LYOR COHEN: I feel fantastic. I’m on my 30th year of avoiding work. It’s not that I don’t work or have had difficult times, but like I tell all young people, if you could avoid a job and you could build a career, that is the greatest gift you could give yourself. How do I feel about the particulars of the where I’m at? I feel strong. I could touch my toes. I have loving, fantastic children. I have a great infrastructure of friends and people that are important to me. I’m interested in all sorts of things other than soundscan, bds and making money. I feel like I’m a fully rounded person that I haven’t even reached my fullest potential as a human being and as a media executive.
LONDELL MCMILLAN: For the young people, you mentioned the distinction between having a career and having a job. Can you share what you mean by that exactly?
LYOR COHEN: A job is something that you go to work, looking at the clock and wishing that the day was finished. A career—you can’t find enough time in the day to do everything that you want to do.
LONDELL MCMILLAN: How did you manage still to have passion about a career as opposed to come to a job now, versus when you were in your early beginnings at Def Jam?
LYOR COHEN: Well, I started at Rush and I never had a job. The key is to find your calling and to take the fundamental risk of being curious enough to find your passion and not stop until you participate in that passion. Too many [people] fall into what traditional pressures of family and friends and society have for them. You know, you got to school, you get a good job, you start a family. It’s so well organized. I’ve never been that well organized and I’ve had the support of my family to give me the strength to take as much risk early on in my career and early on in my life to find my calling.
LONDELL MCMILLAN: When you look for people to work with you or for you, particularly people who want to get into this business of Hip-Hop entertainment, what do you look for?
LYOR COHEN: What I look for in an individual is someone that does not have the expectation that this is going to lead them to fame and fortune. That’s always been a buzz kill to me. I never thought that I was going to make a living doing what I was doing. There was no calculation or premeditation that this will lead me to making a living.
So I look for someone who’s in it because of the deep passion of doing good, if someone loves what they do and they do it really well. Now, understand the difference between really good and magnificent. Ok, Kobe B [Bryant} could go both ways. He’s magnificent. When you’re a point guard and you could go only right, you’re just really good. Really good makes a million, two million a year. Kobe Bryant would make a hundred million dollars. And it’s the versatility; it’s the ambidextrous, its’ the ability to challenge yourself both ways that makes one dangerous. So when I look for someone, I look for someone who has the passion [and] the curiosity to be able to cross over, to go both ways. And both ways could mean a combination of creativity and business. Or both ways could mean different types of styles of music. What I mean by [this is] he’s not stuck on stupid, [or] what people think you’re supposed to do in this business. I like dreamers.
LONDELL MCMILLAN: Give me an example of some of those people that go both ways that are “dangerous” in your view.
LYOR COHEN: I don’t want to use anybody’s names. Everybody knows who they are. The ones that are making a lot of impact— social impact, economic impact— and will stand the test of time. They don’t need a hit record to keep them in business. You know who those are. If Kobe doesn’t go 30 points, you know he’s stolen nine balls and made 14 assists. Real magnificence finds the way to win in every category.
LONDELL MCMILLAN: Do you think the definition between real magnificence has changed over time has changed since the early 80s?
LYOR COHEN: No. No. No.
LONDELL MCMILLAN: What is the difference between Hip-Hop in the 80s and Hip-Hop now?
LYOR COHEN: In the 80s people were in it for great passion, no expectation of economic riches. We partied together. We were a fraternity of people that had a deep love affair for what we did and a great passion for what we did. There was very little competition so I learned every thing I learned the hard way. I made so many mistakes. Listen, how is it possible that we could be high, have no money, zero clout, no organizational skills and no experience and end up making such a living and building something? It’s only because of the pure arrogance of the major labels at the time that allowed us to incubate and artist develop ourselves. We learned things in a very organic and a very hard way, where we made many, many mistakes, but no one put us out. I loved the fraternal order of people. We wanted everybody in that space to do really well. We didn’t have that word “hater.” That is a new term; it’s not an old school term. And what’s changed now is the competition. People are in it for different reasons; [they’re] into economic riches and fame and there’s less of a fraternal order. There’s no association of people wanting to see others do well in this space. They think that if someone else is doing well, they must not be. They’re stealing they’re ability to do well. And that, to me, is sad, but I guess now it’s a billion dollar business and before it was a couple of hundred-dollar business. The world has changed dramatically with the internet invention that we didn’t have before so our ability to go out there, force and do all these street team fighting work has changed the whole [industry] in a dynamic way. How we deliver records and how we source records and artists has changed dramatically. But if everything was just status quo, there would be no shifting of the guard. I wouldn’t be running one of the most important, great institutions. If it was all gravy and everybody was doing great, then my predecessor would still be doing this job. So change also allows for a changing of the guard, new people and fresh ideas.
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