The Tanning of America (17 page)

Even though the majority of viewers of the WWE (as it's now known) and the growing millions of hip-hop fans know that the feigned violence isn't real—that it's being done for entertainment value—the possibility that it can spill over into the real excites human emotions. But that's why the ring is important and why an offbeat, super-talented girl singer like Cyndi Lauper could become beloved out of that mix.

Those comparisons aside, I agree some of the backlash against hip-hop was justified. There were, no question, offensive elements associated with the genre that unfortunately became hyped and underwritten by the corporate record industry, which figured out how to profit from those more controversial aspects. Those were the entities that in the mid-1990s had finally gotten the memo that hip-hop was about to be really big business. After shunning the genre as niche, they now wanted not only to get in on the game but to control it.

Too late. The uncontrollable genie was out of the bottle. How far and how wide it was going to go was in nobody's hands. Hip-hop, more than ever before, had taken on a life of its own—as witnessed by the world in March 1994 when Snoop was the featured musical guest on
Saturday Night Live
. Performing two of his latest singles from
Doggystyle,
he was attired in his Hilfiger best—with a long-sleeved, thigh-length collared jersey that had a bold brand ID across his chest that read TOMMY and a pattern of red, white, and blue stripes suggestive of the flag of the United States. Whatever you thought or had heard about the big, bad wolf of gangsta rap was not on your television screen being watched by millions around the globe with you. Cool as ever, with trademark humor, Snoop seized this seminal tanning moment for all it was worth and made history—as American and as lovable as mom and apple pie.

Tommy Hilfiger acknowledged to me that this was also the pivotal moment in the growth of his brand. And it was bigger than a brand. Hip-hop had arrived.

Much codification on multiple levels and playing fields had been responsible for setting the stage. It's hard to even quantify how important a role MTV had played in getting to this point. From the instant that “ ‘G' Thang” was day-parted, there was no turning back. From a music distribution standpoint, it was an out-of-body experience for any of us in the business of promoting hip-hop artists and music—as if a switch had been flipped and all the doors you'd been banging on to no avail opened up and you were invited to come on in.

From a marketing standpoint, advertisers that might have been hesitant to spend money during
Yo! MTV Rap
s all at once started jumping over each other to buy time connected to the airing of any hip-hop videos. Or, much better yet, to achieve some kind of product placement in them. At the offices of MTV, Van Toffler remembered, phone calls began pouring in from marketers asking how they could get in on any upcoming shoots. If videos could make a Cadillac cool, or whatever brand needed a pop culture boost, the right question to ask was, “How can I get in on that?” Some even made such pointed requests to Van as “Hey, I want Nelly to wear my sneaker, can you help me out?” Naturally, since they were the programmers, not the video producers, MTV couldn't do that. So the next step would be to pay to advertise in time slots when the top videos were airing and get some cool for their brand by proximity.

That's how powerful an art form music videos had become—especially with the influence of Hype Williams. The former graffiti writer who once dreamed of being the next Basquiat or Haring, Hype burst onto the directing scene in the early nineties, after having been mentored by none other than
Video Music Box
creator and hip-hop music video pioneer Ralph McDaniels. Hype was always a creative hero for me.

Iconic from early in his career, he quickly became the Martin Scorsese of music videos. There were two things you could be guaranteed if you had a Hype Williams video: a) It would be expensive, and b) MTV would put it immediately into rotation. In fact, the network started to look like Hype Williams television. That's how much content he delivered. Known for his wide-angle shots and the selective use of the fish-eye lens, along with outrageous color tints ranging from his own film noir black-and-white grainy look with a blue overcast, to jewel tones, metallic golds, coppers, and rich sepias, Hype could turn dark into light in ways filmmakers have yet to figure out all these years later. A small handful of the artists on his videography roster included Usher, Notorious B.I.G., Nas, Lauryn Hill, Jay-Z, Will Smith, Kanye West, Nelly Furtado, Mary J. Blige, and Coldplay.

Hype's breakout moment came in 1995 when Jimmy Iovine commissioned him for an unprecedented half million dollars to direct the video for Tupac's “California Love” (featuring and produced by Dr. Dre). Borrowing story and images from
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,
Hype took such a quantum leap with the visual poetry of the art form in that video, forget it—the seas parted. From then on, everyone who was anyone wanted that and had to have that. Not just hip-hop artists. When top rock 'n' roll bands started to see the impact, most of them started hiring Hype.

In terms of tanning, I see Hype Williams as the visual architect of its transformative power—just as Rick Rubin was its sound architect. Hype has been criticized for flash and overt commercialism, but I disagree. What he does is walk right up to the cutting edge, right into the gap—what we'll discuss more as the Thinnest Slice—into a space that changes the rules and thought itself, and where tanning happens. Moreover, by portraying his main subjects, the poets who had come up from nothing, from the streets, bathed in light, wrapped in luxury and all the trappings of seemingly limitless wealth, he only does for aspiration what hip-hop had done from the start. The new rules that arose dictated that as long as the artist and the video story had credibility, weren't a copy or the homogenized rendition of the real thing, they were still authentic and meaningful.

How did the executives at MTV react in those early days to the excess consumerism the videos couldn't help but celebrate? Van Toffler answered that question by saying that the innovations trumped the other aspects and “Hype's genius was to respect the culture of excess. He made brilliant videos and brought everything to a new level.” Because of the honesty and respect for aspiration and the lack of artifice, the videos pulled everyone in, along with the culture, getting viewers together because, in Van's opinion, “everyone was speaking to each other in the same language of music.”

In five years videos went from costing next to nothing to having price tags of fifty grand and then a few hundred thousand, until there was a true ticket-shock once the top-of-the-line music video could cost a couple million dollars. And like the old days of rap battles, the era of music videos each trying to outdo one another began.

At that point, by Van Toffler's assessment, the stars that shone the brightest in the galaxy ruled by MTV no longer came from rock 'n' roll. After the rock icons crested—everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Robert Plant to Bruce Springsteen to Axl Rose—there was a new polyethnic generation in charge and its stars were all from hip-hop. That was the power of video and the network that harnessed it.

And with this new medium of lush, visual storytelling, it was tanning on steroids, now drawing together the like-minded with a new set of values as to what really defined cool, glamorous, stylish, desirable, believable, and just plain old beautiful.

The sea change really happened in the mid-1990s. Underground music became mainstream, niche began edging into the general marketplace, and color and other traditional labels started to become unglued from the demographic boxes. For the next ten years, you would see the cultural youth movement—called urban but so much more—sweep the nation and merge with multiple aspects of the economy in a rising tide. Reminiscent of the Madison Square Garden moment with “My Adidas,” the numbers had expanded beyond measure, with an endless array of brands being held up for celebration by an evolving slate of superstars, heroes, heroines, and antiheroes. Hip-hop was seeping under barriers, permeating all forms of art and entertainment—not just music, but comedy, movies, TV, theater, publishing, dance, sports, visual arts, fashion, beauty, and their related industries—slowly yet surely becoming nearly a synonym for show business itself. Not show business in terms of a false front or brute commerce, but the opposite—unapologetic, even over-the-top, in-your-face show business that still captured something real, credible, edgy, dangerous, or raw, yet also glamorous, seductive, and hopeful.

Somehow the storytelling in the best music videos managed to bridge those oppositions—and even offer some edutainment to boot. Andre Harrell saw this at his label, Uptown Records, in the 1990s during the start of these halcyon days, and gave me his take on how the videos became instructional. Because of the authenticity of the artists, and how and where they were pictured, the attitude projected in the videos was felt as real, and, Andre observed, it locked onto a similar attitude shared by the viewer. “Through the video image, they're taking in the whole life. Not just the dance,” he commented. The viewer's next thought would then become,
I want to dress like that, be cool like that, to wear the earrings, do my hair like that, talk like that.

Andre Harrell provided the larger context for the phenomenon, saying, “When you see urban culture become more than just a collection of pop records, it becomes a lifestyle drama—how to be in your life, how to solve your problems, how to go dressed up to an affair, how to talk to a woman—all defined by these young people in musical vignettes, which are how-to episodes.” Better yet, America was being given a how-to manual for how to walk, how to talk, what to wear, and how to be cool.

The culture of hip-hop, through the videos, had decided without an invitation to be in all business. Because it could; because who was going to say no? Why not, Andre was arguing, have a say in what car to drive, what soap to buy, what cologne to wear? These how-tos were not just handing out advice about the latest brands or trends. On the contrary, the lifestyle dramas in hip-hop music videos had deeper themes, rooted in classic kinds of American entertainment—Westerns, romances, gangster and crime stories, horror, murder mysteries, gothic fairy tales, sci-fi, war sagas, legends from Greek and Roman mythology, Bible passages, family sitcoms, the nightly news, everything. With a few exceptions, the public had rarely seen the classic archetypes of heroes and heroines in those stories played by individuals of color.

Andre's insight about videos was that they were “four minutes of excellence in terms of how to be a country or how to be from Brooklyn or how to win a war or how to get a chick.” Music video as an art form, in his view, also had a powerful message, delivered on the platform of what he identified as “network television for changing the attitudes of Americans in this continent.”

The first visible measure of changing attitudes happened in communities of color, where, honestly, the videos did more for confidence building than any government affirmative action program could have. How? Well, as Andre explained, they “made us believe; we reached . . . and then we started moving around . . . we got to the places we'd never been, and we started emulating what we'd seen them doing in videos.” Describing that as the “blueprint of the swagger,” he compared the stars of the dramas, the rappers, to Cyrano de Bergerac, showing with the power of their words how to win in love—how to win, period. As Andre described it, “Words have power that manifested a new reality. Nuances count, and people listened—both black and white—the new American audience.”

All of that said, I would argue—as would Andre—that the listening would never have happened on the scale that it did if it hadn't been for one artist in particular who closed the divide between R&B and hip-hop, for starters, and who struck an essential chord with the most powerful group of any market, any time, any place: women.

Mary Jane Blige began her Cinderella-story career as a teenager in the late 1980s and early 1990s at Uptown Records, where her then producer, Sean “Puffy” Combs, oversaw most of her debut album,
What's the 411?
Before he left Uptown to launch Bad Boy Records, Puffy had dubbed her the queen of hip-hop/soul—a distinction that goes to the heart of the discussion about how the genre would soon be coloring all of pop culture.

The blurring of the lines, in fact, had been happening at Uptown all along, thanks to Andre Harrell's direction and insights. Andre saw in the late eighties how the hard-edged drama of rap music, with the thumping drums and bass-heavy groove that were the signature of many Def Jam artists, was not incorporating all the rich cool smoothness and bright musicality that had built the house of R&B. The question he asked was, how can we make this less rough around the edges, give it more soul and R&B, put guys in suits and add glamour plus bring in the hip-hop element and beat but with a less dramatic emphasis? The answer turned out to be very basic: melody.

Andre Harrell, super-smart college graduate, who began as an artist in the rap duo Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, had the insight to leave the rock elements in the mix but to find a way to turn up the heat on the R&B. Some of the efforts that arose from various camps didn't gel and lacked both the hip-hop authenticity and its commitment. Two artists who had the cultural understanding and the unapologetic aspect of it were R. Kelly and Mary J. Blige. They took that, kept in the beats, but also sang to it and brought the melody—putting the hip-hop spin on R&B and making it more palatable for radio. Eventually, you could look back and see how pivotal both were in bringing everyone under the hip-hop umbrella.

But in the beginning, at the point when churban wasn't ready to call itself hip-hop, radio stations initially still didn't know where to put cuts from Mary's
What's the 411?
What did you call it? Not pure R&B, not dance, not hard-edged hip-hop, and definitely not pop. But Andre Harrell finally had a marketing breakthrough to answer that question, as it so happened, when he was trying to secure one of Mary's new releases in the soundtrack for a film starring Halle Berry.