Life and Def: Sex, Drugs, Money, and God
Russell Simmons

CHAPTER 1: Cold Gettin' Paid

There have always been two types of black businesses in this country. First, there are those like Johnson Publications or Essence Communications (or black hair care or cosmetics companies), which cater to black consumers and work that niche for all it's worth. Ebony and Essence, which are institutions in the black community, exist solely to target black consumers, draw revenue predominantly from the ad budgets of white corporations and portray a middle-class black version of American reality.

Then there's the Motown model. Berry Gordy labeled his company the "Sound of Young America." Gordy was a visionary who saw that black culture, as expressed through the music his company created, was just as viable and important culturally--and commercially--as anything in this country. Motown sold black pop music, written and performed by blacks, for consumption by all Americans regardless of their color.

My philosophy takes a little from both, yet differs fundamentally from them. Unlike Ebony or Essence, my audience is not limited by race. My core audience, my hip-hop audience, is black and white, Asian and Hispanic--anyone who totally identifies with and lives in the culture. Those are my peeps.

And unlike Motown, I don't believe in catering to the so-called mainstream by altering your look or slang or music. I see hip-hop culture as the new American mainstream. We don't change for you; you adapt to us. That's what has made Def Jam records, Def Comedy Jam and Phat Farm, to name a few of my ventures, commercially successful and influential. And that is the central philosophy that has driven my career.

WHAT IS HIP-HOP?

I guess I should start with my definition of hip-hop. To me, hip-hop is modern mainstream young urban American culture. I know there's a lot of ideas there, but hip-hop's impact is as broad as that description suggests. Like rock and roll, blues and jazz, hip-hop is primarily a musical form. But unlike those forms of black American music, hip-hop is more expansive in the ways it manifests itself, and as a result, its impact is wider. The ideas of hip-hop are spread not just through music, but in fashion, movies, television, advertising, dancing, slang and attitude.

The beauty of hip-hop, and a key to its longevity, is that within the culture there is a lot of flexibility. So Run-D.M.C. and A Tribe Called Quest and N.W.A and Mary J. Blige and Luther Campbell and the Beastie Boys can all wear different clothes, use different slang and have a different kind of cultural significance. Yet all are recognizable as being part of hip-hop. I believe hip-hop is an attitude, one that can be nonverbal as well as eloquent. It communicates aspiration and frustration, community and aggression, creativity and street reality, style and substance. It is not rigid, nor is it easy to sum up in one sentence or even one book. Simply put, when you are in a hip-hop environment, you know it; it has a feel that is tangible and cannot be mistaken for anything else.

Hip-hop culture is, all these years later, closer to its original aesthetics than jazz or blues or rock and roll are to their roots. For example, the originators of rock and roll were black men who wore fly suits, had their hair slick and didn't give a fuck. That describes all those artists in the '50s who laid down the foundation, men who were trying to fight their way out of southern racism and northern poverty. In their time they were regarded as outlaws. They got arrested. They got harassed. They were attacked.

Eventually mainstream America took over rock and roll and it changed. No longer rock and roll, it became rock. It became hallucinogenic. It became about rebellion for rebellion's sake. It was no longer about drinking and looking fly; it became about taking drugs and wearing dirty jeans. In the '60s and '70s, when this new rock emerged, the old music, and the old musicians, were tossed away. You couldn't tell this new audience that Chuck Berry and Led Zeppelin were the same thing. In one generation you were hot and then you were over.

Hip-hop, however, has been very consistent in its stance. A couple of years ago Erick Sermon, Redman and Keith Murray recorded the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight," the first big rap hit from 1979, and did it exactly like the original. The concepts in that rap record from twenty-odd years ago are still valid. Hip-hop records are still about "I got a fly girl, I'm going to the motel in my new car." They still say, "I'm gonna get flak for being young and street. But I'm still gonna take a bite out of American culture. I'm gonna do it my way and I'm gonna buy everything in Bloomingdale's. I'm not into rebellion for the sake of rebelling. My rebellion has a goal-self-improvement, the ability to acquire all the things normally denied me or to change the way the world speaks, moves, dresses and thinks." So "Rapper's Delight," which basically borrowed rhymes from old-school pioneers, has the same aesthetic as you'd find on almost any Def Jam record today. Then it was gold chains. Now it's platinum Bentleys.

Which is why there are 40-year-old b-boys. I remember flying to a fight in Vegas and meeting the actor Ving Rhames and his wife. Turned out his brother was a competitor of mine in the old days who used to promote shows by DJ Hollywood and sell thousands of tickets. Ving and I talked about going to the Hotel Diplomat in Times Square, where we did big parties in the days before rap records. But we were also talking about the sound on a new Q-Tip record and how dope he was.

Ving and a lot of people like him are getting the same thing out of the culture they used to. The music isn't the same. Sometimes the language on the record is different. But it's the same take on American culture.

In the beginning we ran into a little bit of an obstacle when it came to communicating this urban black and Latino attitude to suburban America. Even after suburbanites began buying the music, they didn't really understand the aesthetic. Now, in the twenty-first century, it's come full circle. Suburbanites purchase hip-hop records in huge numbers, but they also have a deeper understanding of and appreciation for all aspects of the culture. As a result, hip-hop has influenced everything around them. Look at today's rock bands-Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, Korn. They all have hip-hop running through their veins.

You know, rock stars used to be notorious for getting into brawls and getting drunk. In the '60s and '70s, when rock still had some guts, people like Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page represented youthful rebellion. They did drugs. They tore up hotel rooms. They made sexually suggestive records. They expressed sympathy for the devil. Now rap stars have taken it all to another level. They carry guns. They use guns. They go to jail. They express a connection to the people still in jail. They express solidarity with the people from their hood-no matter how dangerous it was or how much money they've made. They confront cops, politicians, other rappers and even themselves on record and off. They do all the things rock stars used to do and they do even more dangerous, outrageous things. Today a kid knows a rock star acts out because he's rebelling against his parents. A rap star, however, is doing it because he has a serious reason-discrimination, personal anger or ghetto conditions. And on top of all that, a rap star wants to make money and enjoy success, and is fearless in doing it. The result is the kind of attitude of authentic rebellion that rock was always supposed to have.

This stance has drawn criticism, but attacks on hip-hop have always been great for the culture. In fact, I personally want to thank Bob Dole, William Bennett and the rest of those right-wingers for reminding kids that hip-hop is theirs. When adults say, "Oh, fuck, don't listen to rap!" they just reinforce young people's commitment to it. Even some 40-year-olds who grew up on rap and who know that the messages in rap can be scary try to tell their kids, "Don't listen to it," which is like asking kids to buy it. People who grew up on rock now look at it and say, "Aw, it's okay," because it's not scary at all. Once that happens, kids don't want it and it becomes a museum piece.

On the other hand, black kids, and the core white, Asian and Latino kids into rap, don't listen to it just to piss off their parents. That kind of rebellion's irrelevant to them. They listen because it expresses what they're thinking about. Punk, new wave, alternative-most of it came and went. Today there's no Clash. There's no Nirvana. Right now rock can't fuck with rap-unless it adopts rap-because the culture is so raw and honest.

When rap came along in the late '70s, there was something synthetic about black pop music. The most popular black music of the time was R&B made simple for white people to dance to; they called it disco. Disco actually started within the gay dance community. They had a creative little thing happening, and then it crossed over to the mainstream. The record industry adopted it because it helped soften the edges of black music. But ultimately disco didn't address the issues rap has. Even though rap was born in the ghetto, it addresses issues a lot of kids across America (and the world) are dealing with-anger, alienation, hypocrisy, sex, drugs. All the basics.

Kids of all colors, all over the world, instinctively seek to change the world. They usually have this desire because they don't want to buy into the dominant values of the mainstream. Rappers want to change the world to suit their vision and to create a place for themselves in it. So kids can find a way into hip-hop by staying true to their instinct toward rebellion and change.

Hip-hop has, in fact, changed the world. It has taken something from the American ghetto and made it global. It has become the creative touchstone for edgy, progressive and aggressive youth culture around the world. That's why my business is bigger than it's ever been. And, I believe, we're far from through.

Copyright 2001 by Russell Simmons with Nelson George
From Life and Def : Sex, Drugs, Money, and God, by Russell Simmons, Nelson George (Contributor). © October 9, 2001 , Crown Pub used by permission.

I Ain't Scared of You : Bernie Mac on How Life Is
by Bernie Mac, Darrell Dawsey
MTV Books

Whether he is heir to Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx as his publicists claim may be debatable, but one thing is for certain....Bernie Mac is a funny man. While Mac has starred in a handful of television shows and movies (most notably Spike Lee's The Original Kings of Comedy, and his new self-named series), his name remains obscured particularly among mainstream audiences by the likes of Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, Chris Tucker and the Wayans brothers. His live appearances have earned him a reputation as perhaps the truest voice of modern humor. Now, Mac has captured his comedic genius in print with his hilarious debut book.

In "I Ain't Scared of You" Bernie tackles such topics as professional athletes, sex, religion, marriage, and child-rearing, but his most poignant material stems from his inner-city childhood. Co-written by journalist Dawsey (Living to Tell About It: Black Men in America Speak Their Piece), this book skillfully captures the rhythm and color of Black life in America. There are some perhaps overly confessional moments (e.g., physical fights with his wife), but Mac shows on more than one occasion that he can reach deep into the pockets of human distress and bring forth a smile. "That's what inspires my humor," he writes. "I don't want nobody to cry."

Nobody is safe; nothing is sacred. Not even Bernie himself. Throughout I Ain't Scared Of You, Bernie turns his humor inward, firing off self-deprecating salvos about his golf game, his own personal hypocrisies, even his sexual prowess -- "Women got toys...You can't compete with no dildo."

Mac's insights have earned him critical acclaim and international popularity. Now, I Ain't Scared Of You captures Bernie Mac's humor whole -- unadorned, unpretentious, and unafraid.

Read Chapter 1 of this hilarious book here:

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Martin Luther King, Jr. on Leadership: Inspiration and Wisdom
for Challenging Times
by Donald T. Phillips


Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech was voted the most electrifying public address of the twentieth century. It takes a leader to give that kind of a speech. Donald T. Phillips presents the ideals of leadership that Martin Luther King Jr. followed in an overview of the history of the civil rights struggle. Phillips describes the techniques King used at various stages of the civil rights battle. He also shares King's comments on leadership. Many of the principles will be quite familiar: listen to learn, lead by being led, awaken direct action, encourage creativity and involve the people. However, the book is especially interesting when it demonstrates how King put these principles into practice.

From mastering the art of public speaking to persuading through love and nonviolence, from encouraging imaginative new solutions in changing times to preaching hope, optimism and the power of dreams, this study of Dr. King's leadership offers a definitive and inspiring modern-day example of leadership at its best.

We can all learn from his leadership.

Read Chapter 1 of this insightful book here:


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Every Tongue Got to Confess - Zora Neale Hurston

On Her Own Ground
A'Lelia Bundles

Walker's biographer and great-great granddaughter, A'Lelia Bundles, does not overestimate her importance when she calls Walker one of the pioneers in her use of direct sales (the Fuller Brush Company was founded in 1906, the same year as Walker's), marketing strategies and commissions. Bundles writes: ''As an early advocate of women's economic independence she provided lucrative incomes for thousands of African-American women who otherwise would have been consigned to jobs as farm laborers, washerwomen and maids.'' Walker's philanthropy ranged from the virtuous Y.W.C.A. to the radical N.A.A.C.P.; she began her career soliciting Booker T. Washington's approval and ended it working with W. E. B. Du Bois, Monroe Trotter and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Shortly before she died in 1919, she planned to organize her sales agents into local clubs that could use their economic clout to protest lynching and other civil rights abuses while improving conditions in their communities.

Bundles's well-paced and well-written book, ''On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker,'' is as much social history as biography, filled with the detail and texture of culture and politics. And rightly so, for Walker's life encompassed Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and World War I. She moved from the kind of poverty that usually ensures anonymity to a 34-room mansion in upstate New York, near the big show houses of John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould; from visits to Tiffany's for diamond jewelry to plans for attending the International Paris Peace Conference in 1919 with a group of blacks determined to lobby for African independence -- which won her a place in the Military Intelligence Division's file of ''Negro subversives.''

She was born Sarah Breedlove in Delta, La., in 1867. Her parents were laborers on the same plantation where they had been slaves, and Sarah labored beside them, chopping and picking cotton. She got about three months of schooling. The rights that Reconstruction had so briefly granted blacks were being snatched away. The Freedmen's Bureau disbanded its education division. And two offshoots of the original Ku Klux Klan were founded nearby, the lyrically named Knights of the White Camellia and the curtly named White League.

Orphaned at the age of 7, Sarah lived with a cruel brother-in-law and a passive sister. ''I married at the age of 14 in order to get a home of my own,'' she later said. She was a mother by 17 and a widow by 20. In 1888 she took her 3-year-old daughter, A'Lelia, and headed north, like thousands of blacks who were fleeing violence and looking for opportunity. For more than half of the employed black women in St. Louis, opportunity meant work as a washerwoman. Sarah did that for 10 years, moving from boardinghouse to boardinghouse.

What Bundles calls Walker's ''scrupulously crafted life story'' began in 1903, when, as she told it so many times afterward, Sarah found herself going bald. (Most rural and poor urban women knew nothing about hair hygiene. They would wash their clothes and scrub their tenement floors, but they might wash their hair once a month.) She prayed to the Lord for guidance, she said, and one night in a dream, ''a big black man appeared to me and told me what to mix for my hair. Some of the remedy was from Africa, but I sent for it, mixed it, put it on my scalp and in a few weeks my hair was coming in faster than it had ever fallen out.'' After trying it out on her daughter and a neighbor she decided to sell her formula; it was ''inspiration from God,'' a gift to be placed ''in the reach of those who appreciate beautiful hair and healthy scalps which is the glory of woman.''

The actual story wasn't quite so visionary or simple. Walker began as an agent for the black businesswoman she eventually outstripped, Annie Pope-Turbo, whose Poro School of Beauty Culture was already well established in St. Louis. (And whose products, Bundles writes, probably helped Sarah's hair grow back.) In 1906 she headed for Denver, armed with Poro products and a third husband, C. J. Walker. She had her own company by 1906 and a divorce by 1912. Helped by her daughter (who much preferred to party but did her best to please mother), Walker took her Wonderful Hair Grower across the country, selling it, setting up shops and training women in her hair-care methods. By 1907, the washerwoman who had earned $300 a year was earning $300 a month. When she died, of kidney disease, her net worth of $600,000 made her a millionaire in myth, not fact. But that sum, the equivalent of $6 million today, did make her one of the richest businesswomen in America.

Walker was a brilliant publicist. When she spoke of her fears or needs, her tone was unyieldingly crisp: ''I was at my washtubs one morning . . . and looked at my arms buried in soapsuds. I said to myself: 'What are you going to do when you grow old and your back gets stiff? Who is going to take care of your little girl?' That set me to thinking, but with all my thinking I couldn't see how I, a poor washerwoman, was going to better my condition.'' But she grew pithy when she talked business; she enjoyed her own toughness. ''Everybody told me I was making a mistake by going into this business, but I know how to grow hair as well as I know how to grow cotton,'' she declared. And: ''My advice to every one expecting to go into business is to hit often and hit hard; in other words, strike with all your might.''

She was a genuine philanthropist who put her money where her beliefs were -- and that money included the advertisements that helped A. Philip Randolph start his socialist magazine, The Messenger. (Randolph's wife, Lucille, helped run the magazine but was also a trained Walker agent.) But she was not above turning accusations of ''undue extravagance'' into race testimonials, telling critics that her mansion, Villa Lewaro -- a pleasure dome with a stucco facade of marble dust and white sand, whose treasures included a Louis XVI chamber suite, an Estey organ and Rodin sculptures -- was ''a Negro institution,'' built to show the race ''what a lone woman accomplished and to inspire them to do big things.'' There is truth here, and there is disingenuousness. Both are fascinating and I wish that instead of presenting them, Bundles had analyzed the relation between them. She suggests that Walker evolved her own version of Andrew Carnegie's ''gospel of wealth,'' which deemed surplus wealth ''a sacred trust to be administered for the good of the community in which it is accumulated.'' An interesting parallel, and Bundles might have further analyzed a woman who had the ruthlessness of a capitalist and the conscience of a progressive. And Bundles need not have been so euphemistic about that fact that in the process of cultivating black hair, Walker's products did, in fact, straighten it. There was a time, especially in the 1960's and 70's, when Walker was accused of fostering black self-hatred. Now, artificially straightened hair is just another option. I am sure that today Madam C. J. Walker would be marketing those treatments for artificially kinked and frizzed hair that have become so popular.

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At Brown, finding himself far behind most of the other freshmen, Cedric must manage a bewildering array of intellectual and social challenges. Cedric had hoped that at college he would finally find a place to fit in, but he discovers he has little in common with either the white students, many of whom come from privileged backgrounds, or the middle-class blacks. Having traveled too far to turn back, Cedric is left to rely on his faith, his intelligence, and his determination to keep alive his hope in the unseen--a future of acceptance and reward that he struggles, each day, to envision.

Broadway Books, a division of Random House, recently published a paperback version. Oprah and Ted Koppel have interviewed both Suskind and Cedric, there's talk of a movie, colleges are buying the book in bulk for diversity workshops, and inner-city schools are assigning it to inspire their students.

Author Suskind met Cedric during his junior year of high school and told his story and the stories of some Ballou classmates to Wall Street Journal readers in a series of articles for which Suskind won the Pulitzer Prize. With a book in mind, Suskind continued to follow Cedric. When the teen-ager was accepted by Brown University in Providence, Suskind said, "I knew I had a book."

"That's what connected the 'other America' of Cedric's neighborhood to 'our America,' " Suskind said. "It was his hope to find a home in 'our America' that would reveal our deepest feelings about race."

While "Hope" makes a strong case for providing college opportunities to students who can't be measured by the conventional yardsticks of standardized tests and advanced placement courses, it is not a preachy book (in fact, the only preaching comes from Bishop Long, the pastor at the church Cedric and his mother, Barbara, attend). The story is told not from the point of view of a well-meaning, white reporter, but from Cedric's perspective.

In "Hope," Suskind says, "I stopped telling the reader what to think." He allowed the characters to be more complicated, even if their actions were not admirable or helpful.

What Suskind did with Cedric and the 12 other "characters" in the book was spend a given day following, watching, listening, writing down pages of dialogue. That night, he would "debrief" the character, reminding him or her of the actions and conversations, and probing with questions such as "What were you thinking when you said that?" or "Why did you do that?" He would go through the process with everyone involved in an incident or conversation, so the reporting for the book was remarkably time-consuming. But it enabled him to write the book from inside the characters, which is what makes it read like fiction instead of conventional journalism.

The result is that the readers of "Hope" truly feel as if they know Cedric. Suskind says that strangers say to him, almost daily, "Say 'Hi!' to Cedric for me," as if he's an old friend.

"It is the genuine human complexities that allow the characters to break out of the stereotypes," Suskind said. "I was able to show that their lives are as complicated as ours."

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