Def Jam Records and Phat Farm owner Russell Simmons was in Atlanta, Georgia over the weekend to promote his new autobiography, Life and Def. Simmons stopped at ATL’s Medu Book Store for a signing and spoke on the recent admission of guilt by his label’s biggest artists, Jay-Z.
“I was kind of surprised…” Russel told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,”I guess he didn’t want the risk of a jury putting him in jail for 15 years, now he is in control of his future again.” Simmons is obviously taking the stance that Jay-Z only plead guilty out of fear of being wrongfully found guilty by the jury, whereby he would have gotten jailtime as opposed to probation.
Simmons also spoke about his clothing line, Phat Farm, which won the Apparel Mart’s D.I.V.A. award for best urban sportswear line at a gala held at the Hyatt hotel on Friday. “We’re going to do $220 million in sales this year,” Simmons predicted. “That doesn’t compare to the $2 billion Ralph Lauren’s doing. But we are making our idea of becoming the next great American brand seem more and more reasonable.” Russell Simmons’ autobiography, Life And Def, is co-authored by legendary Hip-Hop journalist Nelson George. In the book, Simmons shares tales of his youth in Queens, early New York street-hustling days with DJs like Kurtis Blow, and partying in the Caribbean with Naomi Campbell and Robert De Niro, describing his life as full “of decisions and danger with deep moral and emotional consequences.” Readers will get some behind-the-scenes glimpses into the formative and recent years of Hip-Hop, now the most dominant form of youth culture. Simmons relates, for example, hanging out with rapper Notorious B.I.G. hours before he was murdered.