^^^Well to each his own.
You can't deny his legacy and Def Jam was about more than just the Beastie Boys (LL, Slick rick, Public Enemy, etc.)
He made mockery of hip-hop? WTF
Well I as much as I respect KRS-One, running a label is a business.He definitely made a mockery out of the Beastie Boys....some would suggest he made a mockery out of hip hop itself....
KRS-One:
“There really would be no hip-hop as we know it today if it wasn’t for Def Jam. But you don’t get that respect without also being the label that single-handedly destroyed hip-hop…Every time you think of what’s wrong with hip-hop, the lyrics, the commercialized music, one artist being played on the radio all day, things like that, that’s all Def Jam"
I was waiting for someone to bring up Run DMC, which is funny because they were never signed to the label, so whatever Russell did with them is irrelevant to the discussion of Def Jam.
"Got fat bass lines like Russell Simmons steals money."
The cultural significance of Public Enemy to hip-hop and the black community in the late 1980s was far greater than the Beastie boys.
Oh ya, I forgot they would be no PE without the Beastie Boys, according to you.
Well I as much as I respect KRS-One, running a label is a business.
I disagree with Krs, that's just the evolution of a business model.
Def Jam help grow hip-hop, that's a fact.
Bakari Kitwana, Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America (New York: Basic Books, 2005
Even though Latinos clearly had a large impact on the formation of hip-hop, they were not assimilated into the mainstream hip-hop scene until 1990 (8). This may be due to the fact that hip-hop began to be dominated with purely African-American concerns by popular rap artists (9). Logically, this African-American domination of rap would lead one to forget the influence Latino artists originally maintained on hip-hop and to associate hip-hop as a genuine African-American cultural movement instead of a ghetto-driven movement of repressed minorities including both African-Americans and Latinos. This statement is confirmed by Rivera through an anecdote she provides of a Puerto Rican rap-fan during the afro-centric hip-hop phase discovering that his Puerto Rican heritage no longer related to the issues presented by such African-American rap artists like Public Enemy. The point is driven home further when his African-American friends tease him by saying, “Why can’t your people make good hip-hop” (10). Therefore, the marginalization of Latino-oriented issues and concentration of African-American concerns into mainstream hip-hop culture in a sense segregated Latinos and African-Americans while elevating African-American hip-hop to a purely cultural movement.