The Tanning of America (20 page)

Of course, the mainstream wanted to treat it as a trend, not as an evolving and ultimately enduring art form. This wasn't new. We saw it when Bob Dylan, as the poet of his time, would speak about details of life at a depth other songwriters couldn't reach—saying things that others might think but couldn't say, using vivid pictures and feelings that the words triggered. Certain hip-hop artists went there too and put their blood on the page and the stage to speak of what they had lived through, in similarly riveting images. But what changed with hip-hop was that there was no war between high art and what the mainstream liked, primarily because of the beats.

Kanye West once explained to me how one of his most provocative songs, “Jesus Walks,” never had trouble getting spins. In the song he talked about religion being the only taboo subject and that otherwise you could rap about anything, “guns, sex, lies, videotapes.” Basically, Kanye explained, he had learned that in hip-hop you could pretty much say anything, “as long as the drums are right.” With that, the mainstream would move and dance to it anyway and bleep out anything overtly offensive. So when the drums are right, the lyrics either go over the head of listeners who aren't attuned or stream into the frontal emotional lobe of those who are. If you did know what the rapper was saying, however, it was pretty funny when you had Jay-Z on MTV using code like “It'll sell by night” and “It's eggshell white” to boast about the superior quality of a dealer's drugs; you wouldn't know that, unless you did.

Dr. Dre always understood the power of getting the drums right in a way that was multilingual and epic. His production of
The Slim Shady LP,
Eminem's debut, shows that. And as for Eminem, I contend that he is one of the best things that ever happened to hip-hop. Why? Because the level of scrutiny he received from within the field and outside of it forced the masses to pay attention to the lyrics for the first time. There were other reasons I believe he activated tanning and that make him important as an artist, as a proxy for white kids who grew up on Run-DMC and Ice Cube and who, in adopting the dress and the language, had been unfairly labeled “wiggers” (slur for “white nigg**s”). With Eminem, the response came—
No, that's how I dress and the way that I talk, and I'm no less credible because I'm white.
And as a storyteller, Eminem epitomized a twist on what many of the rappers were talking about, because he had all the same issues, only set in a different world. Add to that the fact that he was trying to break into a flock of black and brown sheep as one of the few white ones.

When I was working with Eminem at Interscope, and ended up becoming an executive producer on
8 Mile,
I wanted to portray the challenge of his breaking into the club to be as difficult as it had been for John Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever.
Because if it wasn't, and if he didn't have to prove himself as an artist, it wouldn't ring true. Well, ultimately that's what happened in Eminem's career.

No, he didn't have to sneak in a side door or come through the back. He walked in through the front door with “Hi, my name is . . . ,” with an album that had a mass pop appeal but also had some seriously dark sh*t underlying it. And his arrival on the scene made everyone stop to listen to his every word. Thank God for hip-hop's sake that he's talented! It would have been a bad day for the art if he wasn't gifted, with everyone suddenly paying attention. But from the start he was brilliant. His peers benefited from him too once lyrical content started to be judged differently, and they embraced him because he spoke to the common experience—about parents and authority figures being hypocrites, pretend do-gooders blaming kids for getting high while doing the same, asking,
So how come you point your finger at us? F you!

Dr. Dre gave Eminem the beats, built the authenticity, and everybody ran to him, bought the CDs, and then listened to the words, including insiders, and, as I said, he rhymed his ass off. The verdict was
Wow, this kid is good
. Eminem went on to sell more records than any artist in the first decade of the 2000s. How? Tanning. Yet he was always respectful of the artists who got him where he was, and he gave to the black pioneers of his art form exactly what Elvis Presley didn't return to his—acknowledgment.

Once hip-hop proved that it could earn its keep, it wanted to grow, and through a handful of artists it found another level to make what they were doing as transformational as Basquiat. Not just painting. Not pop art for pop art's sake, but pop art with a vision and depth and texture that you can put up against anybody. I can take lyrics from Eminem and Jay-Z and put them up against Edgar Allan Poe and Shakespeare. I can put them up against Bob Dylan all day.

These observations having been made, I have to admit to being surprised by the numbers represented by tanning that were captured in an article that appeared in February 1999. It was a
Time
magazine cover feature titled “Hip-Hop Nation: After 20 Years—How It's Changed America.” With a team of contributors from all over the country,
Time
's music critic Christopher John Farley unapologetically broached the subject of urban culture's economic impact:

So if you are someone, like me, who has cultural curiosity and you read in 1999 about this incredible, relatively untapped, diverse, superpowered consumer group, in numbers you'd never expected to see before, the next question you'd wonder about is,
What else are they buying?

Thanks to an earlier experience, I definitely knew one of the answers, and that, as previewed earlier, was sunglasses.

No, not just any sunglasses. I'm speaking, of course, about the iconic brand that had been developed by Bausch & Lomb back in 1937 after World War I and II pilots complained of damage to their eyes from the harmful rays of the sun. After a patent was developed for an antiglare lens that reduced the ill effects of infrared and ultraviolet rays, a prototype was produced. With a lightweight, durable metal frame and a style that was more function than fashion, the sunglasses were marketed as Ray-Ban Aviators. Embraced from the beginning by the U.S. Army Air Corps and the brass of other branches of the military, including none other than General Douglas MacArthur, Ray-Bans were soon synonymous with a proud, brave, and mighty nation that had returned triumphant from wars against evil. And in the decades that followed, that winning American brand identity stayed, even as Ray-Ban diversified and came out with a variety of looks and styles that allowed the company to appeal to a wider market without sacrificing quality or losing elite status.

Starting in the early 1960s, after the Ray-Ban Wayfarer II sunglasses were worn by President John F. Kennedy—probably our first president to benefit from very early tanning—Hollywood fell into lasting love with the brand. In that same era, we saw Audrey Hepburn in Ray-Bans in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
and then in '69 Peter Fonda wore Ray-Ban Olympian Deluxe sunglasses in
Easy Rider
. Clint Eastwood made the Ray-Ban Balorama part of his Dirty Harry uniform, while John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd wore Wayfarer IIs in
The Blues Brothers
. In the eighties, after NBC's head of programming, the late Brandon Tartikoff, launched
Miami Vice
from two words he scribbled on a napkin—“MTV cops”—Don Johnson wore Wayfarer II Ray-Bans in the early seasons. Tom Cruise then wore them in not one but two eighties blockbusters,
Risky Business
(Wayfarer IIs) and
Top Gun
(Aviators).

Clearly, the product placement agency that the company had retained at one point when Ray-Ban hit a revenue low had done a formidable job. By the mid-1990s, however, Bausch & Lomb started to worry that maybe their Ray-Ban division had gotten as far as it could go just by appearing as the ubiquitous cool sunglasses in movies and on television. Being a top eighties silhouette was also problematic. Not only that, but in these boom years of bling with steep competition within the designer eye-wear market, Ray-Ban's classic allure was verging on antique.

This was not a challenge that could be so easily remedied by just having the sunglasses placed in yet another movie. That is, unless the movie happened to be
Men in Black,
starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, which Columbia Pictures, a division of Sony, was readying for release in 1997. As fate would have it, a short while before the production deal for the movie came together, I had gotten my start as an executive at Sony. Coincidentally, one of the areas in which I had done very well was overseeing the production and marketing of soundtracks, and CDs with music tied to movies. And in that capacity, I would be able to watch and learn from how the fortunes of a brand of sunglasses were about to be changed in dramatic ways. Because of Will Smith and where he was in his career, paired with Tommy Lee Jones, at the right time, in the right way, with the right vehicle, Ray-Bans weren't just getting to be seen and appreciated. They were about to benefit from tanning by becoming part of the story.

In these years, by the way, Will Smith was not yet firmly established as the world's number one box-office draw movie star as he would be soon enough. But his success had already given him the powers of a brand and a cultural force. Of course, in my future career, I would gain a much greater understanding of how celebrities become brands and to what extent that allows them to be a beneficiary and/or an activator of tanning.

Having mass popularity and being iconic—to the point that your name is known in short or your silhouette alone is recognizable—are components of being a brand. But they do not necessarily help bridge a cultural gap and create a like-minded connection that is required for tanning activation. An artist's ability to be both a brand and a cultural driver comes down to belief. The public has to believe in you and, because of a certain authentic voice that you have, believe that they can depend on what you say and what you represent. Some of it is popularity, definitely, but without authenticity, the offering falls flat. For you as a celebrity to, say, wear an outfit and have others try to duplicate what you're wearing, people have to believe that it's intrinsically you; they have to perceive that you wore it because you believe in the look as cool for you and that it's part of your creed, your distinct interpretation. People don't want to believe that you wore it just to make a hit song or, by extension, to sell a product. Yes, if you wore it because of your belief, and if, along the way, your record is a smash and you ignite a trend, wow, that's dazzling and inspiring and cool. That's where you become a tastemaker, a thought leader, and even an agent of tanning. In twentieth-century pop culture, Madonna understood this proposition better than almost anyone and because of the integrity of her own brand, she changed how people saw differences in color, class, gender, and sexuality. Even though Madonna's music couldn't be categorized as hip-hop, her influences come straight from Motown and R&B, giving her linkage and impact in urban culture.

The artists who became brands in the cycle marked by the growth of hip-hop were the individuals who moved the ball forward because their contribution represented something culturally meaningful so that others could collectively nod and say,
Yeah, this is cool, this is significant.
Originators like Run-DMC or Dr. Dre who are legendary figures today didn't know they were becoming brands at the start. That was never the intent. Making good music was the intent, along with the hope that people would buy it. But when you make good music that touches people's souls and beings over a period of time, when there's a look and a feel that's consistent with that sound, then you became a brand.

Artists as brands bring expectations and assumptions. LL Cool J's brand early on included his confidence, which brought expectations about him as a masculine figure who could speak to women with a certain cool and swagger. And over time, whether you saw him in a Kangol or FUBU hat or drinking Sprite, there was an expectation and an assumption that he would do that only because he believed in it. The expectation is that whether it's music or a product or a cause, it is sincerely felt. And if you are believed too as a brand artist, you are trusted and given a level of respect reserved for those who have earned it over time. Those artists as brands were very important on this cultural journey of tanning. If it weren't for those brands, the hip-hop genre would have been about only the popularity of the drums and would have become just dance music.

Will Smith, without question, is one of the most crucial players in tanning, but not so much because of his early days as a rapper coming out of Philly—although that did give him his authentic hip-hop, urban roots. At the same time that DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince were coming into their own, the edgier trends in the genre made him have to fight hard for legitimacy as an MC. And Will did. He talked about growing up middle-class and the authentic struggle caused by the generation gap. But he did face backlash when the first ever Grammy Award for rap went to him and Jazzy Jeff in 1989 for their single “Parents Just Don't Understand.” The other nominees that year were LL Cool J for “Going Back to Cali,” Salt-n-Pepa for “Push It,” Kool Moe Dee's “Wild Wild West,” and JJ Fad's “Supersonic.” There was a feeling, right or wrong, that though fun and entertaining, “Parents Just Don't Understand” didn't best capture the essence of rap at that time.