the Beastie Boys, a white punk rock band that Rubin transformed into a rap group.
But Samuels writes that Rubin and oth- ers soon found that "the more rappers were packaged as violent black criminals, the bigger their white audiences be- came. . . . Rap's appeal to whites rested in its evocation of an age-old image of black- ness: a foreign, sexually charged, and criminal underworld against which the norms of white society are defined, and, extension, through which they may be de- fied."...