The Tanning of America (9 page)

Putting on a different spin could take all forms and manifestations. For instance, there was the sudden craze for wearing eyeglasses without the lenses. Imagine that conversation at retail when hip-hop consumers showed up in droves and bought designer eye-wear, and would insist, “Take out the lenses. Don't want 'em.” Or then there was the shift from wearing sneakers without shoelaces to the even more popular fat shoelaces. Hip-hop design would take something popular like that and push the boundaries, like Ben Franklin using a kite to harness electricity, and puzzle over how to make one cool usage even cooler. Fat shoelaces; why not?

The repurposing was masterful. If faded, distressed jeans were the thing, then the new spin would be ironing in permanent creases, using so much starch you could wear your pants like armor. Or then there were the new urban usages for brands not intended to even sell in the inner city—hiking boots by Timberland that you'd wear to a party or out on a date. The illogic sometimes was the logic. How could a company like Nordica, which makes ski-wear, or Woolrich, known for heavy plaid woolens—or other makers of apparel for camping and rugged outdoor excursions, with materials that emphasize waterproofing and extremes in weather—get rejected for its intended purpose but be embraced as fashion? That was the point. If hip-hop consumers could co-opt and repurpose, the loyalty would be evergreen.

As Russell pointed out about hip-hop consumers' love for the classics, “They not only rebuilt Versace, they made him legitimate again.” Taking the market power even further, Russell went on, “They decide if it's Pepsi or Coke. They decide on most of what's cool in American culture, whether it's luxury brands or everyday necessities.”

In the choosing process, Russell observed, the culture is elevated all the more, especially by featuring language that is also new, cool, and fresh, or old language that might be stale but is being remixed with expressions and intonations from different voices being drawn into hip-hop. There is an internal exchange between blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, inner city residents, suburbans, athletes, skaters, surfers, college students, and young professionals, with everyone code-sharing in order to translate to the masses what is cool and how to speak about it. So in picking the obvious and less obvious necessities, like socks, brand identification is still a talking point. The legions of the hip-hop generation, it would turn out in time, would be “more brand conscious than any other group in America.” Russell's awareness was backed up by studies done by Walmart's market research group, among others. That's why “hip-hop consumers always come up on top in terms of picking new American trends. And they also come up on top in terms of reaffirming old American trends.”

When I asked about the unique relationship between hip-hop core consumers and older brands, Russell's view was that in addition to co-opting or reclaiming classics, they remain loyal. He also said, “They don't worry about things getting too big.” Other youth culture groups tend to move on once a trend gets too big.

My experience of that arc would happen in the music business at the end of the 1990s, when most heavy metal acts, with a few exceptions, had become “hair bands” and could no longer excite their audience enough to sustain a following. Fans did move on.

Russell's reasoning for the consumer loyalty in the hip-hop community was, “When these consumers have branded something and it gets big, they are more and more proud of it. They like stable, lasting, strong brands. The core tastemakers in the hip-hop group come out of poverty, so they are on the lookout for big.” Russell spoke about how marketing-savvy the hip-hop generation became early on. Whether they were poor, working-class, suburban, or affluent, they had grown up watching TV and deciding ahead of time what they were going to have when they got the money to spend.

So how did these core hip-hop consumers who grew up in the culture from the start originally become tastemakers? Basically, I believe, from being “live on the scene” when the music was being bred and from determining which acts were hot or not. It started as a marketplace unto itself, as I can well remember from when I became a paying consumer, back in my late teens. Coming home from a live performance, loaded up with gear I'd bought, I'd still be in the throes of having cheered the loudest for whoever won the battle or for some brilliant turn of phrase by Rakim or Big Daddy Kane—two of the most gifted pioneering rappers in those years.

Besides the feeling of empowerment from helping determine the winner, there was also the sense that business opportunity was attached to this scene. Definitely I was drawn to that possibility, but these were the years when I was supposed to be settling into an education and a real job. If I had thought there was a career for me attached somehow to hip-hop, I would have signed up. Nothing registered. Meanwhile, I figured, I'd remain a fan and just enjoy the total experience—the crowd roaring, the street entrepreneurs selling T-shirts and hats and mix tapes, everyone on the periphery hawking their stuff that you had to buy. And there was the glamour, the cars, the clothes, the fans, the magic, and, yeah, the endorsement deals that superstars like Run-DMC and LL Cool J were starting to attract.

LL was the hip-hop celebrity who gave the marketing world an early tutorial about the value of aligning their brand with the genre. Part of what made him effective as an arbiter of style—a guy who could wear something one day and the next day have it sell out in the stores—was that LL was always, as he would say, “at the front end of the bell curve.” If everybody else was wearing it, LL was off to find something else—like the Kangol hat before it became part of the hip-hop uniform.

LL would later explain that, for him, trying to pick out trends wasn't the point. When he discovered Kangols, he said, “I just liked the way it looked on me. I didn't need anyone else to tell me whether it would work or not. One thing about me, everything that I've done with fashion has been my own natural thing, because I thought it was cool. Period.”

In 1985, after LL wore his Kangol hat in the movie
Krush Groove
—a stroke of marketing genius to promote Def Jam artists by telling the fictionalized story of the company's rise to success—it unleashed an endless buying spree of this obscure English brand of hats. Before long, hip-hop haberdasheries began opening their doors everywhere—from Harlem's elite boutiques to major suburban shopping malls.

As for brands that nobody was touching until LL Cool J did, like Le Coq Sportif and Sergio Valente glasses, he would say, “I'm just an early adopter.”

Clearly, being an early adopter of rap had put LL in the forefront of the field, both as a writer of some of the early Run-DMC records and then when he carved out an iconic role with R&B-tinged rap that, true to his name, the ladies loved. I'm just saying. They went nuts! In short order, LL Cool J became the first big hip-hop heartthrob, not to mention the guy whom every other male wanted to be. From the standpoint of tanning, his appeal definitely skewed rap's demographics in terms of color and geography. But he didn't blow up on charm, good looks, or talent alone. For years, LL toured out in the sticks, spending more time in Maine than in New York, gigging in basement bars and small nightclubs—where R&B artists on the bills wouldn't even talk to him.

As I would later point out to artists about paying their dues too, those are the hurdles you have to face, as much the requirements for building a loyal fan base as they are necessary for brands to earn consumer loyalty. If you've never “plowed through the drama, through mud, through the gauntlet” (as LL put it), how are you going to know what it means to ignore the naysayers and remain authentic?

By the late 1980s, the plowing was behind him and LL was rocking arenas as a top draw, second only to the kings, Run-DMC. Both coming out of the Rush/Def Jam stable, they were proof of how visionary Russell Simmons and the rest of his management team were. By this stage, Russell and Rick Rubin had more or less parted ways as Rick heeded the call of the west and went out to L.A.—where most of the record business had headquartered and where he would continue to be more involved producing metal and alternative rock bands. Out of these events and upon the theme of heading west, Rick came to LL with an idea for a record that was as crazy as “Walk This Way” had been for Run-DMC. Let me revise: It was crazier because it was against LL Cool J's already successful brand.

The song that LL agreed to write and have Rick produce was called “Going Back to Cali,” and the first time I heard it, I almost choked. Don't get me wrong. The record was hot (and the video was even hotter). But the music was stripped of LL's usual R&B groove and had a more sophisticated, sped-up tempo with a jazzy horn section playing atonal rock chords, almost with a Peter Gabriel feel, not what you'd expect of a rapper from Queens. Why was he even rapping about going back to the West Coast with the glitz and glamour and chicks in bikinis when he wasn't from there to start? Even if he did make the decision in the song not to go back and it did have the refrain “I don't think so.”

Many years after the fact, when I asked LL how he was able to put his authenticity on the line, he said that because Rick believed in it, he went along but was actually terrified about doing something that wasn't in his artistic DNA. What was his concern? He told me, “That it was so different it would ruin me.” Being aspirational was one thing. But as he put it, “I don't need to be fancy.” Still, LL believed that sometimes you have to venture into the unknown, take the risk, and be different. He came from the school of finding comfort in discomfort. That said, “Going Back to Cali” ran the risk of being too different and ending his career.

Instead, as I remember watching with amazement, its 1989 super-success sealed the deal with mainstream consumption that “Walk This Way” had primed. Like a one-two punch! If Run-DMC doing an Aerosmith song in 1986 had been the bridge to making hip-hop a legitimate force in the music industry, with “Going Back to Cali” LL Cool J walked over the bridge for himself and every other hip-hop artist to follow. The genre was presenting to the mainstream a group and a soloist, both musically versatile, widening the bandwidth to include rock and R&B flavorings without losing its essence. The
MTV
video was so brilliant because even though the music had evolved—so it could hoover up new audiences like those who went crazy for Peter Gabriel's “Sledgehammer”—LL's image stayed exactly as authentic and rooted in Hollis, Queens, as possible. The lesson to be noted and never forgotten for anyone in the entertainment industry or in corporate marketing is that in advancing the genre musically to gain greater popularity, Run-DMC and LL Cool J
never had to mortgage their image or the unapologetic values inherent in the culture.

No one had a measure yet of how this moment in entertainment commerce was going to alter the mental complexion of the country. But they would soon.

None of these advances of tanning happened in a vacuum or without precedent. The commingling of commerce and pop culture to produce changes in consciousness had occurred before, mostly whenever there was a trade, like the record business, behind a cultural format. The textbook moment I always use to demonstrate this phenomenon is when Elvis Presley borrowed the blues from black musicians, put a hillbilly rock accent on it, and went on
Ed Sullivan,
swung his hips, and wreaked havoc with the rules against overt sexiness on the public airwaves. After all, in those days, TV married couples were still sleeping in separate single beds. But the more popular Elvis became, the more the makers of commercial brands that had been under lock and key—makers of condoms, birth control, sanitary napkins, and other products that hinted at human sexuality—could come out into the open and appear on drugstore shelves or up near the register. Suddenly, America changed its mind about what was risqué and what wasn't. And the next thing you knew, you had other cultural groups connected to new music bringing along the free-love movement of the 1960s, which had its own commercial beneficiaries that dovetailed right into the women's movement and radical changes in thought about reproductive and political rights.

Hip-hop, therefore, was following in the footsteps of others when the music's cultural reach began to ripple into commerce. Certainly, the practice of putting products and brands into the lyrical content of songs didn't start with rappers. The classic example goes back to 1908's “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” which went on to last over a century as an ad campaign for Cracker Jacks. I think for any imaginative lyricist, it's hard to pass up proper nouns and names, like Sister Sledge's 1979 disco hit “He's the Greatest Dancer,” which went on a brand craze with “Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci,” all in a row. The list does go on and on. Rap just did the brand-name-checking more often and more unapologetically.

It seems that the most frequently mentioned products in pre-hip-hop songs were car makes and models. In 1951, Ike Turner had a hit with what's been called the first ever rock 'n' roll song—“Rocket 88”—which songwriter Jackie Brenston penned about his love for the new luxury Oldsmobile 88. The Beach Boys sang about their girlfriend's daddy taking the T-bird away and their fondness for a little deuce coupe. Prince rocked a party with his red Corvette and the Pointer Sisters harmonized about their pink Cadillac.

And let's not forget that Motown, the most successful independent record company in history, was built from Berry Gordy's vision of having a hit factory that would churn out records and stars—just like brand-new shiny cars rolling off Detroit's busier-than-ever automotive assembly lines. With marketing and musical genius, Motown really wrote the preamble to tanning, creating the historic crossover from R&B to pop with the marketing slogan the company adopted, calling themselves, “the Sound of Young America.” As I was reminded by John Demsey, president of Estée Lauder, who ran the MAC makeup division for years and who understands the power of culture in the marketplace as well as anyone, Motown taught middle America how to get their mojo on while driving their cars. The hit factory in turn transformed black teenagers from Detroit and beyond, like Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder, into global superstars—musical icons and brands unto themselves.