The Tanning of America (11 page)

And also, whether in niche markets or on a mass level, you can go from flowing as credible to ebbing into not being credible so fast you don't know what hit you. Once you've lost your credibility, it's really tough to get it back. Catching that first wave onto the public stage can be relatively easy. Not the second one. I would see this time and again with artists and with brands.

Before my stint managing Kid 'n Play was over, our production company endeavors expanded my network. So, in a case of good timing, I was able to segue out of management and into an executive position in the A & R department of the black music division at RCA. With the mandate to bring in new talent to their urban music lineup and also to oversee production, I could barely believe my good luck. Looking back, I realize that it was not just the nature of the music business that had allowed me to move up so quickly; it also had something to do with what I brought to the table.

For starters, I was and am enthralled with the creative process and have enormous respect for artists. That allowed me to advocate, first and foremost, for the creative forces and to be inspired by their daring to be different. At the same time, I understand how business works and have a “doer” mentality. Daring, dreaming, and doing became my threefold mantra early on, and it would serve me well at every stage of my career. The ace up my sleeve, however, was a knack for translation between the creative and business teams. With that, whenever there were murmurings that hip-hop couldn't survive much longer, I reminded myself that I would have job security nonetheless.

In some ways, I was very naïve. In the early nineties, major labels like Capitol Records and others were dropping or paring back their urban music divisions. The main issue was that along with the R&B sound changing there was a lack of understanding of the audience and how to develop and promote hip-hop artists. Another concern was corporate consolidation. During the eighties, most of the great indie rock and R&B labels became a dying breed. Recording outposts in Philadelphia and Memphis were on the way out. Smaller maverick operations like Sugar Hill Records were no more. In 1988 Motown Records was sold to MCA, and a short time after that, Geffen Records was also sold to MCA (later to be taken over by Universal and merged with Interscope). A&M had been bought by Polygram—which would later be part of Universal and also absorbed by Interscope-Geffen.

Independents could no longer compete with the bigger coffers of the five or six remaining major record corporations, especially when it came to signing top artists. Not only that, but with the corporatization/consolidation of media, the marketing divisions at the bigger labels had more leverage and much tighter control of what got played on the radio; corporations were also more tied in to advertisers and more beholden to their media buys. Of course, a huge stumbling block for the smaller, independent companies was the rising cost of music videos. Mini-movies that jumped off the TV and made you run, not walk, to your nearest record store, music videos were marketing necessities. And finally there was the issue that blinded the industry with its fool's-gold properties: the transfer from vinyl and cassette tape technology—analog—into the digital age. Compact discs. By 2001, cassettes would account for only 4 percent of music product sold across the board. CDs became the cash cow. The major labels that had spent their millions buying record catalogs reissued CDs in every genre and had a marketing field day. That is, at first. In the meantime, certainty and passion in developing and marketing new product for all audiences, especially for younger generations, suffered.

The result was what I would call the cynical pop imitation of rap that made household names out of MC Hammer (“Can't Touch This”) and Vanilla Ice (“Ice, Ice Baby”). Nothing wrong, by the way, with being commercial and fulfilling the turn-of-the-decade market's need for dance music. But the tanning effect was nil. Musically at that time, pop rap was more of a regression in my view because a) in trying to appeal to everybody the sound was formulaic and homogenized, and b) it was bubble gum without the authenticity of culture and code that reflected honesty in people's lives.

In stark contrast, the hip-hop artistry that was evolving in more underground, countercultural ways in self-started, homegrown urban studios—with a range of credible alternatives to pop rap, including hardcore or reality rap—was anything but bubble gum. Most of the powers running the music industry had no clue how to market any of these latest evolutions of an art form they never expected to last as long as it had. Even with MTV's series
Yo! MTV Raps
—instituted in the late 1980s with none other than Fab Five Freddy as one of the hosts—most everyone assumed the drug-, sex-, and violence-laden lyrics and images of reality rap would never make it onto the airwaves. Why would it? Some of it really was too violent, obscene, jarring, insulting, shocking, and disturbing. True, but a lot of it was also incredible, original, brilliant, hilarious, prophetic, and musically and rhythmically addictive, and if you were culturally attuned, it was absolutely important.

At a time when I had an opportunity to sign voices of importance to the RCA roster, I was also eager to bring in up-and-coming production talent that included the likes of the Trackmasters, also known as Tone and Poke—Samuel Barnes and Jean Claude Olivier—and had set up a meeting with them at RCA to discuss the possibilities.

Tone—later to become one of my best friends—arrived first, even though he was running late for our nine thirty meeting. As he was coming in, I asked him to wait in my office as I'd been called into another meeting with my immediate boss, the late Skip Miller (blessings to his family), head of the black music division, and a group of guys from among the top brass. By the time I returned to my office, Tone could obviously tell by the horror-stricken look on my face that there was bad news. First, I had to tell him that, unfortunately, I didn't have a job anymore. Second, I couldn't steer him to anyone else because RCA was shutting down its urban music sector completely. As a first step to getting out of the record business altogether, they were cleaning house—quitting on the artists. Why? “They do not see the sustainability,” I told Tone, repeating what had been said to me.

Now I had to make a list of everyone to contact whose destiny and dreams had just been shattered. As for what I was going to do next, I had no idea. For a few minutes Tone and I both sort of shook our heads in disbelief that all of our rides to fame and fortune could be coming to such an abrupt halt. Then a crazy idea dawned on me and I turned to him and said, “Tone, let me manage you.”

Not missing a beat, he nodded and agreed to talk to Poke, even though we both knew it was already a done deal. Out of the frying pan and into the fire! As a manager and producer, as well as basically becoming the third Trackmaster, I was also able to seek out emerging artists and undiscovered talent for management. This was during the period when I first met a young artist by the name of Nas who rapped about real experience with a candor that was emotionally devastating. We moved forward with his second album,
It Was Written
, which also yielded the big international hit “Rule the World.”

Even though being independent was nerve-wracking, what was liberating was that instead of having to temper my tastes to those of higher-ups or conform to the standards of music that was selling already, working with the Trackmasters meant we could make the music we loved—and then dare to bring consumers in on the party. Why work so hard at having to cross over when we could invite buyers to cross over in reverse? We could also be subcontractors and shop our services to major record companies with distribution capabilities. While we were prepared for our approach to take a while to catch on and even for a bumpy ride in the beginning, much to our amazement, we flew out of the gate without a hitch and were soon unstoppable. We landed on the charts hard and fast, following one breakout hit record after the other at a rate of about every two weeks. The work was incredibly satisfying and rewarding.

The kind of music I was signing as a manager and producer represented a spectrum that ran from hip-hop with R&B roots to old-school, from pop to novelty to hardcore rap, from world-music-infused hip-hop to plain spoken-word poetry and even some rock/electronic-funk-laced rap. The list of artists whose work came out of the Trackmasters years included Nas, Mary J. Blige, Big Daddy Kane, Heavy D, LL Cool J, Faith Evans, the Notorious B.I.G., Foxy Brown, Will Smith, Mariah Carey, and Jay-Z, to name a few.

RCA's decision to drop its urban divison was one of the best things that happened to my career. Now, as for the meeting in the West Coast offices of Interscope with Jimmy Iovine, that also turned out to be a great thing for a lot of careers. By his own account, Jimmy had no context for what he was hearing on his prized speakers when Dre and Suge played the first cut of
The Chronic—“
Nuthin' but a ‘G' Thang.”

As he would tell me in later years, up until that moment Jimmy had heard hip-hop at various stages and just felt he didn't understand it. The sound, to him, had always been interesting and well produced but he hadn't felt the magic of follow-through that would give individual artists or the genre its punch. However, because Iovine paid attention to consumers, he had made sure Interscope's early offerings benefited from hip-hop's more danceable grooves by releasing records from Latin rapper Gerardo (“Rico Suave”) and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch (“Good Vibrations”). The sales success of those releases from commercial artists, one Hispanic and the other a white group, boded well for the multicultural mixing that was happening at retail. But the truth was that those groups didn't represent Interscope's focus on leading-edge music, nor had they improved Jimmy Iovine's appreciation for rap.

Now he was listening to Snoop and Dre through his speakers and everything changed for him. All of sudden Jimmy f**king got it. As soon as “Nuthin' but a ‘G' Thang” finished, he blurted out, “Holy s**t!” He admitted that he had heard Snoop before but now he was coming at the sound with a clean slate, with Dr. Dre's production, and after listening to the whole album it all came together so powerfully that he immediately said, “Let's do this!”

In his own personal tanning turning point, Jimmy finally had a cultural construct for what he was hearing. Describing the feeling to me, he later said, “It hit me then that I knew what it was.” He felt that it was what the Rolling Stones had been when they arrived on the scene, what Guns N' Roses had been, what
The Godfather
and
Goodfellas
as movies had been when they hit a nerve with the public—“plus a little
Shaft
thrown in,” he said. From then on, he compared Snoop and Dre to Keith and Mick as well as to Axl and Slash. To Jimmy Iovine, who knew nothing about the history of hip-hop or the culture it had bred or even the Main Street economy it was already beginning to support, this was no different from the most raucous, rabble-rousing rock'n' roll from past eras—guys (or gals) telling gangster stories.

Everyone warned him against making a deal with Death Row Records. Besides the baggage from previous deals that would make it costly, besides the difficulty in getting
The Chronic
played on radio and MTV and favorably reviewed in spite of obscenity issues, besides the fact that Time Warner (then the parent company of Interscope) would withhold support, and besides everyone's certainty that there was a ceiling on rap's core (black) audience, they went ahead with the deal.

All the predictions about the challenges that
The Chronic
would face did come true, and then some. That is, except for one thing. There was no ceiling. Or, if there had been one before, thanks to economic forces, that lid was about to be blown off for good. The core audience, as only time would tell, wasn't black. It was tan.

During the same time period when decisive meetings were happening at Interscope and at Trackmasters, it seemed that Madison Avenue, along with the rest of the advertising world and their counterparts in corporate boardrooms, finally got the memo that it was no longer the 1950s or '60s—back in the day when modern mass marketing began. Many of the up-and-coming baby boomer executives being handed keys to power at those companies had grown up in the shifting era that would be explored in the cable TV series
Mad Men,
which debuted in 2007. As a time in which the monologue in commercials and print ads portrayed a lifestyle that was idealized, airbrushed normalcy—a picture that rarely matched up with anyone's reality—in the fifties and much of the sixties you were led to conclude that your life would only live up to those ideals once you'd bought into the brands being marketed.

One of the few commercials that commented on race relations and attempted to reflect the real social and political concerns of the day was a Wisk detergent spot in 1963 that, shockingly ahead of its time, had two kids, one black and the other white, playing baseball together. For the most part, however, the color barrier would remain as firmly in place in advertising as it had been in the days of Jim Crow. Since the 1940s, socially conscious brands, like Pepsi, had developed loyalty in the African-American community with the inception of niche marketing—ads directed at black or other minority consumers—to great success. Sometimes there was backlash, as, for example, in the sixties when some of Pepsi's distributors complained the brand was too closely aligned to the consumer of color.

By the early 1970s, efforts to integrate marketing messages that would appeal to a general consumer reflected the widespread, potent influence of pop culture—music, film, TV, and other media that had an increasingly diverse audience. So at most of the top ad agencies, where women account managers were sprinkled among the men, you might have one or two African-American executives or maybe another nonwhite manager working with accounts to reach Hispanic or Asian-American or other ethnic demographics. Ironically, even as women and minorities were slowly gaining a presence in the boardrooms, instead of the corporate thinking and direction becoming more inclusive, lines drawn between consumer types were more color-based than ever. That said, the exciting news was the extent to which the advertising field did embrace a much more creative mode of communication, with a keener eye to smart storytelling—through music, jingles, slogans, animation, and especially the artful use of code.