Def Jam Records commemorates 25 years of groundbreaking hip-hop

Def Jam Records is synonymous with hip-hop. Because of its trailblazing efforts and desire to just push what it loved forward, Def Jam pushed forward the entire hip-hop culture.

Born in legendary producer/engineer Rick Rubin's NYU dorm room in 1984, the label began its meteoric rise to fame releasing some of the most important music in the history of hip-hop.

Among the names that are widely known for their roles with Def Jam are a host of personalities that were more behind the scenes but still completely integral to the success of the label.

Two of those names are graffiti artist/graphic designer Cey Adams and former Def Jam director of publicity Bill Adler.

Both Adams and Adler were with Def Jam from the beginning, and though you may not know their names, if you're a fan of music you've felt the weight of their work.

Recently, Adams and Adler have teamed up to release a new book that looks back on the history of the label's first 25 years, called "Def Jam Recordings: The First 25 Years Of The Last Great Record Label."

Adams is a little easier to connect to Def Jam as a result of his iconic artwork, specifically the designing of all of the early album covers for the records Def Jam was releasing.

Adams began his art career as a graffiti artist in New York, tagging and creating pictures that helped make a name for himself, so much so that he was asked to translate his talents to posters, fliers and any other art Def Jam needed.

His influences were more modern, just as you'd expect from a young man cutting his teeth in a new form of art.

"I've always been a big fan of pop art so I would have to credit Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and folks like that," says Adams.

Being the artistic personality that he is, Adams was often protected from the heat that Def Jam would occasionally take due to some of the external powers that took issue with rap music and the influence it had over the youth. Because of this, he could continue to create album covers like he did for Public Enemy's "Fear Of A Black Planet."

"Because I was more on the visual arts side, I didn't experience a lot of that," he explains. "That was stuff that (label executives) Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons had to deal with behind the scenes in a lot of the meetings. I was in my drawing room just creating and having a good time. I was lucky to be sheltered from a lot of that stuff."

During the '80s, New York was a troubled metropolis, but it was also a place of great creativity and innovation, Adams recalls.

"It was amazing. Looking back on it, it was really one of the most amazing times in American history, as it relates to young people for sure, and certainly coming out of New York. I mean, there's nothing like it since. Not only was the graffiti scene blossoming and obviously the rap scene and hip-hop in general but it was when Madonna's career was just starting, the Talking Heads was just getting off the ground, Blondie was just hitting. So much great stuff was going on at that time. You had the art, you had the music ... downtown in Manhattan at that time was such an amazing place. It was just creativity going on everywhere."

Def Jam, which began as a collaboration between people of different colors and religious backgrounds, was also never conscious about that fact and that they were helping to break boundaries around the country.

"We didn't really think about that. Especially myself, hanging out downtown in the '80s, I was accustomed to hanging out in nightclubs with different kinds of people, black and white, Latino, Asian, it wasn't something I don't think a lot of people stopped to think about," Adams says. "And certainly, looking back on it, maybe it was a big deal but I never really spent a lot of time thinking about it."

A long way away from its beginning in the '80s, Def Jam is still putting out albums, and has several stars on its roster that are able to achieve gold and platinum sales status even in a time when the record industry is in a free fall. Though Adams misses the days before they became a larger corporation, he's still glad that Def Jam is part of the culture.

"Well certainly it's not the small boutique label that it once was and I have to admit that when we moved from the downtown offices up to the big fancy corporate offices that they're at now, it didn't feel like what we had started," he says. "But at the end of the day, I guess for a business to grow and succeed, that stuff kind of has to happen.

"I have to admit, I'm more fond of the early days when it was a small, simply-run label with a handful of artists making great music. And that doesn't take anything away from what Kanye and Rihanna and Jeezy and Rick Ross and those guys have created, I'm just saying that reminded me of the early days of Def Jam, it just got a little big for my liking but I'm happy that they're still surviving."

As for his favorite album covers, Adams goes back to the early years, with a few of his more recent works sprinkled in.

"Definitely LL Cool J "Mama Said Knock You Out," "Fear Of A Black Planet," a lot of my work with the Beastie Boys, most of the LL Cool J, Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys in general. And, certainly some of the work that I've done with Jay-Z because that kind of ushered me into the new millennium, if you will."

Regarding his new book, Adams believes that sitting down with Adler to create 300-plus pages of stories is one of the greatest things he's had the opportunity to do in his long and plentiful career.

"It was a dream come true. It's easily one of the most gratifying things I've ever done in my career, to sit down with all these images and just pore through them and know that nobody's leaning over your shoulder saying you have to do one thing versus another. Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons and Lyor Cohen gave us full reign to tell the story the way we needed to tell the story and trusted us, and that was a great thing."

Co-author Bill Adler is no stranger to the ways of writing, as he's not only an author but a man who has dealt with the art of having to craft attention-grabbing essays in order to gain publicity for Def Jam's artists and tours.

His job, he admits openly, wasn't actually that hard to accomplish.

"My job was relatively easy, I must say," says Adler. "I always felt very badly for my friend Bill Stephney because he had to work the records to radio. That was tough! Trying to get rap on the radio in the mid-'80s and late '80s and early '90s was very, very tough. It was just my job to talk to the press, and that was much, much easier.

"The New York Times was writing about rap before I even started working for Russell in 1984. I found over and over again that the local reviewer in a given market was pretty open to writing about one of our tours when we came to town, if only because we've sold 20,000 tickets there and you couldn't ignore the event as a news event no matter what you thought about it as culture."

With that kind of backing from the public, Adler believes Def Jam should be considered a success from its very genesis because rap itself was already proving to be a successful commercial and cultural art form.

"Rap was a success in the very beginning. Think of the Sugar Hill Gang. That's a record that came out in 1979, it sold I don't know, six million copies and charted in a dozen countries. There's something about this music that appeared to be intrinsically popular. So, by the time we came around in 1984, Rick (Rubin) had already made "It's Yours" with T La Rock, which was a rap record that did very, very well, just a little indie record out of his dorm room. He teams up with Russell in 1984 and he puts out two 12" singles in fall. The first was LL Cool J's "I Need A Beat" and the second was the Beastie Boys "Rock Hard," and they created a local sensation. Luckily for us, local happened to be New York City, and our success reverberated in the corridors of power. I'm pretty sure before the year was out Rick and Russell were in serious negotiations with the people from Columbia Records to strike a deal with them. It was obvious to anybody who was paying attention that we were going to do pretty well."

Though it was a success in his eyes from the start, Adler recalls the difficulty they had with radio due to the segregation created by FM rock radio in the '70s, and how hip-hop helped to break those walls down.

"Radio became segregated in a way that I hadn't seen it during my lifetime. I was born in 1951, I'm going to turn 60 at the end of this year. I grew up as a young person when The Beatles hit in 1964 - it was a magnificent thing, you know - and at that time if The Beatles had a hit you'd hear it and if Aretha Franklin had a hit you'd hear it immediately afterward. The idea that somehow because I'm not black I shouldn't listen to Aretha Franklin, it just never occurred to me.

"Somehow, here comes FM rock radio and they decide that the only rock music worthy of the name is made by white people, so all of the black artists were pushed off of the playlist. That was a terribly, terribly damaging phenomenon in American pop culture ... I don't know if they ever got this idea that they shouldn't listen to listen to black music, but it became harder for white people to hear music made by a black artist. I will say that the popularity of rap music, which was instantaneous, kind of in passing accomplished the reintegration of American pop."

Though they've always had their successes as a label, Adler recalls a very dark period in the history of Def Jam that was ushered in by the departure of Rick Rubin.

"When Rick left Def Jam is touched off a really depressed period, an unsuccessful period that lasted several years. I mean, Rick was gone by the end of '88, even though it wasn't formal, effectively he had nothing to do with the label after 1988. That period through '92 into '93, was a very, very low period for the label. We had our successes, we had our hits. Public Enemy continued to make records. LL Cool J continued to make hit records. 3rd Bass was doing well for us. But we put out a lot of records that did not do very well at all during that period and you could say that the label was just about to go belly up when Lyor Cohen was made president of the label and he managed to turn it around. I'd say that if it weren't for Lyor, the label would've just disappeared in 1993 or so."

Along with Adams, Adler is fine with where Def Jam is today.

"It's Def Jam's job to find new talent that's true to the label's core mission. At the present moment, they're making wonderful records and having a lot of success with artists like Young Jeezy and Rick Ross and Kanye West, and that's all very much to the credit of the label. Rihanna is also gigantic for them. She's a little anomalous as far as I'm concerned because you know, she's in the line of Madonna, and you know there's nothing very hip-hop about Madonna. But, having said that, she's on Def Jam, she was signed by Jay-Z, and she's also doing very well for the label. I'm fine with Def Jam in 2011."

For a genre that was once considered a passing fad to last for as long as it has - with the amount of success that it has had - learning the story of the record label that has arguably had the biggest impact on it is not just for the music historian, but also for the music fan.

Cey Adams and Bill Adler will be at the Harley-Davidson Museum Saturday, Oct. 22 to discuss their book and both the visual and auditory history of Def Jam through personal stories, videos and a Q&A session with the audience. Tickets are available here.