TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050492/0504460.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 6KB | 114 lines

                                                                                SHOW BUSINESS, Page 69

The Impresario of Rap


Russell Simmons took hip-hop out of the inner city and into
the pop mainstream. Now he's rich and livin' large -- but he
retains the in-your-face style of the streets.

By JANICE C. SIMPSON


    They call Russell Simmons the man with the juice. That's
rapspeak for power. During the past decade, this streetwise
entertainment mogul has amassed tons of it. You want to talk
records? He owns six labels, including the pioneering Def Jam.
Live concerts? His management company boasts a roster of such
seminal rap performers as Run-DMC, Public Enemy, LL Cool J and
3rd Bass. Television? His broadcast and film-production company
turns out the popular Home Box Office show Russell Simmons' Def
Comedy Jam, a weekly showcase for black stand-up comics. Nobody
has done more than Simmons, 34, to move rap -- or hip-hop, as
aficionados call it -- from the streets of the inner city into
the mainstream of American pop culture.

    He has moved it, but not modified it. Unlike Berry Gordy,
the Motown Records founder who used widely appealing performers
like the Supremes to facilitate soul music's crossover into the
white market in the early 1960s, Simmons has built his
reputation on a refusal to assimilate. He promotes artists whose
speech, dress and demeanor reflect the in-your-face bravado of
black urban adolescents and the rebellious fantasies of those
in the suburbs. Taking direct cues from his audience, Simmons
told Run-DMC to wear their dark glasses and black leather suits
onstage and LL Cool J to retain his slouchy, bucket-shaped
Kangol hat. He also encouraged Public Enemy to be politically
controversial and BWP (Bytches with Problems) to be sexually
explicit.

    "Russell likes it pure, just as it is," says his friend
and mentor Quincy Jones. "He wants it raw." Says Simmons: "I
don't think every black kid can look at Bill Cosby and hope
that's what they're going to be one day. It's not that I don't
think Bill Cosby is a great role model. I just don't think he's
the only one or that assimilation is the only way we can make
it."

    Simmons constantly prospects for new ways to market the
rap phenomenon. In the works at his TV and film company are The
Johnson Posse, a sitcom Simmons describes as "Married . . . with
Children in the projects"; The Clown Prince, a comedy for
Tri-Star Pictures about a white youngster who grows up in a
black ghetto and has trouble fitting in at a predominantly
white college; and a syndicated radio network that will transmit
hip-hop music via satellite to AM stations around the country.
Earlier this year, Simmons made his first venture into print,
teaming up with Jones and Time Warner to create Volume, a new
music magazine that is slated to make its debut in September and
is aiming to become the Rolling Stone of the 1990s.

    But wait. With its reliance on profanity and lyrics that
often demean women, disparage nonblacks or celebrate violence,
doesn't rap seem to glorify the worst aspects of ghetto culture?
Not necessarily, says Simmons. He dissociates himself from the
misogynistic and racist statements his rappers make. The
president of his company is a woman. During the uproar three
years ago over anti-Semitic statements made by Professor Griff,
then a member of Public Enemy (later severed), Simmons condemned
Griff. Nevertheless, he steadfastly defends the right of his
performers to have their say and to say it however they want.
"I let the rappers be what they are," he says. "I try to choose
the most acceptable part of it, but I don't try to change them.
These kids are just telling what their realities are. I think
it's important that people hear them."

    Although the music he promotes celebrates a street-tough
life-style, Simmons, the son of an attendance supervisor for the
New York City school system, grew up in a comfortable
middle-class home in Queens. He was a sociology major at the
City College of New York when he first heard a disc jockey at
a Harlem club break into a rap. Simmons had already begun
promoting parties during his spare time, and he sensed the
commercial potential in the deejay's chants. "People thought of
it as a gimmick, but I knew it wasn't," he says. He eventually
quit school to promote rap full time. In 1983 he and a friend
named Rick Rubin, a student at New York University, pooled their
savings and started the Def (rap for cool) Jam (music) label.
They signed a distribution deal with CBS Records two years
later. (Rubin left in 1988 over differences about the direction
of the company.)

    These days Simmons is, as the rappers say, livin' large.
His empire brings him an income of $5 million a year. He still
prides himself on his jeans-and-sneakers wardrobe, but he drives
around town in a white bulletproof Rolls-Royce. He does his
business out of his apartment, a triplex penthouse previously
owned by Cher in a trendy part of New York's East Village. He
drinks Cristal champagne and buys abstract art.

    It's all a far cry from the gritty B-boy life that first
fueled rap. Some say Simmons has fallen out of touch and lost
ground to younger, more radical hip-hoppers in Florida and
California. Simmons admits that times have changed, but he isn't
ready to retire yet. He still visits an average of 15 clubs a
week to scout new talent. "We're not going to be as young and
edgy as we were," he concedes. "But we're still in touch enough
that we're way, way, way ahead of American pop culture."