Def Jam founders celebrate book release

First, Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons, the founders of hip-hop's most influential label, Def Jam Recordings, led the standing-room-only crowd at the New York Public Library's majestic Celeste Bartos Forum in 5 1/2 minutes of silent meditation.

Later, they blasted Public Enemy's revolutionary call for protests, "Fight the Power," so loud it was bouncing off the room's 30-foot-high glass ceiling Friday night.

That range seems about right for a celebration of the publishing of "Def Jam Recordings: The First 25 Years of the Last Great Record Label," a coffee-table book of heft and substance about the anti-establishment early days of hip-hop.

"It was only the counterculture if you were on the outside," Simmons told Paul Holdengraber, director of "Live from the NYPL," during the two-hour interview. "To us, it was just culture."

Rubin said he and Simmons launched Def Jam out of his NYU dorm room because they wanted to document the hip-hop culture they saw in the clubs and in the streets.

After Holdengraber pulled out a quote from Rubin in the 1981 Long Beach High School yearbook -- "I want to be loud, I want to be heard, I want you all to know I'm not part of the herd" -- the Long Island native laughed and said, "I'm still the same."

After songs and videos of Def Jam's numerous successes played -- a young LL Cool J doing "Rock the Bells," the Beastie Boys fighting for their right to party, Slick Rick's "Children's Story," Run-D.M.C.'s performance of "Walk This Way" -- Rubin talked about how he called Chuck D of Public Enemy every day for six months to persuade the rapper from Roosevelt to sign to Def Jam and how he cried when he first heard "Fight the Power."

When asked why, Rubin said, "It changed what rap could be."