Culture

Label Conscious: The Ghosts of Def Jam's Past

Def Jam Recordings: The First 25 Years of the Last Great Record Label BY Def Jam, Bill Adler, Dan Charnas. edited by Rick Rubin, Russell Simmons. Rizzoli. Hardcover, 312 pages. $60.
The cover of Def Jam Recordings: The First 25 Years of the Last Great Record Label

In 1995, the head-trauma wing at a nursing home in Bensonhurst began acquiring the lost memories of Def Jam's first rapper. Terry Keaton, a new patient at Haym Salomon hospital, had emerged from a coma unaware that he was T La Rock. Or that T La Rock had a hit in 1984 called "It's Yours." All of this was news to Keaton, as it was to neurologists. What was known is that the history of T La Rock — and perhaps the time of his life — had been purged from Terry Keaton's mind with a blunt instrument.