JAYFORCE

Aaliyah, Ace Hood, the Afros, Ali D, Arrested Development: In Bill Adler’s extensive collection of Hip-Hop history, some of the genre’s biggest names are arranged next to lesser mainstream artists.

Adler was the founding publicity director of Def Jam Records. One of his first assignments was getting pop music critics at daily newspapers to cover one of the label’s new artists, LL Cool J. He worked at Def Jam for six years, before going independent and later running a gallery devoted to Hip-Hop photography. From these ventures, he accrued a massive archive, which lived in a storage space in the basement of his building until he sold the collection to Cornell University last year. Soon it will also live online

Adler sent Cornell University 500 vinyl recordings, an impressive collection of books in several languages and roughly 100,000 newspaper and magazine articles about rap and Hip-Hop…

(more, including a FREE download of the “All Things Considered” segment on NPR, via the download link that follows)

DOWNLOAD: CORNELL UNIVERSITY AND BILL ADLER TO CREATE A DIGITAL HIP-HOP ARCHIVE