by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The carpet outside last Monday’s Hip-Hop Inaugural Ball was not red but green, in honor of Heineken, one of the event’s sponsors. The green also could have stood for the price of the ticket—five hundred dollars for general admission, twenty-five hundred for “Sky Level.” The proceeds were promised to Russell Simmons’s Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, a group that has spoken out about everything from ending the Rockefeller drug laws to defending hip-hop lyrics before the F.C.C. The ball was held at the Harman Center for the Arts, on F Street, where heated white tents had been erected to contain the green carpet and any overflow. Nick Cannon, a long white scarf around his neck, shook hands outside the main lobby. On the green carpet, Don King, in rhinestone-studded denim, posed in profile for the paparazzi. A few feet away, Simmons, the co-founder of Def Jam records, took questions. He wore a long dark jacket, a black Yankees cap, white shell-top Adidas, and a pin-striped shirt buttoned to the collar with no tie.

Upstairs, the V.I.P. area was called the Hennessy Lounge. African-Americans reportedly purchase as much as eighty per cent of the Cognac imported to the United States. Hennessy, knowing its customer, was premièring a limited-edition bottle “in honor of our 44th president,” with a portion of the proceeds going to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. Smiling women in black blouses served cocktails engineered with the Presidential hooch. A flat screen flashed images of the bottle. A row of models of indeterminable race, wearing black dresses, stood off to the side having their photographs taken with various guests.

Simmons ambled in with a small entourage, and the room got tighter. He pulled aside the rapper T.I. and talked to him about the importance of mentorship. In March, T.I. is expected to go to jail on federal weapons charges. He was to be honored at the ball for “bringing an awareness to this election season,” according to his Web site. He introduced Simmons to a teen-age boy from Georgia whom he’d taken on as a mentee, along with a few others. “This is just one of them,” he told Simmons.

Simmons had flown in from Utah, where he’d been screening a new movie about Run-DMC’s late d.j., Jam Master Jay, and marketing SpongeBob diamonds, part of a jewelry line that he and his ex-wife had helped start. He stood next to a display of Hennessy 44 bottles and did a series of TV interviews, rattling off several packaged points. He called Obama’s election a “shift in consciousness.” He mentioned his own work on three elections. He talked up the environment and compared Obama’s rise to Run-DMC’s. “Nobody from the black congress believed,” Simmons said. “I remember when Run-DMC was on MTV. Nobody else black was on there but Michael Jackson.”

When he was done, he mentioned that Obama’s security team had come by earlier to check the place out. “I don’t think he’s going to show up,” Simmons said. But, he added, “I wouldn’t expect John Kerry to come.” Ushered onward by a handler, Simmons began making his way out. At nearly every step, he was stopped by an admirer and was asked to pose for a picture. He was tired, and his smile was work—the mouth forced to spread, the eyebrows at half-mast. Once outside the lounge, he darted down several flights of stairs, past different ballrooms with different d.j.s playing different music, until he was in the basement. He went through a door with his name taped to the front, into a makeshift dressing room,and introduced an Abercrombie & Fitch model named Katie Rost, his date. “She’s smart and she writes,” he said. “She went to Boston University and got a degree in journalism.” (Later, on her blog, Rost quoted from T.I.’s acceptance speech at the ball: “So I’mma thank Him for everything. . . . I’mma thank Him for making me sell crack. I’mma thank Him for making me have shoot-outs. I’mma thank him for allowing me to watch my partners die in my arms, so I’d be fearful enough for my life and paranoid enough to go out and cop machine guns and silencers so I catch a fed case and I have to put up $3 million for my bond . . . just so I be validated enough to get out there and touch the youth because they know that I done been through it.”)

In 2008, Simmons took a leave from H.S.A.N. and went around the country campaigning for Obama. The President’s relationship with hip-hop is complicated. Nas hosted an official event for the campaign, and the President’s staff has noted that he has some Jay-Z on his iPod. But he was forced to denounce the rapper Ludacris for writing a song with the lyrics “Hillary hated on you, so that bitch is irrelevant.” The inaugural concert featured performers of all strains of American music, but, aside from Will.i.am singing a duet with Sheryl Crow, there were no rap performances.

Simmons talked a bit about Obama and hip-hop. “He embraced it as much as a politician can,” he said. “I was amazed by his willingness to put some of us in the room. If I was running for President, I wouldn’t want me to speak for me, so I was amazed. He let those of us who love him work for him.”

He also mentioned hosting Louis Farrakhan at his first Hip-Hop Summit: “I’m a big fan of Minister Farrakhan, but I was concerned that my association with him might rub off on Obama.”

Simmons had two more balls to get to, but he was considering heading to bed instead. He then ticked off his various projects—working with 50 Cent on the Jam Master Jay film, pushing Governor David Paterson toward retroactive repeal of the drug laws, teaching yoga classes sponsored by Smartwater. He said, “Every morning, I stand on my head for five minutes.” ♦

Labels: Entrepreneur, Hip Hop