The Tanning of America (19 page)

Meanwhile, these kids in Aspen hadn't just downloaded a Wu-Tang single or two. Quite the opposite. One of the guys told me, “Other than Biggie, all we listen to is Wu-Tang . . . ,” and then proceeded to detail the life and times of the late Notorious B.I.G. and how the best video ever was for “Hypnotize” (on his last, posthumously released album), which immortalized Biggie as a ghetto-born James Bond out on his yacht surrounded by players and hot women before speeding off in a motorboat over the high seas in a chase against villains in helicopters.

Clearly, these kids weren't casual or status culture consumers. And what was it they loved about Wu-Tang? They thought RZA's beats were “sick” (as in great) and Method Man was just “the sh*t.” And one of them talked about how crazy but likeable the late Russell Tyrone Jones, a.k.a. Ol' Dirty Bastard, had been. He had recently dropped dead on the street of what was determined to be a lethal mix of drugs in his system.

Then another one of the kids pointed out that Wu-Tang never lost the whole countercultural feel, or the aspect of what used to be called “gangsta” (a term that in 2004 had fallen somewhat out of favor, and with certain acts was really just superfluous).

My friends heading up to the ski slope knew the chronology too, how the East Coast/West Coast feud came to a violent head in 1997, when Biggie was shot and killed, after Tupac's shooting death in '96. They even knew that things had settled down for the most part with everyone's realization that keeping the peace and empowering the community was not only more in line with the values of the movement but better business for one and all. Insiders were starting to accept the truism that with power comes responsibility, at least among some of the more socially conscious artists, producers, and prominent hip-hop voices. Many did feel it was time to do more to combat the violence.

As the decade wore on, that stance triumphed over hip-hop's more dangerous elements. Not that it stopped the media from promoting the feuds. Nor did it change the code about what made a rapper credible.

One of the artists that I signed during my tenure at Columbia/ Sony was 50 Cent—who was dropped from their roster but was later brought on board at Interscope after being championed by Eminem and signed by Jimmy Iovine. During the interim, 50 had been shot nine times and lived to tell about it in his album
Get Rich or Die Tryin'
. There was nothing about him or his music that lacked credibility before he got shot. But the truth was that it wasn't that distinct. After almost dying, not only did he have something to talk about that authenticated who he was, but, bizarrely, as a result of how one of the bullets hit him in the jaw, his voice actually got better and became more unique. It helped him tell his story better and elevated the sound he was delivering. Dangerous ? No doubt. But talented beyond question, 50 Cent could now use his fame and his voice like a megaphone for the multicultural rockin' party that America wanted to have “In Da Club.”

The Sony executive, Don Ienner, with whom I battled over the signing and who unceremoniously dropped 50 Cent—as well as Alicia Keys—was indicative to me of Sony's general lack of cultural curiosity and, specifically, an apparent contempt for hip-hop culture. This was partly a reflection of the corporate atmosphere at Sony overall, which never seemed comfortable with hip-hop as a music genre either. While it's true that Def Jam had been at Sony, controversies connected to the group Public Enemy had led to that label being dropped from distribution. The upshot was that the corporation would dabble in hip-hop but didn't want to invest in it. So those were some of the land mines that I was trying to dodge and still advocate for artists and music.

You can imagine the uphill battle faced by Mariah Carey when hip-hop began to inform her artistry. At first it was just bringing in the rhythm, as Mariah did in “Dreamlover,” which used beats from “Warm It Up,” a Big Daddy Kane record. In the video, the choreography for the guys dancing to that hip-hop-infused rhythm was based on a Jamaican dance-hall style of dance called “the Bogel,” then becoming popular with urban kids but not yet known to the general public. It showed how much Mariah was paying attention to where culture was. For hip-hop fans, this was very cool, but it went right over the heads of the executives. Nothing could have prepared them for what happened next when Mariah wanted to include a collaboration with Wu-Tang Clan's Ol' Dirty Bastard on her album
Daydream
. After all, she was the label's top-selling pop recording artist at the time—not to mention their superstar who would sell more records than any other American artist across the entire 1990s. For her to take her own music into the genre of hip-hop as far as what Ol' Dirty epitomized, in the company's eyes, was too far.

And truly, with as much as she had to lose, Mariah Carey was putting the most at risk by wanting to tap into the future of tanning that this fusion of different music styles and culture was creating. Mariah knew exactly where the mainstream tan mind-set had already arrived, and she knew in 1995 how important serious rap was to the evolution. If her instincts told her to ride hip-hop as far as she could while still bringing her R&B/pop fans along, why not? Well, a big reason why not was there was no promise that they would come along. That was a considerable risk that she believed was important to take. So when executives tried to dismiss her instincts it had to be offensive, both to Mariah and to her then husband, Tommy Mottola (who was a much valued friend and guide to me, especially in navigating the murky waters of the industry at the time). Refusing to be dissuaded, Mariah Carey and her “Fantasy (Bad Boy)” remix featuring Ol' Dirty Bastard gave us a tanning juxtaposition like nothing we'd ever heard. Besides its global sales success, critics recognized that it was the new paradigm for how R&B/pop and hip-hop could harmonize. Many believed it was the most important single of Mariah's songwriting career. As for Ol' Dirty Bastard, it gave him a mainstream outing that blasted off and went into permanent orbit.

Allow me to confess that for all I knew about how far and wide hip-hop sensibilities had spread, I still couldn't help but be delighted by the kids on the slopes that day. They were not passive consumers visiting culture; they had been fully activated by it. They were a big reason why I had ventured out of my comfort zone into the marketing world. True, the shorthand answer for why I got out of the music business was “Sunglasses” (as I'm setting the stage to elaborate upon soon). But another reason had been to solve the mystery of how kids and young adults like the ones I met in Aspen (who would not be considered hip-hop's core audience) had become so connected to urban culture that they co-opted it as meaningful to their lives.

The question wasn't academic. For years fellow record business insiders and I were mystified by skewed sales numbers that showed units moving in zip codes where those singles weren't on the radio—so it was odd how they were doing that without exposure. We also saw a tanning effect happening as rosters started to sign hip-hop artists who were also white, Latino, Asian, and from other ethnic backgrounds—selling in supposedly African-American-only zip codes.

When I asked Steve Berman at Interstate what clues he had been given earlier on that the music was attracting a much more diverse audience than anyone expected, he reminded me of how the various retail accounts around the country—in the good old days of record stores—reported those trends from the start.

“Remember the Box, in Florida?” he asked. Of course. The Box was really, truly video on demand—before its time. The Box was on cable networks in a lot of the major cities and consumers had a chance to call the 1-800 number and order any music video that was selected. Radio was being circumvented because kids were at home, paying the $1.99 (or whatever it was) to watch videos that they wanted to see—and that's how it was getting into the house. It was video on demand (what the Internet offers to us today for free). This was the way that music distribution and marketing would be going, only it was too premature to be commercially successful. But what it did do was explode record sales after kids had ordered the videos from the Box—wherever it was available. A retail eruption followed next, with big-name independents or regional chains that had as many as thirty to fifty stores all reporting sales of hip-hop in non-urban locations to non-urban kids.

Back to radio, I still wondered why was there such resistance to playing the music when retailers were tracking sales of that magnitude. Steve's feeling was, “Took time to get there.”

Throughout my career in the wild, wild west of the changing music industry, one of the most important general marketing lessons I learned was the value of local advertisers. Why? Because those mom-and-pop businesses are on the front lines of cultural understanding and have their ears to the ground as to who their customers are and what their tastes are. Because of proximity, local advertisers—used-car dealerships, stationers, florists, whatever—tend to have a better gauge on whether the stations where they buy ads play the music their customers like; if not, they recognize that those listeners will move on.

In describing these patterns, Geoff Mayfield, a high-profile analyst now at Universal's music group, formerly
Billboard
's director of charts, emphasized, “Radio is the first line of defense for advertising. If Z100 is not playing the songs that kids want to hear, the local auto dealer isn't getting the ROI that he wants.” Since getting return on investment is the sword by which marketers live and die, that was logical. The example Geoff offered for the nineties was, “When radio starts playing Michael Bolton for too long, the advertiser goes elsewhere.” Therefore, credit for helping rap break the glass ceiling in radio belongs to the power of smart businesses putting pressure on stations to update their programming. In turn, the local advertisers started seeing a direct translation to a more active, loyal consumer base. That was one of the first unexpected transmissions of cool I witnessed in action.

Not everyone was happy when advertising showed its power or, for that matter, when consumers leveraged their preferences and hip-hop began to dominate the radio dial. Scholars of pop culture and rap purists and hip-hop's old-school voices predicted that surely all the commercial success and mainstream explosion would be the death of the art form. There was an assumption that once hip-hop artists no longer had to battle for legitimacy—now that they were rolling like royalty, becoming unapologetic capitalists, and showing off their bling and their rides and their cribs—everything in their DNA that had come from poverty, hard times, pain, dysfunction, and the outcry against social injustice would be suppressed.

But that didn't happen to the art form, which was still evolving. For one thing, hip-hop always had to fight for legitimacy. For another, all this really meant was that record companies were finally putting money behind talent and newcomers were given real opportunities. So it was really a recruiting poster to continue building the army.

Not everyone could claim the stature of being a folk hero and folk artist. Those who did were the true storytellers. When Jay-Z, for instance, came out with his first album,
Reasonable Doubt,
it was literature written in code—a poet speaking three or four levels down into his Brooklyn past growing up in the Marcy Projects. The entire album was conceived as his effort to explain to a judge why he took the actions that he did, providing evidence of reasonable doubt, saying,
Look at where I live
,
put the light on that experience and tell me, what am I supposed to do, because all I want is to change my situation.
He's saying,
The prayers aren't working, the schools are failing, the parents are breaking, so we will raise ourselves up, live with the consequences, do x, y, and z, and we're getting the hell out of this.

The storytelling was all the more riveting because of the originality of the language being used for it. Thunder did not crash and lightning didn't strike when a New Orleans rapper—Lil Wayne at fourteen years old—created and first used the phrase “bling bling” in a Cash Money Records video and song, but it was still thunderous when it went on to be a description of jewelry and riches understood worldwide. The strength and the power of the colloquialism to spread that far that fast was proof once more that art transcends barriers and causes this tanning to forge on. As an artist, an older Lil Wayne could come back and speak to more serious concerns, as he did in a nine-minute piece of oratory in which he took older generations to task about the need to tackle racial differences differently—stating plainly, “
Humanity is helping one another, no matter your color or your race
.” The record wasn't commercial but it was Lil Wayne using his popularity, his platform, to talk about diversity and helping every race, color, and creed to promote the value of people coming together.

This messaging revealed a marketing miscue on the part of record companies and marketers who didn't know colloquialisms or code. Everyone loves to talk about selling CDs, obviously. But marketers miss the point that content is a platform for artists to speak to their audiences, for connection—which is the art's reason for being. Artists like the validation of selling lots of records but that also means they're speaking to a lot of people.

And so, the message of tanning was starting to become a conscious one—a message of one mind-set, one mental complexion, one America.

When artists started saying that racial bias and stereotyping based on color were not acceptable, on both sides, they not only elevated the medium and gave it a social conscience but they were giving props to their audience—those consumers from all backgrounds who were showing them love and buying their albums, like the kids on the ski slope. Artists understood that their art was being valued by white fans who were not beholden to what their parents thought of African-Americans or other ethnicities, to the old ways of judging someone based on color and the old thinking of putting them in boxes and in branded compartments. The artists were activating a generation that didn't think in those terms.