![]() “I knew it would last, but I didn’t know that it would revolutionize music the world over,” he said. He described hip-hop as “a very, very, very important American expression.” ![]() ![]() He later mentored Rubin and even produced some songs himself using the pseudonym Oliver Shalom, a play on the Hebrew honorific for the dead, “alav ha-shalom” (“peace be upon him”).Īt 75, Fuchs still runs Tuff City and plans to release a four-part vinyl compilation of classic rap songs to which he owns the rights later this year. “I left my career as a writer and decided to run a record company on the belief that this Black music, like every other Black music in history, would be worth codifying,” he said. In his 2010 book “The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop,” Charnas shares the stories of the record label executives who commercialized hip-hop, including several Jewish ones: Roy and Jules Rifkind, owners of the label that released one of the first rap records in 1979, “King Tim III (Personality Jock)” by Fatback Band Aaron Fuchs, founder of Tuff City Records, the first rap label to secure a major-label distribution deal Tom Silverman, founder of Tommy Boy Records, whose roster of musicians included Queen Latifah, Coolio, De La Soul, and Naughty By Nature Jerry Heller, co-founder of Ruthless Records with rapper Eazy-E and Julie Greenwald, Def Jam’s head of marketing in the ’90s (who now runs the Atlantic Music Group).įuchs, who launched Tuff City in 1981, said by phone that he began working with hip-hop artists such as The Cold Crush Brothers at least a year before Rubin started Def Jam. ![]() “White people have played more of a role on the business side than as artists because hip-hop is, for the most part, a Black art form,” explained Charnas, who worked in A&R (which involves seeking out new artists to sign) at Rubin’s American Recordings label in the early 1990s. RELATED: The 10 most influential Jewish rappers of the past 50 yearsīut the biggest contributions that Jews have made collectively to hip-hop may have been on the business side, as managers and record label executives. 4 titled “Bars Mitzvah.” There is also a vibrant, multilingual hip-hop scene in Israel. Today, there are a number of rappers who make Judaism a prominent part of their stage personas, from Kosha Dillz to Lil Dicky to BLP Kosher the latter dropped an album on Aug. In the early 2000s, religiously-observant artists such as Y-Love and Matisyahu carved out a niche for rap infused with Jewish wisdom and spirituality. Over the last five decades, many Jewish rappers from different backgrounds and nationalities have left their mark on hip-hop culture, from Drake to Doja Cat to Mac Miller to Nissim Black, to name just a few. It would take six years after that Bronx party for a rap record to get airplay on pop radio (Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”).įast forward to 2023, and hip-hop is ubiquitous - not just on Spotify and TikTok, but across pop culture, from television to fashion. In its early years, rap was dismissed as street music by most music industry gatekeepers. 11, 1973, hip-hop was born (or so the origin story goes) when Jamaican Americans Cindy Campbell and her brother, a DJ who went by Kool Herc, hosted a back-to-school dance party in the recreation room of their Bronx apartment building. ![]() “Instead of hip-hop being rapping over disco instrumentals, he conceived of it as sonic collage art.”įifty years ago, on Aug. “If you want to talk about a singular Jewish contribution to hip-hop, it’d be Rick,” said Dan Charnas, a journalist and arts professor at Rubin’s alma mater, in an interview. Rubin produced and released the group’s 1986 debut album, “Licensed to Ill,” which became the first rap album to reach No. He certainly was not, but he was one of the only white Jews making rap records until Michael “Mike D” Diamond, Adam “MCA” Yauch, and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz - better known as the Beastie Boys - burst onto the scene. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |