CIA Agent Testifies Agency Created Hip Hop 'To Keep Black Americans Enslaved'
The People's Voice
The Story of Lyor Cohen: Little Lan$ky and the Big Check
How the Israeli-raised president of Island Def Jam Records became one of the most important men in hip-hop, and why he may now become one of the most important men in rock & roll
By Rich Cohen - June 21, 2001
You never think of wood shop in Compton. You think of welding or auto shop or running laps, that’s for sure, but who imagines the bad boys from Menace II Society or Boyz N the Hood making a spice rack? Yet wood shop is just what Harrell Cohen, a hippieish young man who grew up in the old Chico Marx mansion in Griffith Park, California, was teaching the kids of South-Central in the mid-Seventies, in that brief interlude between Republicans – wood shop, and all it suggests. And who knew this minor trivia would turn out to be a factor in the history of hip-hop, a musical culture that was then still just a smudge on the untied Adidas of a few kids clear across the country in the Bronx? For it was that shop teacher who, wanting to support his students, each weekend took his kid brother Lyor to the neighborhood basketball games in South Central, where Lyor, the future president of perhaps the greatest of all hip-hop labels, Def Jam, first swallowed the beat. “In intermissions, they would roll up drums and a huge bass guitar and do some freaky shit,” says Lyor Cohen. “It was like the Gap Band, and I remember distinctly, at age eleven or twelve, or thirteen, or fourteen, around in there, that the beat came and my jaw crashed. I physically swallowed the beat, and it went inside me. It was like someone forced down a huge pill. I knew something important had happened to me. I always credit my brother for putting me in the exact right place.”
He was born in New York, where his father, an Israeli, worked in the consulate. Following the divorce of his parents, and due to the demands of his father, who did not want Cohen raised with his mother’s family, he spent the next few years with a foster family on an avocado farm not far from Tel Aviv. When Cohen’s mother remarried, to a psychiatrist, Lyor moved in with them in L.A. In school, he forgot Hebrew and stumbled over English. A speech therapist worked on him, creating what he calls “a speech-therapist accent.” He struggles with his R’s and just rolls through the rest of the alphabet.
Since he was very young when his mom remarried, his stepfather is the only real father he has ever known. As a result, Cohen speaks of two fathers: the man who raised him in Griffith Park and his biological father, a primal figure standing forever between Cohen and his sense of himself. When I ask Cohen whether his stepfather ever tried any psychiatry on him, he looks at me like I am crazy and says, “Of course not,” then frowns, smiles and adds, “Well, wait a minute, he did hypnotize me. He took me so far back that, even though I don’t remember the language at all, he had me speaking Hebrew.”