In Def Jam Recordings: The First 25 Years of the Last Great Record Label, the book’s vivid imagery is the real draw, especially in telling the Def Jam story:

Hip-hop photography is rich because it depicts a genre in which the line between person and persona is intensely fraught: name another art form so profoundly caught up in notions of authenticity, in “keeping it real.” But the contrast between the posed and the candid shots in “Def Jam Recordings,” which tell different stories, underscores how wonderfully unreal rap artistry often keeps it. Glimpse, on one page, candids of rappers mischievously goofing off behind the scenes, being boys having a grand old time. On another, see the same boys turned men, soberly engaged in “being a rapper”: exit the goofy grins; enter the don’t-mess-with-me stares and hip-hop visual clichés in all their glory — dollars and diamonds, muscles and minks, cars and cigars.

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