
• Guitar Hero: Aerosmith — The 2008 game puts the song in your hands, letting you play along with Joe Perry's riff and even featuring Run-DMC as unlockable characters. It is a fun way to feel the groove from the inside.
• Make your own two-voice verse — Grab a friend and trade lines over the beat in Run-DMC's tag-team style, finishing each other's phrases. You will quickly discover how much rhythm and timing go into making it sound effortless.

🎵 Listen to this song