A seminal moment from hip-hop’s game-changing year, EPMD’s 1988 debut Strictly Business set new standards in funky beatwork and cold-steel rhyming. Released at a time when artists like Public Enemy and Big Daddy Kane were pushing the limits of speed and chaos, EPMD—a Long Island duo made up of Erick Sermon and Parrish “PMD” Smith—took a slower, more methodical approach, one that leaned into the hard, mid-tempo funk of Zapp, Kool & the Gang, and Rick James. EPMD didn’t shy away from traditional hip-hop boasts (“To the average MC I’m known as the Terminator/Funky beatmaker, new jack exterminator” goes one PMD line), but the duo’s bravado was tempered by effortless, unflappable cool. Let LL Cool J and Run-D.M.C. take on their competitors with verbal dynamite; EPMD was going to claim victory with a pair of funky silencers. Sermon was still in high school when the duo began shopping around its two-song demo, one that landed EPMD a spot at Sleeping Bag Records, the label that released its first single: “It’s My Thing,” an irresistible shot of slow-flowing molasses funk that hit shelves in 1987—and was immediately embraced by tastemaking New York DJ Red Alert. The track featured a slightly out-of-joint loop of the classic breakbeat “7 Minutes of Funk” by The Whole Darn Family (Sermon would later claim the song’s loose, imperfect feel would influence Jay-Z’s 1996 debut Reasonable Doubt). Meanwhile, the single’s B-side, “You’re a Customer,” was partially informed by Parrish’s multicultural experiences in the Boy Scouts and at college, and mined its grooves and textures from rock acts like the Steve Miller Band and ZZ Top. Both tracks appear on the self-produced Strictly Business, the album that would firmly establish EPMD’s bona fides. Its monster first single, “You Gots to Chill”—built off a Zapp cassette they’d heard being played by Smith’s father—was featured in the very first episode of Yo! MTV Raps. The follow-up single, “Strictly Business,” makes funky work of an Eric Clapton sample, while “The Steve Martin” was created for EPMD’s dancer Stezo (who’d soon have a formidable rap career of his own). And the album’s closing track, the storytelling rap “Jane,” would begin a saga that would follow the group for years—an origin story for a franchise that would spawn no fewer than six sequels. The success of Strictly Business helped Sermon and Smith launch the collective known as the Hit Squad, which would come to dominate the 1990s, featuring such acts as K-Solo, Das EFX, Redman, and Keith Murray. And the album would influence the sound of pop and hip-hop for years to come: The drums from “You’re a Customer” would be repurposed for such crucial singles as Mario Winans’ “I Don’t Wanna Know” and Gang Starr’s “Mass Appeal,” while Sermon’s opening line to “You Gots to Chill”—“Relax your mind, let your conscience be free/And get down to the sounds of EPMD”—would be tweaked and interpolated by an entire generation’s worth of rappers and DJs. An epochal moment for New York rap, Strictly Business stands as one of the most essential hip-hop albums of the 1980s.