A ‘Giant Anthology’ Of Profile Records, Rap’s Early Champion

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Profile Records never meant to get into a swat game, though a tag launched a careers of swat groups like Run-D.M.C.

Frank Micelotta/Getty Images

Profile Records never meant to get into a swat game, though a tag launched a careers of swat groups like Run-D.M.C.

Before a arise of Def Jam as hip-hop’s decisive record label, there was Profile, that helped shepherd in some of a genre’s early shifts in sound and style. A new two-CD anthology, Giant Single: The Profile Records Rap Anthology, chronicles a label’s 15-year story and legacy.

Profile never meant to get into a swat game. When Cory Robbins and Steve Plotnicki started a tag in 1981, they suspicion they’d be releasing dance singles — a devise that fast shriveled in a punishing feverishness of a anti-disco era. However, hip-hop was only commencement a rise, and Profile gambled on a New York swat twin named Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde.

In 1982, an determined businessman named Russell Simmons was selling a demo of his younger brother’s swat group. One of a people he approached was Robbins, who favourite what he listened and sealed a group, a contingent out of Hollis, Queens named Run-D.M.C.

To many ears today, Run-D.M.C. is “old school,” though in a early 1980s, hip-hop was anything though well-defined. All of it was new school, and Profile helped lead a class, releasing annals by artists as different as a pioneering womanlike twin Sweet Tee and DJ Jazzy Joyce, a dancehall-influenced Asher D, and a genre-bending rap/rock partnership of Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith.

Profile can even exaggerate one of a biggest one-hit wonders in cocktail story — now a tack of corporate parties and Gen-X weddings alike: Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two.”

Even Profile’s comparatively teenager releases would after turn vital influences. The 1986 singular “Drag Rap,” by The Showboys, found new life a decade after as producers like Mannie Fresh began sampling a record’s mad drum programming to emanate a New Orleans character famous as “bounce.”

The 1990s saw Profile’s change start to fade, as it was eclipsed by Def Jam, Death Row and other labels. By 1996, it stopped recording new acts. What Profile left behind, however, was a catalog that helped chaperon hip-hop from what was once discharged as a ephemeral gimmick to a buttress of tellurian enlightenment we know today.