The musician that made Tom Hanks love rap music
Tom Hanks may be one of the most underappreciated rock fans there is. While many people might recognise the award-winning actor for his iconic roles in films like Saving Private Ryan and Forrest Gump, Hanks has done his part to make sure that his love for the music he grew up listening to is never forgotten, including producing some of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame television broadcasts. Although Hanks has a central fixation with older rock and roll, that’s not to say he isn’t willing to learn from other genres.
When first turning up the radio, Hanks was enamoured with artists as varied as The Beatles and the Dave Clark Five. Growing up at the dawn of the British Invasion, Hanks dreamed of having jobs that made artists’ fun profitable, loving what he heard from songs like the Fab Four’s ‘There’s a Place’.
However, The Beatles were only one small aspect of Hanks’ musical palette. When combing through his favourite records, Hanks would also be influenced by the sounds of soul music, loving what he heard from artists like Dusty Springfield. That said, as rock music started getting heavier, another genre was bubbling up to change the musical landscape overnight.
Influenced by the four-on-the-floor sounds of disco, the early 1980s spawned the very first hip-hop outfits, with artists like Run-DMC and Beastie Boys later inventing the new school of what rap would be. Alongside those promising young artists from New York was a rapper named LL Cool J, still riding high off his debut album, Radio.
Although LL may have been one of the strongest MCs to touch a microphone then, he was also willing to show his sensitive side. After catching some flak for the song ‘I Need Love’, the rapper came back even stronger with the song ‘Mama Said Knock You Out’, announcing his arrival yet again as one of the hardest to ever touch a microphone.
While Hanks was more than willing to fall back on the music he loved as a teenager, he couldn’t hide his love for this song upon release. Despite coming up well after Hanks’s adolescence, he credited LL Cool J with helping him learn what hip-hop was all about.
When talking about the song later, Hanks recalled the anger that was contained within the song striking a nerve with him, saying, “There is something about the anger and joy that is inside this song, I have since met LL Cool J. He is one of the most happy, smiling, delightful people you will ever come across, but in this video, he had that boxing microphone down, and he was screaming into it.”
Although Hanks could appreciate the old school of hip-hop in the late 1980s, the genre would undergo another significant change in the next decade. With the emergence of gangsta rap starting with the likes of NWA, aspiring rappers like Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls were about to take a more brutal look at what was going on on street level, writing songs about the inner city’s lifestyle. Hanks may have learned to appreciate what rap had to offer, but ‘Mama Said Knock You Out’ was the sound of a genre in its infancy, waiting to explode.
