The Death of Def: Rick Rubin and the Legitimacy, Respectability, and Commodification of Hip-Hop

In 1984, 21-year-old amateur deejay and producer Rick Rubin released his first single, “I Need A Beat” by rapper LL Cool J, under the label Def Jam Recordings, a record label that Rubin operated out of his dorm room at New York University (Gueraseva 299, 3).  In 1986, Rubin was crowned “the king of rap” in a cover story for Village Voice (102).  In just two years, and only through collaboration between Rubin, his co-founder Russell Simmons, and their talented artists, Def Jam legitimized itself among the young Black and Latino urban base of hip-hop culture, navigated the politics of respectability to introduce hip-hop to mainstream white, middle-class, suburban American audiences, and established itself as the dominant producer of rap music.  Rubin, to whom “Def Jam was about purity of intention and the love of an underground culture” (qtd. Adler 8), brought such an intense dedication to his work as a producer that rap as a genre may never have gained popularity and artistic reputation beyond the New York City (NYC) music scene without his passion.  However, over just two more years, Def Jam’s pure intentions and collaborative nature crumbled from three tensions that all centered Rubin, who resisted Russell Simmons’s concern for respectability in favor of legitimacy within hip-hop culture, fought with artists for creative control, and blamed other Def Jam executives for the commodification of hip-hop, despite his central role in popularizing the genre.  Rubin left Def Jam in 1988 after suffering the realization that the defiant, anti-establishment, “black punk” attitude (Watkins 122) that had originally drawn him to hip-hop had been absorbed by the culture industry, stripped of its true messaging, and shaped by the taste of white audiences thanks, significantly, to his own work as a white man who funnelled hip-hop music to white audiences. Rubin’s conflicts and realizations stemmed particularly from his work with the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy, two of Def Jam’s most innovative groups; the early careers of these two groups will be traced chronologically in this paper, as issues of legitimacy, respectability, creative control, and commodification were enmeshed in the development of both. 

Rubin, then the guitarist for a small punk rock band called Horse, developed a curiosity for hip-hop in the early 1980s, when he discovered that many hip-hop clubs in NYC would play classic rock songs for live performers to rap over (Brown 24).  After leaving Horse to focus on establishing Def Jam, named after hip-hop slang that effectively meant “the ultimate sound” (Gueraseva 7), Rubin committed himself to producing rap music, one of the four artistic pillars of hip-hop along with deejaying (alternately spelled DJing), breakdancing, and graffiti (Ogbar 38) that he approvingly called, “the black punk” (Watkins 122).  Searching for a promoter for Def Jam’s first 12” release, Rubin was introduced to Russell Simmons, who was five years his senior and “had [already] made about 20 hit records” by Rubin’s recollection (Brown 25-6; Watkins 122).  The two became partners, developing a collaborative and experimental atmosphere for their artists and helping to launch the careers of T La Rock, Jazzy Jay, LL Cool J, Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, and others who went on to introduce hip-hop to the national conscience and dominate the genre for years to come (Watkins 122).    

Rubin’s musical intuition as a producer attracted other talented figures to Def Jam—Rubin recalled that Simmons, “couldn’t believe that I was white,” which was a compliment to his musical abilities (Brown 26)—but Rubin absolutely needed Simmons to achieve legitimacy among hip-hop audiences.  Perhaps just as important as being already established in the world of hip-hop, Simmons was Black (Watkins 122).  Especially in the early decades of hip-hop, according to interdisciplinary professor of media and African American studies Craig Watkins, “race has always been synonymous with credibility,” and Rubin, a young Jewish man from an upper-middle-class Queens family, needed Simmons as his partner to legitimize Def Jam in the eyes of the Black hip-hop artists that Rubin hoped to sign to the label (121-3).  Although Simmons reflected 25 years later in Def Jam Recordings, a compendium of Def Jam’s productions from 1984 to 2010, that “[w]e were motivated by disdain for the mainstream.  I wanted to make records that were disruptive” (8), in Def Jam’s early years, he often attempted to temper Rubin’s aggressive, rock- and punk-influenced inclinations with his more “middle class and R&B” taste (Watkins 123).  While Simmons brought racial legitimacy to Def Jam, Rubin’s authentic, innovative work legitimized Def Jam’s sound among established hip-hop audiences.  Simmons devoted himself to the politics of respectability—a phrase that would not be coined until 1993 but was well understood by Black artists and promoters.  Originally used by professor of History and of African and African American Studies Evelyn Higginbotham to articulate the experiences of Black women, respectability politics encompass any “behaviors and attitudes that reproduce dominant norms […] for producing a counter-narrative to negative stereotypes placed upon subordinated groups,” which has been critiqued for catering to the dominant white gaze, reinforcing racist social stratification, and denying that respectability can be expanded to include culture outside of the white mainstream (Pitcan et al. 165).  While Simmons felt more comfortable working within established limits of respectability, Rubin wanted to push those limits and force them to accommodate anti-establishment punk-rock and hip-hop music that already had legitimacy in marginalized urban culture.  Rubin’s artistic approach was like that of “[t]he great artists,” identified by theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno as “never those whose works embodied style in its least fractured, most perfect form but those who adopted style as a rigor to set against the chaotic expression of suffering,” as resistance to the standard of artistic quality and value set by the dominant culture industry (103).  As the Def Jam co-founders struggled to agree on an approach to respectability, creative and financial clashes between the two became increasingly common, especially after Def Jam artists broke into the mainstream white, middle-class, suburban market.  

Def Jam’s breakthrough was primarily thanks to the meteoric success of the Beastie Boys—known around the Def Jam studio as “the Beasties”—whose 1986 debut album License to Ill became a “multiplatinum phenomenon” (Gueraseva xvi) as one of the best-selling rap albums of the 1980s, the first rap album to hit #1 on the Billboard 200 chart, and Def Jam’s and hip-hop’s first #1 album on any chart (Brown 48).  Rubin met the Beasties—Mike D (Michael Diamond), Ad-rock (Adam Horovitz), and MCA (Adam Yauch) —before founding Def Jam or meeting Russell Simmons, and he began deejaying at their shows, which transitioned from hardcore punk-rock music to rap with Rubin’s influence (Brown 39).  In 1984, Rubin pressured the three male members of the band to cut ties with their female drummer, Kate Schellenbach, because he “didn’t like women rapping,” according to Schellenbach (qtd. Brown 40), imposing an inorganic image on the group.  Then, he produced their single “Rock Hard,” on which he made the music and they added their lyrics (Adler 78), extending his influence from their image to their sound.  Over the next two years, an unusually long recording period compared to standard industry practice, the band split their time between touring as Madonna’s opening act and recording License to Ill with Rubin (Adler 80, 74).  Rubin is credited as the album’s primary producer and as a co-writer on all of its 13 tracks (Beastie Boys). However, his influence was limited on two songs: “Slow and Low” was given to the Beastie Boys by Run-DMC, their close friends and fellow Def Jam group (Brown 45), and “Fight For Your Right” was primarily written by MCA and his friend Tom Cushman (Adler 88).  Rubin, according to Ad-rock, disliked these tracks for their juvenile lyrics—such as the opening rhyme of  “Fight For Your Right”: “You wake up late for school, man you don’t want to go / You ask your mom, ‘please?’ but she still says, ‘no’” (Beastie Boys 00:22-00:33)—that disrupted the tough, rap-rock attitude that he believed would earn legitimacy and respectability for the album and the band (Adler 88).  

The Beastie Boys, guided by Rubin, needed to legitimize themselves among their Black audiences and peers.  Cey Adams, a Black artist who designed the Beastie Boys’ logo and considers them “best friends,” describes the group’s earliest shows as “uncomfortable” because of the band’s image, which was curated and encouraged by Rubin (qtd. Adler 78).  “They were wearing red-and-black Puma tracksuits with Puma sneakers and matching do-rags,” Adams recalls, adding, “Puma suits were heavily identified with break-dancers and people who lived the culture.  I was really afraid that people would think that the Beasties were making fun of it…” (78).  Attempting to fit in with the almost exclusively Black and Latino hip-hop scene, the Beasties, in the words of Russell Simmons, “thought that they had to put on costumes… they almost dressed in blackface.  It was really insulting” (qtd. Adler 79).  Although Rubin pushed back against Simmons’s attempts to play into a politics of respectability, his investment in the Beastie Boys’ sound and image indicates an acute concern for legitimacy—respectability in a marginalized rather than mainstream culture—although this original attempt was misguided and came across as insulting.  

Ad-Rock recalls the frustration of trying to push against the image Rubin constructed for them, saying, “‘Fight For Your Right’ was really making fun of ‘those people’—the frat dudes, the happy hour motherfuckers.  The next thing we know, we’re up on stage being that” (88).  Rubin even chose License to Ill’s iconic cover, which depicts a Boeing 727 plane crashing into a mountain and is often listed among the best and most recognizable album covers of its era (88).  Ad-Rock calls the album cover “totally a Rick deal” and “stupid,” repeatedly asserting that none of the Beasties liked or approved of it (88).  Summarizing the experience of working with Rick Rubin, Ad-Rock asks:

Waddya gonna do?  We should’ve said to Rick, “Wait a minute.  This is not your group, this is our group.  This isn’t your record, this is our record.”  But when you’re seventeen… we were cutting tracks, getting drink tickets at Palladium, hanging out with Madonna.  I didn’t give a shit about what the drums sounded like.  I should’ve, but, you know, I had a girlfriend.  (88)

Rubin knew exactly what music and image the band needed to produce to achieve both popularity and perceived authenticity, but he imposed his own vision on the Beastie Boys and sacrificed true authenticity to achieve it.  License to Ill became the best-selling rap album in history at the time of its release (Simmons 92), and it marked the beginning of hip-hop’s “evolution into the huge industry and pop-culture-driving phenomenon it is today” (Brown 38).  Despite this successful navigation of the politics of respectability, which was Simmons’s goal more than Rubin’s, Simmons was virtually never present in the studio, and he had no say over the Beastie Boys’ sound (Brown 43).  Rubin used the Beastie Boys to present “[r]ealistic indignation,” which Horkheimer and Adorno call “the trademark of those with a new idea to sell” (104), and it sold incredibly well.  Under Rubin’s direction, the Beastie Boys grew from an underground hardcore band to rap sensations over the course of just two years, launching successful careers and introducing hip-hop culture to mainstream American audiences, which established a precedent for other artists from Def Jam and beyond to achieve similar mass recognition but compromised the “purity of intention” and collaborative reputation of Def Jam.  

After the release of License to Ill, the Beastie Boys began to openly resist Rubin’s influence, giving up the Puma tracksuits after just a few shows, and they “legitimized themselves because they talked about white boy shit,” according to Chuck D (Carlton Douglas Ridenhour), frontman of Public Enemy (qtd. Adler 90).  Authenticity or “realness,” as opposed to “fronting,” was essential in the hip-hop scene (Ogbar 39), and the Beastie Boys never attempted to hide their hardcore roots or to present themselves as coming from the same cultural background as their Black peers.  Essential to hip-hop realness, in the analysis of historian Jeffrey Ogbonna Green Ogbar, is “an intimate familiarity with the urban, working-class landscapes that gave rise to hip-hop in the 1970s,” a seemingly narrow requirement that actually allows for many routes to authenticity, as, “[i]mplicit in this spatial notion is a class consciousness that is inextricably connected to race” (39).  The Beasties, who had been attending and performing hardcore and hip-hop shows in NYC clubs since their early teens (Gueraseva 12), had geographic and class authenticity, and they earned legitimacy by adapting rap to their experience as young white boys with a humorous self-awareness.  “Black kids were drinkin’ 40s.  Beasties were drinking beer,” Chuck D summarized, meaning that the Beasties were still invited to the party, both literally and metaphorically, despite their differences in style (qtd. Adler 90); Kevin Liles, a longtime Def Jam employee and founder of music label 300 Entertainment, recalling a party at the University of Maryland, described the excitement generated by a Beastie Boys song blasting over the speakers as, “Everybody gonna lose their minds!  Did the black students care that the Beasties weren’t black?  Listen to me: Nobody.  Gave.  A.  Fuck” (90).  On the 1987 Raising Hell tour, which threw four major Def Jam groups together on once concert bill and in one tour bus, even Simmons became, in his own words, “such a fan of what was developing with the Beastie Boys and the way it was integrating the rap audience,” adding that “[r]acially, I thought it was very, very important” (90).  Liles bluntly explains, “Could three black guys have pulled off what they [the Beastie Boys] pulled off?  The answer’s no” (90).  In a later interview, Rubin admitted his view of the Beastie Boys as a vehicle for bringing hip-hop into the mainstream and his concern for commercial respectability at the time, saying,

If a 14-year-old girl in, oh, Alabama had brought home a Run-DMC album in those days—you know, looking at these black guys as rock ‘n’ roll guys or sex symbols—it would not really have been okay.  Whereas, as stupid and disgusting as the Beastie Boys might have been, that was okay because they were white.  Reality is, this is a very racist country, very racist.  I think when they played the Beastie Boys on MTV, then it made it easier for MTV to play Run-DMC (qtd. Brown 44).

After recognizing that he needed Simmons, a Black hip-hop promoter, to lend Def Jam credibility among hip-hop artists, Rubin also recognized that the Beastie Boys, a hip-hop group composed of and produced by young Jewish men, was the only group signed to Def Jam that could be both authentic enough to be welcomed by the established hip-hop scene and respectable enough to sell to the mainstream American market. After navigating this industry-changing manoeuvre with the Beastie Boys, Rubin sought to push the limits of respectability further, and he turned his attention in 1987 to Public Enemy (PE), a Black group that became the most influential group in hip-hop of their era (Watkins 114).  Chuck D, frontman of the group, was college-educated, from a middle-class background, and 26 years old in 1987, which was “ancient in hip hop years” (116), but he embodied an “unassailable black masculinity and power” that inspired comparisons to Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and other civil rights and Black nationalist leaders.  Rubin immediately “fell in love” with Chuck D, according to Simmons, and he called Chuck D daily until he agreed to sign a recording deal (qtd. Adler 97).  Chuck D had two stipulations: Flavor Flav (William Jonathan Drayton Jr.), whom Rubin did not like, had to be in the group to provide a humorous and youthful counterpart to Chuck D, and, after hearing how Rubin had controlled the Beastie Boys, PE had to have complete creative control over their work (98).  PE’s production team, called the Bomb Squad, incorporated sirens, recorded speeches, and snatches of casual dialogue into the group’s music to capture a more complete sound of urban life, and the group’s logo, designed by Chuck D, depicted a silhouette with crossed arms through the scope of a rifle, suggesting that “strong-minded blacks were ‘public enemy number one’” (116-9).  Easily legitimized among their peers and hip-hop audiences and exercising the creative control granted to them, Public Enemy, as Rubin had anticipated, expanded the limits of respectability to include Afrocentric political content, making them, in the opinion of Simmons and many others in the music industry, “the most important band of their era—rock, rap, R&B, whatever—and […] one of the most influential of all time” (89).

Rubin only asserted his own vision for the group when encouraging them to push their image to even further extremes; PE’s lyrics were aggressively anti-establishment, which, according to Rubin, scared Simmons (Brown 49).  Simmons later said that “my white, Jewish partner had to convince the most important political rap band of all time to start recording black,” indicating that even PE worried its message would not resonate with mainstream audiences (Simmons 88).   When Simmons first heard PE’s debut album Yo! Bum Rush the Show, he derogatorily called it “black punk rock” and asked Rubin, “How can you waste your time on this garbage?” (Watkins 123); Rubin, wanting to push the limits of respectability, surely relished Simmons’s distaste.  The album, with its punk, political, theatrical, yet undeniably hip-hop sound, new styles of political and “gangsta” rap—tracks like “Public Enemy No. 1” popularized lyrics about violent and criminal behavior with rhymes like, “I’ll show you my gun, my Uzi weighs a ton / Because I’m Public Enemy number one” (Public Enemy 01:18-01:23)—and once again redefinited mainstream music tastes (98), launched PE’s short yet massively impactful career, and reasserted Def Jam’s dominance on the hip-hop scene.  “At a time when most rappers typecast themselves as comedy acts or party bands,” ran a review in the New York Times, “Public Enemy’s best moments promise something far more dangerous and subversive: reality” (qtd. Brown 51), and the limits of respectability adjusted to include this harsh, militaristic reality.  

After devoting himself to bringing hip-hop into the mainstream conscience and expanding the limits of respectability with the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy, Rubin began to lose interest in hip-hop because it became, ironically, too mainstream for his liking (Watkins 124).  Articulated by Horkheimer and Adorno, the rule of the culture industry is that “[a]nyone who resists can survive only by being incorporated” (104), and hip-hop had become too enmeshed in popular culture to die.  As its “oppositional culture” (Ogbar 39) was absorbed by mainstream markets, hip-hop’s anti-establishment attitudes were reduced to performative images—clothing, artwork, magazines, and anything with a logo—to be packaged and sold to white, middle-class, suburban audiences.  Def Jam’s artists were left wondering if they had sold out as financial concerns became more important to the company’s executives than the creative and collaborative atmosphere that Def Jam had built its reputation on just a few years earlier (124).  “When we first joined Def Jam,” Chuck D recalls, “it was Def Jam against the world.  Rap music was already against the world, and Def Jam was the motor that ran that war” (qtd. Adler 98). 

By the late 1980s, the culture industry caught up to Def Jam and the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, and other Def Jam groups like Run-DMC realized that they were mainstream acts, inspiring listlessness and frustration as legitimacy and realness came to matter less than “the commercial appeal of [their] image and music” (Watkins 119).  These artists experienced, as Horkheimer and Adorno’s contemporary Herbert Marcuse described more than 20 years earlier, “the obliteration of the oppositional,” “liquidation of two-dimensional culture,” and, finally, “wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale” (60) as rap became the bestselling music genre in the United States over the next decade (Ogbar 38). Welcomed by many as “an example of young black talent and business expertise and even as a salve for America’s old wounds of racism” (38), hip-hop’s mainstream success and rapid commodification became, to some within the industry, a “perversion” (Marcuse 61).  To Rubin, who perhaps should have expected that achieving mainstream popularity would alter the culture of Def Jam and the broader hip-hop scene, “[t]he intentions seemed wrong,” and rap “became a way to make money” (Watkins 124), losing its legitimacy in his eyes.  

The tensions that had been building around Rubin for years—his resistance to respectability, need for creative control, and, now, disdain for hip-hop’s increasing commodification—were finally addressed in 1988, when Def Jam president Bill Stephney stepped down from his role, exhausted from having to navigate conflicting orders from Rubin, Simmons, and Lyor Cohen (Gueraseva 67).  His replacement would be either Rubin or Cohen, a former Hollywood concert promoter who had moved to NYC to work for Russell Simmons’s Rush Productions Company as the road manager of Run-DMC (Simmons 75).  Both men seemed primed to step into such an influential role after achieving major success in the past two years with projects that launched the rap genre and Def Jam into mainstream culture: Rubin produced Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill and Public Enemy’s Yo! Bum Rush the Show, and Cohen brokered a $5 million deal for Adidas to endorse Run-DMC (Gueraseva 95).  While Rubin had spent the next two years searching out promising artists to further push the limits of respectability—notably Public Enemy and Slayer, a heavy metal band (Gueraseva 73)—Cohen had invested himself in Def Jam’s R&B acts and gotten closer to Simmons, who he shared an apartment with and whose brother, Joseph Ward Simmons (known as Rev Run), was the frontman of Run DMC (Simmons 75; Gueraseva 104).  When choosing the company’s next president, Def Jam executives were choosing whether the company, looking forward, would prioritize expanding its reputation for driving genre trends in the music industry or capitalizing on the credit it had already established in hip-hop to maximize its profits.  They chose Cohen.  

Rubin was already tiring of debating Def Jam’s future with Simmons—a communication breakdown that artists capitalized on by pitching ideas to Simmons that Rubin had already shot down, knowing that if they failed to get support from one, they could get it from the other (Adler 94)—but, when he finally decided to leave Def Jam in 1988, “it really had more to do with Lyor than Russell,” Rubin said (94).  Cohen wanted the Beastie Boys to break into the film industry and, after being so subjected to Rubin’s creative vision while making License to Ill, the Beasties insisted on complete creative control of the project; Rubin felt betrayed, saying, “now I’m the bad guy while Lyor’s role is to make all of the Beastie Boys’s [sic] dreams come true—whether it’s good for them or not” (94), and Simmons, his partner, declined to take a side in the conflict, only complaining to Def Jam director of publicity Bill Adler, “My Jews are fighting” (94).  Ad-Rock recalls Def Jam as “a comic book back then,” with Rubin as “the weird white dude acting like he’s Captain Lou Albano,” a professional wrestler, and Cohen “screaming, ‘We are winning by the largest margin!’  Lyor was really into winning” (51).  Suddenly, while basking in their debut album’s success, finishing a tour, and meeting to discuss plans for their film, the Beastie Boys stopped receiving royalty checks because they had not yet produced a second album (Adler 94; Gueraseva 151).  Determining that Rubin and Cohen were too demanding, the Beastie Boys broke their contract and left Def Jam to sign with Capitol Records, which Rubin said, “broke my heart,” and Cohen recalled left Def Jam “numb for years afterward” (qtd. Adler 96).  Exhibiting their missing sense of ownership over the album and desperation to cut all ties, the Beasties abandoned the master rights to License to Ill, which remained the most popular album in the Def Jam catalogue “and one of the most important catalogue albums in the record business,” according to Simmons (114).  Rubin moved to Los Angeles to found Def American Recordings, where he flexed his multi-genre producing skills working with major artists including the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Mick Jagger, and Johnny Cash (Brown 85, 99, 105).  Def Jam survived the twin losses of its biggest band and biggest producer, but this new era, born of conflict, bore little resemblance to the label’s collaborative and innovative early years.  

Without Rubin’s opposition, maximizing financial profits became Def Jam’s primary goal (Watkins 124), and the collaborative, creative approach to music that originally earned Def Jam legitimacy and respectability was utterly lost by the turn of the millennium.  Frustrated that the majority of Def Jam’s profits went to Sony, its parent company, and not to themselves, Simmons and Cohen, who was soon made a partner in the company, attempted to replicate Sony’s structure in a pyramid scheme by investing in several smaller labels that would operate under Def Jam’s supervision, but every one of these projects failed (Simmons 111-2).  Def Jam accrued $17 million in debt, and Sony executives began, from Simmons’s perspective, “preparing to rape me of my company” by encouraging Public Enemy and LL Cool J to leave Def Jam and sign deals directly with Sony (112).  On the advice of Donald Trump, who told Simmons that “his name kept him going” when his business failed, Simmons and Cohen used the legitimacy, which Simmons calls “brand value,” previously established by Rubin to secure a $35 million deal with PolyGram, allowing them to break from Sony (113).  Both PE and LL had remained loyal to Def Jam despite Sony’s offers, but when Chuck D suggested that PE should receive part of the profits from Def Jam’s new deal with PolyGram—PE’s legitimacy within hip-hop culture and success in mainstream markets was crucial toDef Jam’s brand value—Simmons and Cohen rebuffed him, leading PE to break their contract with Def Jam (Watkins 120).  Chuck D reflected later, “[All] that talk about us being family was just bullshit. I said ‘fuck that, I’m outta here. Find me a taxi and execute this contract’” (qtd. Watkins 120), and he released a new song called “Swinder’s Lust” that compared corporate executives to slave owners (121).  Although Rubin had also fought with his artists, his need for creative control stemmed from a deep passion for hip hop music and culture, and his similar arguments with Simmons and Cohen ensured a level of equality between artists and executives; after Rubin’s departure, Simmons and Cohen did not fight for creative control, but for money, and, by allying against their artists, the two of them imposed a hierarchy where executives’ financial concerns mattered more than artists’ freedom of creative expression.  

By 1998, hip-hop was the bestselling music genre in the United States (Ogbar 38) thanks, significantly, to Rubin, who is now “a nine-time GRAMMY-winning producer, named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time and the most successful producer in any genre by Rolling Stone” (”Rick Rubin”).  At Def Jam and other labels, the first generation of rappers who had backgrounds in the NYC underground music scene, legitimacy among hip-hop audiences, and respectability in mainstream culture were replaced with a generation that was driven by this new era’s promises of money and celebrity, rather than a passion for the music or culture (Watkins 126).  After being folded into the dominant culture industry and achieving widespread popularity among mainstream white, middle-class, suburban audiences, hip-hop began catering to that audience. 

Executives like Simmons and Cohen were accused of having “sold out,” and hip-hop became defined by violent and misogynistic sensationalism that sold well but, unlike the provocative and violent persona of pioneering “gangsta” groups like Public Enemy, lacked a basis in lived experience or emancipatory political expression (126).  The Source, a hip-hop cultural magazine, voiced the concerns of many within the culture who saw themselves misrepresented in the new generation of artists by asking, in March of 2001, “Is this music defined by the culture that inspires it or the white palms that purchase the CDs and sign the checks?” (qtd. Ogbar 37).  Hip-hop lost, in the language of Marcuse, its Great Refusal in its most mainstream forms, as “refuting, breaking, and recreating… factual existence” became secondary to catering to the tastes of the dominant culture, which “[established] cultural equality while preserving domination” (66-7).  That domination, embodied by the “white palms that purchase the CDs and sign the checks” identified by Source, was established by Rubin, a white man who struggled with his artists for creative control of their projects, fought with his executive peers over Def Jam’s priorities and direction, and filtered early mainstream hip-hop through his own conceptions of legitimacy and quality.  While it would be wrong to say that hip-hop has been divorced from its origins in Black and Latino urban youth culture—a push within hip-hop culture to reject respectability gained prominence in 2012 after police posted “unrespectable” photos of teenager Trayvon Martin to intentionally evoke less empathy from white viewers and justified his shooting by saying he looked “gangsta,” which sparked the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown movement of people of color sharing side-by-side photos online of themselves in “respectable” professional clothes and hip-hop fashion (Pitcan et al. 165)—it would be just as wrong to ignore the extensive influence of the white gaze, particularly the gaze of Rick Rubin.  

In 1993, the Webster Dictionary added “def” to its pages, which Rubin interpreted as a death knell, a sign that hip-hop had completely lost its revolutionary, counter-culture status (Brown 101).  He shortened his new label’s name from Def American to American Recordings, and he held a funeral for the word “def,” complete with hundreds of celebrity musician mourners, a casket full of records, and a gravesite in a real cemetery (101).  Tragically for Rubin, he was one of the primary assassins of the genre’s authenticity.  Despite his “purity of intention” (qtd. Adler 8), commitment to gaining and maintaining Def Jam’s legitimacy within hip-hop culture, and outspoken resistance to Simmons’s concern for respectability, Rubin scouted groups and produced music that he knew could become popular in both hip-hop and mainstream white, middle-class, suburban markets, incrementally pushing the limits of respectibility to include more and more politically and stylistically radical elements of hip-hop.  Rubin’s artistic control over some Def Jam releases—like the Beastie Boys’ License to Ill, which was the first hip-hop album to achieve mainstream popularity—and influence in shaping the image of even Def Jam’s most radically Afrocentric group—Public Enemy, which remains one of the most revolutionary and influential musical groups of any genre—is evidence that, from its very beginning, mainstream hip-hop was heavily influenced by the sensibilities of a white, upper-middle-class man who had been a stranger to urban hip-hop culture until his adulthood.  While Rubin despised the commodification of hip-hop, which reduced the music’s anti-establishment messaging to purchasable slogans and iconography, it’s not surprising that white, middle-class audiences enjoyed listening to the same kind of hip-hop music he enjoyed producing.  Rubin’s attempt to ignore respectability in favor of legitimacy resulted in Def Jam artists being limited to a form of legitimacy that was approved by Rubin’s white gaze, redefining rather than rejecting respectability.  From its first release in 1984 through Rubin’s exit in 1988, Def Jam launched the careers of several authentic, innovative, and popular hip-hop groups, permanently reshaping the music industry.  But the death of def was inevitable from the moment of Def Jam’s birth: Rick Rubin’s expansion of the limits of respectability allowed for the stripping of authenticity and ultimate commodification of the hip-hop music he loved.  

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