How did you get from the Beatles to hip-hop?
I was the only punk rocker at my high school. And there were at least a handful of black kids who liked hip-hop. Both were kind of the new music of the day, and it was lonely being the only punk. If times were different and we’d had the Internet, I would have had punk-rock friends all over the world. I probably never would have gotten into hip-hop. But because of where I lived and because there was no community to be a punk with, I started hanging out with the kids who liked hip-hop. And I learned about it through them. They had cassettes of Mr. Magic’s Rap Attack, which was the one place where hip-hop was on the radio.
Just recorded from the radio?
Just recorded from the radio. It was an hour a week. And that was all the listening we had. Before college, I started going to Brad’s Record Den in the Bronx, where they sold hip-hop records, sort of working my way into the hip-hop community.
Was crossing over difficult for you?
More just a fish-out-of-water feeling. I went to a lot of places where I felt like I didn’t belong. But I think that the oddity of me being there made it OK. Like, something about it was so strange that I was in these places where there were no white people at all.
It’s interesting that you were bold enough to make that leap.
The thing is, when you’re a fan from the outside of something, you can embrace it in a different way than when you’re a fan from the inside. Run-D.M.C. could be sort of gangstery in their own way, pre-gangster rap, because they were suburban kids. Kurtis Blow, who was from Harlem and really around gangsters, he didn’t want to be a gangster. He wanted to look above it and wear leather boots and be more like a rock star. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were really inner-city, hard-life guys, and they wanted to be from outer space.