Part Four — Hip Hop Record Labels

Def Jam Recordings

Started in an NYU dorm room in 1984 and never stopped running the culture.

Founded: 1984
Founders: Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons
Base: New York University dorm room, then Manhattan
Status: Owned by Universal Music Group since 1998; still active

Def Jam is where the independent era turns into the modern rap industry — a punk kid's dorm-room label and a Queens promoter's roster, fused into the most durable brand hip hop has produced.

Weinstein Hall, 1984

Rick Rubin founded Def Jam in his dorm room in Weinstein Hall at New York University; the first release was a single by his own punk band, Hose. Russell Simmons joined soon after they were introduced — accounts credit Vincent Gallo, DJ Jazzy Jay, or a meeting on the TV show 'Graffiti Rock', where Rubin recognized Simmons as 'the face of hip hop'.

The second record to carry the Def Jam logo was T La Rock & Jazzy Jay's 'It's Yours'. The first releases with actual Def Jam catalog numbers followed in 1984: LL Cool J's 'I Need a Beat' and the Beastie Boys' 'Rock Hard'. Both sold well enough to bring CBS/Columbia to the table with a distribution deal the next year.

The Rubin sound and the crossover years

Rubin's production was rock logic applied to rap: enormous drums, guitar stabs, nothing wasted. It produced LL Cool J's 'Radio', the Beastie Boys' 'Licensed to Ill' — the first rap album to top the Billboard 200 — and, in 1986, the label's only thrash metal signing, Slayer, whose 'Reign in Blood' remains a Def Jam release in name.

As the decade closed the label signed Public Enemy, whose politics drew equal parts acclaim and outrage and gave hip hop its most confrontational voice. Lyor Cohen became president of Def Jam/RAL in 1988 after a power struggle with Rubin, who left to found Def American.

From imprint to institution

Simmons and Cohen built Rush Associated Labels as an umbrella for Def Jam's spinoffs, home to EPMD, Nice & Smooth, Redman, Onyx and Warren G, plus the R&B imprint OBR Records. Ownership moved with the industry: CBS became Sony in 1991, PolyGram took a stake in 1994, and Universal Music Group has owned Def Jam since 1998.

Later chapters — DMX, Jay-Z, Ja Rule, Kanye West, Rihanna, Big Sean, Pusha T — belong to a different era, but the through line holds. Def Jam took the storefront and dorm-room independence of Enjoy, Sugar Hill and Profile and built a corporation out of it without giving up the logo's street authority.

Essential cuts

1984
I Need a Beat
LL Cool J
Def Jam catalog number one, cut when LL was sixteen.
1984
It's Yours
T La Rock & Jazzy Jay
The Def Jam logo's first appearance; Rubin's opening statement.
1986
Licensed to Ill
Beastie Boys
First rap album to hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
1988
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
Public Enemy
The Bomb Squad's noise collage and rap's sharpest political record.

On the roster