The Impresario of Rap

By JANICE C. SIMPSON

THEY CALL RUSSELL SIMMONS THE man with the juice. That's rapspeak for power. During the past decade, this streetwise entertainment mogul has amassed tons of it. You want to talk records? He owns six labels, including the pioneering Def Jam. Live concerts? His management company boasts a roster of such seminal rap performers as Run-DMC, Public Enemy, LL Cool J and 3rd Bass. Television? His broadcast and film-production company turns out the popular Home Box Office show Russell Simmons' Def Comedy Jam, a weekly showcase for black stand-up comics. Nobody has done more than Simmons, 34, to move rap -- or hip- hop, as aficionados call it -- from the streets of the inner city into the mainstream of American pop culture.

He has moved it, but not modified it. Unlike Berry Gordy, the Motown Records founder who used widely appealing performers like the Supremes to facilitate soul music's crossover into the white market in the early 1960s, Simmons has built his reputation on a refusal to assimilate. He promotes artists whose speech, dress and demeanor reflect the in-your-face bravado of black urban adolescents and the rebellious fantasies of those in the suburbs. Taking direct cues from his audience, Simmons told Run-DMC to wear their dark glasses and black leather suits onstage and LL Cool J to retain his slouchy, bucket- shaped Kangol hat. He also encouraged Public Enemy to be politically controversial and BWP (Bytches with Problems) to be sexually explicit.

"Russell likes it pure, just as it is," says his friend and mentor Quincy Jones. "He wants it raw." Says Simmons: "I don't think every black kid can look at Bill Cosby and hope that's what they're going to be one day. It's not that I don't think Bill Cosby is a great role model. I just don't think he's the only one or that assimilation is the only way we can make it."

Simmons constantly prospects for new ways to market the rap phenomenon. In the works at his TV and film company are The Johnson Posse, a sitcom Simmons describes as "Married . . . with Children in the projects"; The Clown Prince, a comedy for Tri-Star Pictures about a white youngster who grows up in a black ghetto and has trouble fitting in at a predominantly white college; and a syndicated radio network that will transmit hip-hop music via satellite to AM stations around the country. Earlier this year, Simmons made his first venture into print, teaming up with Jones and Time Warner to create Volume, a new music magazine that is slated to make its debut in September and is aiming to become the Rolling Stone of the 1990s.

But wait. With its reliance on profanity and lyrics that often demean women, disparage nonblacks or celebrate violence, doesn't rap seem to glorify the worst aspects of ghetto culture? Not necessarily, says Simmons. He dissociates himself from the misogynistic and racist statements his rappers make. The president of his company is a woman. During the uproar three years ago over anti-Semitic statements made by Professor Griff, then a member of Public Enemy (later severed), Simmons condemned Griff. Nevertheless, he steadfastly defends the right of his performers to have their say and to say it however they want. "I let the rappers be what they are," he says. "I try to choose the most acceptable part of it, but I don't try to change them. These kids are just telling what their realities are. I think it's important that people hear them."

Although the music he promotes celebrates a street-tough life-style, Simmons, the son of an attendance supervisor for the New York City school system, grew up in a comfortable middle-class home in Queens. He was a sociology major at the City College of New York when he first heard a disc jockey at a Harlem club break into a rap. Simmons had already begun promoting parties during his spare time, and he sensed the commercial potential in the deejay's chants. "People thought of it as a gimmick, but I knew it wasn't," he says. He eventually quit school to promote rap full time. In 1983 he and a friend named Rick Rubin, a student at New York University, pooled their savings and started the Def (rap for cool) Jam (music) label. They signed a distribution deal with CBS Records two years later. (Rubin left in 1988 over differences about the direction of the company.)

These days Simmons is, as the rappers say, livin' large. His empire brings him an income of $5 million a year. He still prides himself on his jeans-and- sneakers wardrobe, but he drives around town in a white bulletproof Rolls- Royce. He does his business out of his apartment, a triplex penthouse previously owned by Cher in a trendy part of New York's East Village. He drinks Cristal champagne and buys abstract art.

It's all a far cry from the gritty B-boy life that first fueled rap. Some say Simmons has fallen out of touch and lost ground to younger, more radical hip-hoppers in Florida and California. Simmons admits that times have changed, but he isn't ready to retire yet. He still visits an average of 15 clubs a week to scout new talent. "We're not going to be as young and edgy as we were," he concedes. "But we're still in touch enough that we're way, way, way ahead of American pop culture."