During the mid-1980s Simmons had fully developed his internal device the next big thing in music. He helped bring the Beastie Boys to a wider audience, and even revived the careers of the fading rock act Aerosmith, when Run-D.M.C. covered their 1975 hit “Walk This Way.” The two groups even made a video together, which became a classic of MTV’s first decade on the air. As Fast Company writer Jennifer Reingold explained, by 2003 “the marriage of hard rock and rap seems natural, two strands of the same teenage angst and anger. But in the mid-1980s, the idea that black street kids and white suburbanites could like the same music was shocking.”
