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.T H E D I G I TA L U N D E R G R O U N Dmusic could be distributed.Chuck D, despite his wishes, relented and removed the songs.But he also used the group’s website to strike back at the industry that was about to become the focus of his anti-establishment fury.He even cut a new song, “Swindler’s Lust,” ascathing critique of the label he helped put on the map.In the song he compared corporate ownership of master recordings with theownership of slaves.Before downloading the song, visitors were invited to read the fol-lowing statement: “It seems like the weasels have stepped into the fire,” he wrote.“The execs, lawyers and accountants who lately have made most of the money in the music biz are now running scaredfrom the technology that evens out the creative field and makesartists harder to pimp.Let ’em all die.I’m glad to be a contributor to the bomb.” Throughout the college lecture circuit, and mediainterviews he conducted, Chuck D continued his hard-hitting assess-ment of the music business and repeatedly stated that he was deter-mined to “murder his contract with Def Jam.”In January of 1999, after a twelve-year historic run together, Public Enemy and Def Jam severed ties.Public Enemy and Def Jam drove each other to new heights and helped to make rap music a relevant genre around the world.Their breakup symbolized the profoundconversion hip hop was undergoing.Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons, the two men that created Def JamRecords, were an unlikely duo.The chemistry between them set Def Jam on fire.In the end, however, their distinctive backgrounds ulti-mately drove them apart.When they met, Rubin, a Jewish kid from a Long Island upper-middle-class family, was studying at New YorkUniversity.Simmons, who came from a modestly middle-class Hol-lis, Queens, family, was an upstart—yet still largely unproven—pro-moter and manager hoping to establish himself during hip hop’shumble beginnings.As a student at NYU in 1981, Rubin was going to121 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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