The Tanning of America (10 page)

So by the early 1990s it wasn't unthinkable that hip-hop artists would want to seize opportunities in product endorsement that those who had come before them had made possible. Yes, it's true that in the past the idea of pushing brands would have been seen as inauthentic, or something you did after your career peaked, or as some kind of selling out. But no longer. Why not? Why wasn't it selling out for rappers to embrace and promote Versace when it would have been seen that way for rock 'n' roll and R&B icons or pop superstars? Well, one reason, as we saw with “My Adidas,” was that it's not a sellout when it's authentic to your taste and style anyway and you're already doing product placement for free. It was part of the art and far from selling out; Andy Warhol proved that when he painted iconic pop art portraits of products like Campbell's soup cans, paying homage to one of the most classic, enduring American brands ever.

When I asked Jay-Z for his insights, he pointed out that many of the rock musicians had come from sustainable backgrounds, seeking acclaim for their talent and a level of cool that playing music gave them. For rappers coming out of the projects, getting paid and bettering yourself is part of gaining credibility. Jay reminded me also that it's not selling out when a kid in the projects sees a guy rapping about Sprite or the Gap because they know he'll be getting the money and that feeds his or her own aspiration. It's not that being acknowledged for talent and great work isn't desirable, but getting paid trumps those goals.

I agree. I don't think many hip-hop fans ever subscribed to the concept of selling out, not when you come from nothing and a deal can become part of your rags-to-riches success story. Besides, if you were helping a company prosper by giving it a street pass and not getting paid, by the laws of the street that was
your
bad. After putting Kangol on the map, for instance, LL Cool J expected the company would want to work a deal with him. They made overtures, but when Kangol didn't follow through on them and ultimately didn't bite, he quietly changed hat brands.

The other reason that endorsement opportunities made sense to hip-hop artists was because sports superstars had been aligning their winning images with top brands for years, scoring deals valued in the multiple millions without anyone batting an eye. Together, Michael Jordan and Nike began writing the rules of sports marketing starting in the mid-1980s, when Phil Knight signed the young Chicago Bulls phenom. What Jordan did for Nike and vice versa became the gold standard that reached its apex in the late 1990s, benefiting and employing the force of hip-hop in the process. To this day, I give infinite credit to Nike and their innovative advertising team, Wieden and Kennedy, for opening my eyes to the only-in-America story of how a celebrity athlete, Michael Jordan, turned a sneaker company into a global power.

It was all about the synergy. Oh yeah, by the 1990s, Jordan was the quintessential celebrity athlete endorser of any product, although the Nike swoosh went along for the ride, no matter what the brand. The mythology was indestructible. His ability on the court to defy gravity effortlessly was so extraordinary that once it was combined with the unique and well-designed Air Jordans, his signature line, the combination was unstoppable. With acrobatic dunks, championship buzzer-beating shots, prolific scoring, and an uncanny ability to win, all day, any day, Jordan seemed superhuman, mystical even. Sports anchors, fellow athletes, and fans alike were constantly dumbfounded. How did he do it? In one of the ad campaigns, Nike ventured to answer the question with the slogan, “It must be the shoes.”

The moral of the story wasn't that Air Jordans would endow anyone with his ability to play or with his fairy-tale lifestyle. What people would get for over a hundred bucks a pair was another kind of uplift, a way to convey status, to touch Jordan's greatness via brand alignment. Or, as Phil Knight would say, he wasn't selling sneakers at all; rather, he was selling dreams.

The narrative of dream-seeking was so incredibly successful that every brand associated in any way with sports—and even those that weren't—wanted in on the magic formula. And so the stage was set for athletes of all stripes to ride Michael Jordan's coattails and nab their own endorsement opportunities.

Because of the literal proximity in inner-city neighborhoods between ballers and rappers, it was automatic for there to be a kinship and an overlap of language, values, and style. When hip-hop stars began showing up in the most coveted and expensive courtside seats at NBA games around the country, the public accepted the symbiotic relationship as a given. The fact that most rappers might have fantasized about being on the court dunking the ball was matched by evidence that more than a few NBA players dreamed of rapping. Some actually did, like Shaquille O'Neal, who made two successful albums.

With most basketball players influenced by hip-hop culture, all to varying degrees, as the nineties wore on you could usually look at the court and see the latest reflection of fashion trends happening on the street—from piercings and tattoos to the ever-changing rules for male hair grooming and the dramatically expanding cut and size of uniforms. However the players were translating hip-hop's new rules for their look, fans in turn would reinterpret the style for street wear; then sports apparel manufacturers would pay unprecedented amounts to license team logos and colors and then go on to have a sales bonanza by mass-marketing apparel to consumers anywhere and everywhere. Besides the apparel companies that would come to life as the result of hip-hop's huge embrace of professional and college team attire, sportswear by existing companies such as Champion and Starter would become wardrobe staples. If you didn't have a Starter jacket, there was practically something wrong with you!

Like everything else about hip-hop, the potential for an economic impact as the result of the proximity between rap and sports wasn't taken seriously at first. Because it was not premeditated or mercenary to start, the intertwining of the two cultures really wasn't so earth shattering—until it was. Such was the case when NWA in South Central L.A. decided to adopt the warrior mentality, colors, and style of its favorite local team, the Raiders. NWA—which stood unapologetically for “Niggaz with Attitude” and included at various stages Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, DJ Yella, and MC Ren—came onto the scene in the late eighties when hip-hop fashion was starting to explore the bright color palette. But wanting to avoid colors altogether, as L.A.'s most lethal gangs had commandeered them (especially red and blue, which belonged to the Bloods and the Crips, respectively), NWA opted to stick with all black. Actually, they opted to don the black and silver, with the logo of the pirate with a patch over one eye backed by a shield—the uniform elements that reflected their devotion to the L.A. Raiders.

It wasn't just the fact that the guys from Compton were loyal to their hometown Raiders; there was also the opportunity to identify with an unapologetic team that had a storied past. The team, in its own way, was from a hard-knock life, as a whole coming from nothing and then becoming crazy, badass champions. That was even before leaving Oakland in 1982, when they brought their black and silver to L.A. and won the Super Bowl the very next year. As Ice Cube would later say in
Straight Outta L.A
.
,
his documentary about the Raiders' twelve-year stay in Los Angeles before they picked up and went back to Oakland, his first impression of the team was that “they were violent and a little rough around the edges . . . and I think that's what I liked about them.”

The Lakers, he would explain, were too glitzy and the Dodgers “out of reach,” but the Raiders felt like family. As Ice Cube recalled, “It seemed like my uncles played for L.A.”

Once NWA started wearing Raiders jerseys and other team-associated gear on their album covers and in publicity shots, the local boom for football-related apparel and merchandise was a done deal. The gear wasn't just for showing up at the L.A. Coliseum to cheer for the Raiders. For youth in Los Angeles, black, Latino, Asian, and white, it was like putting on clothing that gave you superpowers of attitude and protection—both the hard-edged, outlaw mentality of the rappers and the brash “Just Win, Baby” mind-set of the Raiders. The assumption at the sports organization's front office and in the press was that gang members had co-opted the Raiders attire—even though it was so much more beyond that. And not only in L.A. All of a sudden, there was a new entry point for consumers across many demographics and across the United States to identify with the take-no-prisoners playing style of both the football team and the rappers. Before the Raiders decided to pull up stakes and return to Oakland in 1994, the NFL's annual licensing and merchandise revenues went from $300 million to $3 billion—thanks mainly to what NWA had unwittingly caused!

All of that was accomplished without endorsement fees or any marketing deals ever being struck. Unbelievable! No matter how you personally felt about the bad-boy groove and the more violent lyrical content that was ushering in the era of gangsta rap, you had to admit that it reflected something completely authentic that was tied to real experience in consumers' lives. And somehow, when combined with the culture of football, the commercial translation became larger than the sum of the parts.

Ice Cube talked about his understanding of how this happened : “Sports without music is just a game. The music adds the same thing it does for a movie soundtrack. It tells your emotions where to be.” And as for what the image and persona of the Raiders did for the music, he also asserted, “It changed the trajectory of hip-hop.”

Because of the association firmly emblazoned in the mind of the public, across the demographics, all of a sudden if you liked football, really the quintessential American sport, it was okay to like rap music. Poetry. The tanning effect was swift and forceful, causing a quantum shift in how language from “the street” made its way to main street.

As early as 1991, executives from media to Madison Avenue to the music industry were starting to try to figure out how to handle the baby Godzilla of rap that was rattling its cage, trying to set itself free. The bad news was that nobody really had any clue just how powerful the market force was going to be. The good news was that the opportunities were plentiful for people who could serve as translators—people like me.

O
n a Southern California morning at some point in early to mid-1992, or thereabouts, a future mentor of mine, Jimmy Iovine, held a history-making meeting in his offices at Interscope Records. A rock producer who had come up through the ranks of the music industry starting in the early 1970s, working closely with superstars like John Lennon, Stevie Nicks, Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Petty, and shepherding the fortunes of entities that ranged from U2 to Nine Inch Nails, Jimmy famously kept a pair of beloved old speakers hooked up to his office sound system that he believed were the only trusted means for listening to new artists. That day, those speakers would come in handy as he met with fellow Interscope executive John McLain and two guys named Marion and Andre—otherwise known as Suge Knight and Dr. Dre—who were then looking for distribution for their label, Death Row Records. The album they hoped Jimmy would decide to hear on his speakers was called
The Chronic,
featuring Dre with a new rapper by the name of Cordozar Calvin Broadus—better known as Snoop Doggy Dogg.

On that same morning, or in this general time period, across the country in the offices of RCA's record division, where I was then employed, a few back-to-back meetings were wrapping up that were definitely historical for me. Even though my path and the paths of everyone meeting on the West Coast would eventually intersect, the only common bond we had at the time was the confusing state of affairs in which the music business found itself.

By now, at last, in my early twenties, I'd finally given in to the pull that hip-hop had been exerting over me for years. After I let go of the idea that the mortgage business (or any of the other professions I tried) was going to be my calling, it seemed as if doors into the music industry kept opening and I kept getting the go-ahead. Well, at least initially. My entry point had been at the lowest rung of the ladder, not long after I'd befriended DJ Wiz, who DJ'd for the young, versatile rap duo Kid 'n Play. Besides their ability to rock a party, they were fresh, with killer comedic banter and funky dance moves—and, in the case of Kid, a distinctive hi-top fade—that made them instantly memorable.

What Wiz saw in me, I'm not sure, but he probably appreciated that I was an energetic fan who loved hip-hop and who maybe was curious to learn more about its inner workings. At any rate, he began inviting me to hang out backstage at performances and in the studio. Before much time transpired, I started pitching in and helping move equipment and run errands, and next thing I knew, they offered me an official spot as a roadie. A short while later, Wiz (a.k.a. Mark Eastmond from Queens), Kid (Chris Reid, from the Bronx), and Play (Chris Martin, from Queens too) decided to make me their road manager. In that capacity, they began turning to me for advice on all aspects of their broadening portfolio of work. However it happened, my insights and instincts were valued enough that I eventually stepped in as Kid 'n Play's manager. Wow. While being excited by the opportunity, I clearly had lots to learn. First came the crash course I was given in the intricacies of the record business. Next, because of Kid 'n Play's film franchise with
House Party
and its sequels, plus their various TV projects, I was fortunate to learn the behind-the-scenes basics of film and TV production.

With the entrepreneurial atmosphere that surrounded hip-hop, everything about it seemed to move at meteoric speed. And as I learned from watching the mainstream success of Kid'n Play, it became apparent that as quickly as you can gain a foothold in commercial popularity, you can veer just as fast into the territory of being considered soft art. Big alert. The experience would provide a cautionary tale for me down the road—both in entertainment and in advertising—that fortunes in the mainstream can turn on a dime and the change can come on as swiftly as a shift in the weather. Credibility in the pop culture marketplace is everything. It's a lesson worth underlining—
credibility is everything
.