My Sharona in a new suit, written between towns
The guitar is famous before this song borrows it. Two bars of the Knack’s My Sharona, straightened into a rap snare, and Run and DMC are already trading lines as if the riff had been waiting for a pair of voices that do not sing. It’s Tricky does not hide the theft. It advertises the nerve. The hook winks at Toni Basil’s Mickey and then talks about something less cute: how hard it is to rock a rhyme that lands on time, how the business of being this good in public is a trick you can fumble. Jam Master Jay cuts the beat like a man who knows the crowd will finish the phrase. They do.
DMC has said the rhyme was written on the road. He wanted, on a record, what crews did in a park: take a known song and turn the chorus to their own business, the way Cold Crush had done with Paul Simon. My Sharona was the hard beat. For a while they imagined the words over Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock or Kraftwerk’s Numbers, a block party in the head. Then they decided on a new track, and Rick Rubin, producing Raising Hell with Russell Simmons in 1986, said to put some rock in it. The album was cut with the muscle of that idea, Chung King’s rooms in New York holding a group that critics were still calling a fad. DMC’s answer was the song itself. If it is not composing, what is the trick of making My Sharona say a different sentence.
The single did not need to top a pop chart to do its work. The album did the topping, a rap record at a size the industry had not budgeted for. On stage the track is a routine, hats, the trade-off, the crowd shouting tricky back as if they had passed an exam. Years later the Knack’s writers sued over the sample. The suit proved the nerve had been audible. It did not prove the song was only a sample. The Mickey-flip and the road rhyme are the parts a lawyer cannot play.
It’s Tricky was actually written on the road. So if you listen to It’s Tricky, it’s actually My Sharona. Critics was already saying hip-hop is a fad.
(Darryl McDaniels, SPIN, 2023)
DMC, looking back, has called it the greatest hip-hop song, which is a boast the track would recognize. The point in 1986 was narrower and sharper. Hip-hop was being told it would not be here in three years, that it was not real writing. A chorus about how tricky the writing is, set to a rock riff everyone already owned, was the rebuttal you could dance to. Rubin did not hand them the concept. He pressed the rock button they were already standing on. Jay arranged. The voices did the rest.
What remains is the handoff. It’s Tricky still sounds like two men who trust the next line to arrive on the one, which is a small miracle dressed as a party. The Knack riff keeps its smirk. Run-D.M.C. keep the clock. Between them the business stays difficult, which is the lyric, and the reason the lyric has not gone out of date.
