The 75 Best Rap Singles of 1985

Thanks to stars like Run-D.M.C. and Roxanne Shanté, rap grew fitfully into a pop culture fixture. But respect for the art remained elusive.

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February 8, 2025

At the 27^th annual Grammy Awards, Melle Mel rapped alongside Chaka Khan as she belted out her top three Billboard Hot 100 hit, a cover of Prince’s “I Feel for You.” On TV video showcases like NBC’s Friday Night Videos, Run-D.M.C. smashed a glittery sequined glove underneath an Adidas sneaker in “King of Rock.” In movie theaters, the Force M.D.’s flexed and posed over the kinetic breakbeat of “Itchin’ for a Scratch” in Rappin’. Meanwhile, Rush Artist Management, newly flush from its unexpectedly successful “Fresh Fest” arena tour, announced itself with a multi-page supplement in Billboard magazine that declared, “Six Years After ‘Christmas Rappin,’ Rush Says Rap, Like Rock, Is Here to Stay.”

By 1985, rap had grown into a fixture of pop culture, as impossible to avoid as a William “The Refrigerator” Perry TV commercial. (That year, as the Chicago Bears stormed to a Super Bowl championship, the All-Pro defensive lineman joined his teammates in a surprise novelty hit, “The Super Bowl Shuffle.”) But was rap a vital new genre destined to reach the “upper echelon pop circuits,” as Robert Palmer wrote in the New York Times? Or was it destined to fade as kids tired of breaking, pop-locking, and straining their necks while trying to do windmills on cardboard? Much like heavy metal, another ascendant culture with nuances that perplexed outsiders, mainstream rock critics struggled to convey the thrill of kinetic 12-inch singles like The Boogie Boys’ “A Fly Girl” without deriding them for a perceived lack of substance, all while a growing number of superfans – mobile and college-radio DJs as well as fledgling rappers – followed the genre with increasing fervor.

“It’s not Michael Jackson and this is not *Thriller*!” A still from Run-D.M.C.’s video for “King of Rock.”

Thanks to her breakout 12-inch, “Roxanne’s Revenge,” Roxanne Shanté emerged as the first major female voice of the recorded rap era. In retrospect, her Pop Art singles represent an incredible run of an artist shaping the genre in her image. While Mr. Magic’s Juice Crew concept predates her, she was arguably its first major star. Unfortunately, she couldn’t escape the shadow of the Roxanne wars. By mid-1985, the fad inspired so many idiotic novelty tracks like Gigolo Tony’s “The Parents of Roxanne” that UTFO and production team Full Force, the team behind the original “Roxanne, Roxanne,” filed copyright infringement lawsuits. It’s only been in recent years that Shante’s trailblazing work has received long overdue reassessment.

Meanwhile, Doug E. Fresh & the Get Fresh Crew’s 12-inch single, “The Show” b/w “La Di Da Di” exemplified the widening contours of hip-hop’s adolescent imagination. Conceptually, Harlem beatboxer and rapper Doug E. Fresh designed the A-side, “The Show,” as a countdown to spiritual epiphany. Keyboard programmer Dennis Bell appropriates Shuki Levy’s theme music from Inspector Gadget, a syndicated cartoon series, and the track has a skittering rhythm reminiscent of D.C. go-go. In his verses, Fresh’s protégé, Slick Rick, scrambles pop iconography like Tony the Tiger, the animated mascot in Frosted Flakes commercials, and The Beatles’ “Michelle.”

The B-side, “La Di Da Di,” was markedly different. As Fresh laid out sparse beatbox vocalese, Rick unfurled a humorously filthy story about encountering a young woman and her mother that try to seduce after him, while utilizing melodies from A Taste of Honey’s “Sukiyaki” as well as, ingeniously, his own. “Ricky, Ricky, Ricky, can’t you see/Sometimes your words just hypnotize me,” he imagines the mother telling him. It was a bravura performance of juvenile smut that captured the genre’s binary impulses towards uplift and hardcore reality.

“The Show” soared to number 4 on Billboard’s Black Singles chart and earned RIAA gold certification while failing to cross over to the Hot 100, an admirable feat that nevertheless was also a damning indictment of pop radio. Yet it wasn’t just “white” stations that refused to play “The Show.” Black music stations, fueled by older and conservative listeners that found rap annoyingly immature, began removing any trace of it from the most profitable drivetime rotations, and consigned the genre to late-night programming and weekend mix shows.

In a Billboard editorial, Rush Artist Management founder Russell Simmons compared the situation to “de facto apartheid.” “Despite rap’s many successes, some radio programmers remain hostile to rap, while others pretend to ignore it in the hope that it’ll just go away,” he wrote. “We rap producers and artists are convinced that we’re the standard bearers of the next revolution in American pop music; some radio programmers, by contrast, are convinced that if rap has any place on radio [at] all, it must be subject to severe quotas and restrictions.” Part of these “restrictions” dictated that rap vocals shouldn’t be more than spicing in an otherwise benign Black pop hit: a few horny bars on Atlantic Starr’s “Freak-A-Ristic,” a campy story in Con Funk Shun’s “Electric Lady,” and a generous Kurtis Blow cameo in Rene & Angela’s “Save Your Love (For #1).”

Still, the financial stakes continued to grow. Run-DMC’s second album, King of Rock, nearly shipped gold, despite scattered misgivings that it may not have been as groundbreaking as their debut. The trio performed on the Philadelphia stage for Live Aid, an Ethiopian famine benefit broadcast around the globe. And when Steven Van Zandt organized Artists United Against Apartheid, an all-star protest of South Africa’s government, he savvily invited Run-DMC, Afrika Bambaataa, Melle Mel, and Kurtis Blow to the ensemble. By year’s end, Simmons negotiated a distribution deal with Columbia Records for Def Jam, the label he co-owned with producer Rick Rubin. Tommy Boy Records, home to Afrika Bambaataa, scored a similar deal with Warner Bros.

Ever the self-promoter, Simmons lionized his heroic and ultimately lucrative efforts in Krush Groove, a limply entertaining 1985 melodrama where Blair “Russell Walker” Underwood romanced Sheila E while mentoring hot talents like Run-DMC, Kurtis Blow and the Fat Boys as well as future Def Jam stars like LL Cool J and Beastie Boys. Spin magazine asked, “Does the world need another hip-hop movie?”

“L.L. Cool J is one of the best young talkologists around, because he speaks directly to and about his generation,” wrote Nelson George in the liner notes to *Radio*. Photo by Josh Creuse.

Today, however, Simmons’ legacy is an uncertain one. Investigative stories about him as well as the 2020 documentary On the Record make it difficult to parse between his very real achievements and his allegedly unsavory personal and professional behavior. Unfortunately, the archetype of the empire builder who leaves a trail of abused and traumatized employees, friends, and lovers in his wake is a recurring one.

As for rap itself, 1985 proved to be a transitional year. The genre remained hamstrung by 12-inch singles of varying quality. Full lengths ranged from occasional standouts such as Mantronix’s self-titled debut to ephemeral compilations of hit tracks. Most albums, like UTFO’s UTFO and Grandmaster Flash’s They Said It Could Be Done, sounded like hits-and-filler instead of concise artistic statements. That would all change in the months and years ahead.

As the genre fitfully grew, Grandmixer D.st, who became the first hip-hop act at the Grammy Awards when he and Herbie Hancock performed “Rockit” at the 1984 ceremony, released “Home of Hip-Hop.” The track gave voice to all the Bronx pioneers who felt the culture slipping from their control, leaving them to grumble and sneak-diss as Run-DMC and a new school of stars conquered the world. “The Bronx is the home of hip-hop/We don’t care what anybody says,” raps Rahiem from then-recently disbanded Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five. “It’s been avoided and exploited/But it will never be taken away!”