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Music / Record LabelDefinitive Jux
Definitive Jux
ABOUT THE WORK
Definitive Jux created a place for a particular type of independent hip-hop that felt like its own universe. Cannibal Ox, Aesop Rock, El-P, Mr. Lif, RJD2, C-Rayz Walz and the artists around them could be strange, political, abrasive, funny, cerebral, wild or deeply personal. They did not need to sound alike. They felt like they belonged to the same world.
That is what Def Jux made. Not simply records, but context. It gave artists somewhere to put personal history, tragedy, anger, alienation and the disorientation of post-9/11 wartime America.
Def Jux did something more interesting than simply document angst. It gave that angst ambition. An artist could begin with whatever was broken, frightening or unresolved in ordinary life and push past it into imagination: bizarre characters, science fiction, poetry, paranoia, impossible New York streets and entire alternate realities.
That is why records like Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein, Aesop Rock’s Bazooka Tooth and El-P’s Fantastic Damage feel connected even when they are radically different objects. Each contains recognizable emotional and social experience but keeps expanding outward until the experience becomes larger than autobiography alone. The imagination is still rooted in lived experience and in an interpretation of the world around them, preventing it from collapsing into escapism.
The Revenge of the Robots documentary followed Def Jux artists on their 2002 tour, giving the records a companion piece: an opportunity to see what the institution looked like when it moved through the world. El-P, Mr. Lif, RJD2 and the people around them were no longer names connected by a logo on the back of an album. You could watch the personalities, performances, jokes, exhaustion and chaos of the thing in motion.
Def Jux built a world on record. Revenge of the Robots let you visit it.
That is what Def Jux made. Not simply records, but context. It gave artists somewhere to put personal history, tragedy, anger, alienation and the disorientation of post-9/11 wartime America.
Def Jux did something more interesting than simply document angst. It gave that angst ambition. An artist could begin with whatever was broken, frightening or unresolved in ordinary life and push past it into imagination: bizarre characters, science fiction, poetry, paranoia, impossible New York streets and entire alternate realities.
That is why records like Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein, Aesop Rock’s Bazooka Tooth and El-P’s Fantastic Damage feel connected even when they are radically different objects. Each contains recognizable emotional and social experience but keeps expanding outward until the experience becomes larger than autobiography alone. The imagination is still rooted in lived experience and in an interpretation of the world around them, preventing it from collapsing into escapism.
The Revenge of the Robots documentary followed Def Jux artists on their 2002 tour, giving the records a companion piece: an opportunity to see what the institution looked like when it moved through the world. El-P, Mr. Lif, RJD2 and the people around them were no longer names connected by a logo on the back of an album. You could watch the personalities, performances, jokes, exhaustion and chaos of the thing in motion.
Def Jux built a world on record. Revenge of the Robots let you visit it.