The Tanning of America (14 page)

Maybe because LL Cool J had been part of hip-hop's ride from the start, he may have had a deeper sense earlier on than most of us about what was happening in the minds of young Americans who were white and suburban yet being drawn to all aspects of the culture. He might not have had the language to speak about it yet in 1997 but my hunch is that the opportunity to help promote an African-American-owned and -run start-up like FUBU and help bring awareness to it from outsiders was an appealing way of being a cultural ambassador. Which is, by the way, what hip-hop was doing naturally, not by having to stage a self-conscious Benetton ad full of different colors of people, but by sketching an arc to take in all backgrounds.

Such a collective in which people of diverse ethnic heritage live can best be described with an anthropological term that we at Translation have updated and rebranded for its potent marketing applications. The word is “polyethnic.”

When understood in this context, it makes sense that the reason why the standard silos for African-American, Hispanic, General Market, and so on, began to no longer apply over a decade ago. Marketers who recognized the challenge realized that they needed new tools for cultural diplomacy, even if they didn't know how to use them. This was how the opportunity to be just such an ambassador arose for LL when he was hired by the Gap in 1997 to help them reclaim some of the luster of coolness that they were beginning to lose. And what LL Cool J did to seize the moment remains, to this day, one of the most unapologetic, bold, and daring things I've ever seen anyone do in my life.

Upon arriving at the set to shoot his commercial, LL happened to be wearing a FUBU hat, and as he came out of the dressing room in his Gap outfit, he decided not to take it off. A wardrobe coordinator might have told him to remove it, but when he didn't, nobody persisted. After all, the Gap executives were looking to him as a rap artist, a musician, not as a cultural force. Not having paid enough attention to the street, they had no idea what FUBU was anyway. Apparently no one looked at his lyrics before they shot the commercial. Did anyone check any kind of script he might have brought? Most likely, they didn't. So then, when cameras rolled and he did his bit, nobody knew what he meant when he threw in a rhyming lyric that went, “For Us, By Us, on the low.”

What? When I saw it on TV, as best as I can remember, it was like being hit by lightning. Nobody did that! My conclusion was that none of the executives had a clue about code or that hip-hop could have its own language or that he had just piggybacked FUBU onto the Gap's megabrand global mass-marketing ad campaign. This was the Gap, and there wasn't even a culturally connected person in the room or someone who knew a culturally connected person? That's how novice most corporations were in their understanding of the force that hip-hop had become. The Gap executives in that case had no way to calculate that what LL Cool J had just done by shouting out another brand and telling listeners in code to buy “on the low”—via word of mouth, like a street drug—was about to unleash contagious consumer behavior at a mass level. The Gap must have wanted so badly to be part of the new tan culture that they were willing not to know or care what LL had said. As he would later report, they did eventually figure it out but weren't too upset. Why should they be? They were now cool by association. And FUBU went galactic.

There is only one other time when, I think, a strategy was pulled that was even more bold and more daring that caused a tanning shift that was truly seismic. The economic reverberations of it can still be felt to this day. It also helped create a new tier of powerful hip-hop moguls who really did have a say on behalf of their generation, who lived up to the promise of “for us by us.” That was back in 1992 when Jimmy Iovine masterminded a way to get Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre what is known as day-parted on MTV. With a little help from his friends.

W
hen I first moved into the offices that my company, Translation, now occupies, I remember wondering what to do about a two-story white blank wall. Instead of hanging up a piece of art or having kids come in and do street graffiti on it, I decided to use the wall as a reminder of the power that culture can have in transforming hearts and minds and chose to have it inscribed with the words of Sidney Poitier. From a speech he delivered upon receiving an honorary Academy Award in 2002 for lifetime acheivement, the words are especially meaningful to me not only because of the seismic tanning shift Poitier created but also because of the towering barriers he overcame in his personal journey.

I never forgot the story of how, in 1943, at age fifteen, Sidney Poitier had come alone to the United States from the Bahamas, three dollars to his name, to find work in Miami. Unprepared for the indignities of racism, he was given a crash course over a short period of time. It culminated one evening when a job interview the following day meant he had to go pick up his clothes from a dry cleaner in a white part of town about ten miles from where he was staying. The bus got him there but by the time he paid for the dry cleaning, there were no more buses for the night. Not knowing any better, he tried to hitchhike back to the black neighborhood. The next thing he knew, Poitier had mistakenly flagged down an unmarked police car with five white officers inside. They took him into an alley, put a gun to his forehead, and told him that instead of killing him then, they would follow him all the way to where he was staying and if he turned back to look at them they were then going to shoot him dead. I can only imagine what must have gone on in his mind as he looked for their reflections following him in shop windows the whole way home.

Even though Poitier didn't speak about that experience in accepting his honorary Oscar or the fact that he was the first African-American to receive a Best Actor Academy Award (for
Lilies of the Field
in 1964), that story was undoubtedly part of the subtext when he spoke of the distance he had traveled:

I wanted the speech to be on the wall as a reminder that the best storytellers—whatever their medium—are those who have that sense of citizen responsibility to the times in which they live. And I also wanted to be reminded every day of one of my heroes who embodies the transcendent power of popular culture.

For the world audience, seeing a person of color through the motion picture lens provided that transcendence. But it was a much different force that enabled hip-hop to finally overcome external and internal challenges to find its transcendent power. What was it? The answer is short and sweet: music television.

In 1987, when Van Toffler arrived at MTV and started moving through the ranks to eventually become president of MTV Networks—which today includes MTV and MTV2, VH1, among other cable channels plus departments for feature films, TV series, and video games—he had a vision that both appealed to advertisers and also scared them. Van was on a quest to make MTV the number one entertainment destination for the most sought-after yet elusive consumer demographic: youth comprised of 12-to-29-year-old viewers. What advertiser wouldn't love that goal? But the part that scared them was
how
MTV intended to attract and keep their audience. Unapologetically, Toffler and the team at MTV believed they could cultivate a discerning, loyal, constant viewership by offering culturally relevant music.

No, that didn't sound scary when you were talking about videos from mainstream rock stars. But issues came up immediately once rock started veering into grunge and heavy metal, or when pop artists like Madonna started pushing the envelope with sexually explicit content and images. Anything new, as usual, took advertisers out of their comfort zones and made them worry whether it was worth it to associate their brand with certain artists in order to win favor with the younger demographic but then run the risk of turning off other core consumers in older demographics.

From the start, Van Toffler was used to helping advertisers get past their issues. “For us,” he explained to me, “it was always trying to reflect what the artists were seeing in the lives they were leading and the cultures they were reflecting. That's what we ultimately stood behind when talking to advertisers—that this is going on in the world. And musicians always set the cultural barometer for everyone else.”

The strength of that argument had prevailed until edgier rap came along. Though the lines had long been blurring in the marketplace, the old divisions segregating black and white music that had confused the record industry were still impacting the thinking of music television programmers. As a result, videos by hip-hop artists tended to make it onto MTV by a kind of hit-or-miss process. That would change as the genre gained popularity and programmers and advertisers started to relax—at least with anything in the spectrum of the more rock-infused and pop-laced hip-hop. In fact, thanks to market testing, by the late eighties everybody arrived at the happy conclusion that white kids in suburbia who watched rock videos also liked rap. But then, right at the turn of the decade, red flags went up. Artists were being prosecuted on obscenity charges, some were fighting allegations of misuse of copyrighted materials, and all of a sudden hip-hop was back in the not-ready-for-prime-time category.

For a minute, as all of this was coming to a head in the late eighties, it looked as if the inroads that rap music videos had made toward legitimacy had come to dead ends. Not willing to give up, as Van Toffler recalled, the creative voices and programmers at MTV came together and made a strong case not to abandon the genre. Leading the way in the discussion was the late Ted Demme, then a recent college graduate who had begun his career in media as the host of a radio show on WSUC-FM. When Ted left the freedom of college radio—where he could mix music, talk, and comedy—he brought his underground, countercultural sensibilities with him to MTV.

Van noted that in 1988 he started hearing more and more from Ted and fellow up-and-coming MTV executive Pete Dougherty about how both the music and culture of hip-hop were percolating in urban streets across the country. In D.C., there was almost a dance subculture within the culture, known as go-go, and then there were the local underground economies on certain streets there and in Brooklyn where you could only find particular mix tapes in particular locations, just as in neighborhoods of Queens and the Bronx, all of them part of a phenomenon spreading similarly into different regions of the country. At a moment when the art form was about to be sequestered to the past, mix tapes were turning into the underground railroad for cultural expression. Ted and Pete argued that this new street music and culture, rich with language and customs of its own—something that was, as Van described, “really real with not that many filters”—ought to at least have its own regular MTV segment.

Toffler and the rest of the decision makers agreed. “Ultimately,” he told me, “we felt that though we weren't going to be the first ones to feature hip-hop and rap, we were going to be the first big media company to shine a light on it and talk about it.” In those days, the network was developing weekly shows devoted to certain “alternative” segments of their audience. The segmented shows that were developed over the years included
120 Minutes, Alternative Nation,
and later,
Subterranean
. Usually they would air once weekly, later at night, not during peak viewing hours or in regular day-parted programming. Basically, broadcast hours are broken into daily blocks of time and programmers select content that is seen as most appropriate for that part of the viewing day. Getting day-parted at MTV meant reaching the general, wider audience, the same times when advertisers saw the biggest bang for their buck in reaching the best target audience for their product. So the weekly nighttime shows were intended to build an audience among a specific segment of viewers and also boost popularity for each show's genre. Made sense. Rather than putting hip-hop music videos into general rotation, Ted Demme and Pete Dougherty were given the green light to add a new series,
Yo! MTV Raps,
to the lineup of segmented programming. While this had to be a feel-good decision for the culturally curious, I don't believe anyone had a clue as to how much the segment would blow up. To mainstream eyes, the couple of other music video outlets that were including hip-hop in their programming in this period had seemingly not amassed much more than a fringe or niche following. Over at BET—Black Entertainment Television—in the late eighties and early nineties, after facing resistance even from within the African-American community, rap videos were now infiltrating the mix. But as a cable channel still in its infancy BET didn't yet have the household count, exposure, or audience reach to be a market force.