Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorn. Back in 1979, 1980, there were plenty of people who still

thought that hip-hop was a fad, but not my guest Russell Simmons. He knew it was real and it was

here to stay and it's made him very, very successful. I believe in Curtis Blow, I believe in Houdini,

I believe in Jimmy Spicer, I believe in Phyllis Four, I believe in all of these guys, you know,

some lasted longer than others, but I believed, you know, and we made that movie Crush Groove was

about a movie, it was about a manager and his audience and you know, I mean I was two years

all the time, but I've seen it since. Right, but you know, that was the point we believed.

And I think that's where it takes in anything, I learned a lesson from that experience, you know,

having faith in your vision, that is stuck with me, you know, in every business I've taken on,

it's taken a lot longer than the business plan and has been faced with more obstacles and mostly have

been investments in white spaces where people don't know what it is in the first place.

Everything from financial services to poetry, to a lot of the investment, to doing a show

about a Revenant 5A student, no one like these ideas. It's Bullseye.

Coming up, I'll talk to Russell Simmons. He helped found Deaf Jam recordings and

basically helped start hip-hop. He once argued that the Beastie boys shouldn't dress up as

hip-hop guys with matching jumpsuits. He said they should wear the same clothes they did

and they were a punk rock band. I always like to promote authentic and honest things because they

have more stable lasting kind of impression. Antiole talked about why he did drugs. That's why

everybody uses drugs. Make the noise stop. And why he started meditating. The reason we meditate

is to make the noise stop. And later on in the show, are you a music snop?

Carl Wilson says we choose music partly on how good it is, but also as an act of self-definition.

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