(Rizzoli, $60)
It was a seminal moment in hip-hop that almost didn’t happen, said Ted Mann in TheAtlantic​.com. “When James Todd Smith’s home-recorded demo tape arrived at Rick Rubin’s New York University dorm room, Rubin didn’t even listen to it at first.” Smith, who had been writing rhymes since he was 12, had sent the cassette to a fledgling label called Def Jam. Fortunately, a friend of Rubin’s rescued the demo from the mail pile, and soon the Kangol-hat-wearing teenager was working in the studio with Rubin and label co-founder Russell Simmons. Thus was born the million-selling rapper LL Cool J, as well as a juggernaut of a recording label whose vision of mid-1980s New York “spawned a global culture.”
Def Jam “fundamentally altered the sound of pop music,” said Tim Marchman in The Wall Street Journal. Artists like LL Cool J and Public Enemy, and later Jay-Z, were marketed as if they represented the inner city’s indigenous soundtrack. But the text of this coffee-table history tells a somewhat different story: that because Rubin and Simmons worked from the beginning to wed rap to the squall of punk and metal, they were repeating a trick pioneered by two other great labels—Sun Records and Motown. “The myth of Def Jam is that it found something in the streets of New York and presented it to the world. The more interesting truth is that Def Jam invented it.”
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Declaring Def Jam to be “hip-hop’s equivalent of Motown doesn’t quite do justice to the company’s achievements,” said Gareth Grundy in the London Guardian. Besides being “the most significant” label to export hip-hop to the world, Def Jam could fairly be credited with helping elect America’s first black president. In 2008, deflecting criticism from Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama famously pretended to brush specks of dust from the shoulders of his suit. A reference to a 2004 Jay-Z hit, the gesture was a signal to a broad generation influenced by Def Jam artists that the potential leader of the free world “spoke their language.”
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”