The Tanning of America

by Steve Stoute

  Not every parent out in the sleepy safe suburbs was a fan of their kids watching the gritty, urban, irreverent, and unpredictable show six days a week. Even if it was public television. From what those teenage viewers would later tell me, their parents weren’t any happier when they started tuning into the more mainstream black music videos that BET was starting to air in the late 1980s. But then, interestingly enough, as soon as Yo! MTV Raps debuted in August 1988, first as a music special starring Run-DMC along with Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince (a.k.a. Will Smith), then as an hour-long show shown once a week, hosted by Fab Five Freddy, suddenly, somehow, some way, parents didn’t seem to mind as much. Even when the show expanded a short time later to include a daily installment hosted by Ed Lover and Dr. Dre, the general consensus by those who didn’t love hip-hop was Well, let the kids watch it, seems like they’re just having fun. Again, why?

  Part of it was timing, and the fact that the MTV brand and banner gave the genre a legitimacy. Plus, my guess is that the segmented programming made it safe for visiting—just as advertisers were beginning to see it as safe for visiting.

  As envisioned, the show didn’t reinvent the wheel. It built on everything that Video Music Box and BET had started doing—but, like a petri dish, helped grow the culture by pointing out that what was happening in the Northeast was in full swing down in Atlanta, over in Houston, and out in California. Now the images and words were more regionally and culturally diverse—palm trees and skateboarders, graffiti that mixed Spanish and English, dance grooves locally branded, language with Caribbean, Asian, Middle Eastern, or other accents, or vocalized with a southern lilt or a western twang. The global exposure was a two-way street—with Yo! broadcasting from places, like Jamaica, where it wouldn’t be lost on the hosts that the poverty of the ’hood there was so extreme, as they would say, that it was definitely the “’ hoo-ooo-ood.” One of the more memorable specials for me was shot in Japan. Here were 1990s Japanese kids in baggy pants with baseball caps on backward, listening to rap, break-dancing, popping and locking like they invented it. Proof positive of the global power of hip-hop and music television.

  When I asked Van Toffler at what point he and the other MTV execs started to recognize that the audience was much bigger than the segmenting would have suggested—and when they knew that white suburban kids were starting to emulate the language and the dress of the hosts and guests and the stars of the genre—he answered, “It was probably ten minutes after Yo! MTV Raps aired.” The reaction from one and all, Van remembered, was literally, “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  With MTV’s overall mission to tell real stories and provide the authentic narrative of life from the streets, Yo! acted as a cultural ambassador, as hip-hop had been known to do, for the entire network. Van’s comment was, “Nothing connects more to the audience, whether it’s told through rock music or folk or hip-hop, than real stories.”

  That popularity impacted a lot of careers, as I experienced firsthand. In the early years of the 1990s when I was going from artist management to working as an executive at RCA and then becoming a producer/manager—in tow with the Trackmasters—our success depended on whether or not we got played on radio and music television. Plus, Yo! gave exposure to artists as much as it did to their music.

  Since most of the show was taped in-studio and there was lots of time to fill that wasn’t about the music videos, the hosts were constantly coming up with entertaining bits, often inviting guests to freestyle right along with them or to engage in an unscripted megalogue with cameras rolling. The atmosphere was anything goes, wild and unhinged.

  “Thank God it was taped,” Van Toffler said about that. “It was uncontrolled chaos.” One of the most famous instances of things getting truly out of control was Tupac Shakur’s unsolicited rant about kicking the asses of the Hughes brothers—allegedly because of how they fired him from the movie Menace II Society . The hosts were practically tackling Tupac to get him to calm down. But to no avail. The Hughes brothers ended up showing that clip when they took Pac to court.

  As boisterous as the shows got, Van Toffler knew that Yo! and MTV were benefiting from the excitement that those kinds of spontaneous outbursts aroused. Yeah, it was rough around the edges, but it was full of surprises, never the same, and a proving ground for emerging hip-hop artists like no other. Or, I should say, that was mostly the case except for the period of backlash against hardcore rap, right around the time in mid-1992 when Jimmy Iovine and Interscope were coming up with a bold, new strategy for how they were going to promote The Chronic.

  The irony was that for all the liftoff that Yo! could offer, it was still segmented programming that wouldn’t guarantee getting a music video day-parted and put into heavy rotation. The way for most rap or metal videos to keep from being limited to late-night airings was to first have a radio story—heavy growing rotation (a.k.a. “spins”) and an expanding audience. And getting that to happen for hip-hop in those days—to climb to the top of the mostly still segregated R&B and pop charts—was next to impossible.

  Just what was happening and why was revealed in the early nineties when new technology in bar coding for retail cash register sales showed what was actually selling in the record stores—as opposed to what stores had been reporting to Billboard and other trade publications. When the weekly syndicated radio show American Top 40 (hosted by Casey Kasem and then by Shadoe Stevens) started basing the Top 40 list on a formula that included airplay but was weighted by these actual sales figures, it turned out—much to the shock of white-owned stations—that hits by black artists (rap, R&B, and pop) were dominating like nobody’s business. The bar code scans also showed that besides black music, hard-core metal rock was booming. The other revelation in the scan reports was that there was completely unprecedented sales momentum for country music. Who knew? The data was contradictory to everything that programmers had been trained to understand about their advertisers and listeners. Country and metal were problematic but programmers could adjust. All that black music was another story. And so, when a significant number of stations threatened to drop American Top 40, a new formula for creating the list was established—weighted not by sales figures but by airplay as recorded among Top 40 stations. They jerry-rigged the formula.

  Metal had a home on rock stations anyway and country music took lessons from R&B, first adding more mainstream pop music elements and then finding stations for brand-building for the genre on the AM dial. But what this did to hip-hop was throw it right back out into the cold, radio-wise, once again, after gaining legitimacy, back to being an orphaned street music—not fully suitable for black R&B stations, not welcomed on white pop stations (now being rebranded as contemporary hit radio), and not ready to be given its own station platform. Then we all turned around and a portal, as if out of nowhere, suddenly opened. It was crossover urban, called “churban” or rhythmic radio.

  At Interscope, Steve Berman had just arrived at the company when the game plan for promoting “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” was coming together. Steve later explained to me how churban was invented by saying that even though hip-hop wasn’t fitting any of the traditional radio models, “it was so powerful in terms of how it was moving, people and units and money, that they had to grow these other formats.” Hip-hop had become such a powerful force for pop culture and for selling music that some of the radio stations that were paying attention to consumers and record stores in their own communities had no problem taking the leap.

  A leading example in New York was Hot 97, an early adopter of churban programming. Not ready to be labeled rap or hip-hop, these types of stations welcomed a diverse audience of black, white, and Hispanic listeners. But even with this middle ground, there was trepidation that anything too cutting-edge would be off-putting to advertisers and some of the audience. When I recalled those days with Andre Harrell, the brilliant, pioneering entrepreneur who worked with artists at Rush Management before launching Uptown Records—where he would famou
sly give one young hip-hop newcomer, Sean “Puffy” Combs, his first job in the industry—he could remember having to jump through those same hoops. Andre reminded me that a lot of the confusion in radio was a reflection of uncertainty on the part of the big record companies. They didn’t know with clarity how to market the music.

  So that was the tangled web of distribution obstacles in which Jimmy Iovine and his team at Interscope found themselves once the deal had been made to partner with Death Row Records. To complicate matters, as Jimmy recounted the story, everyone was telling him that the amount of money he would need to spend even to get the first single into serious rotation wasn’t going to be worth it. In his words, “Everybody was telling me the sh*t is bigger than the cat.” An expression that came from his father, its point was that if the cat is bigger than the problems, you keep the cat. But when the “sh*t is bigger than the cat, get rid of it.” Well?

  By his own admission, Jimmy was naïve. He had no resistance or baggage and was seeing only upsides. He was sitting in his office, continuing to listen through his prized speakers, and as he said, “I’ve never known from hip-hop before. I don’t know anything about it. All I know is the Rolling Stones, Guns N’ Roses, Godfather, Goodfellas.”

  And so Jimmy went all in. The first thing that he did was to treat the deal as if it was being made with superstar rock guys. The deal was unheard of at the time for several reasons but more than anything it allowed Death Row to own their masters—which was the right thing to do because they had walked in the door with finished product. What was so unusual was that Jimmy wasn’t betting the odds. He was funding the fledgling record company, giving them their own identity and autonomy, with the cockeyed belief that this was the beginning of much more to come. Crazy? If history had turned out differently, yeah. But then again, this was Dr. Dre, one of the most prolific, authentic producing virtuosos ever to grace recorded music. And there was something about Snoop Dogg’s voice on “ ‘G’ Thang,” with its iconic tone and phrasing, and how it jumped off any sound system and into any listener’s nervous system on the very first hearing, that could not be denied. Written by Snoop, the single reminded Jimmy Iovine of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. Same structure, same vibe. It felt like a classic, he told me, even before it dropped.

  In the meantime, Interscope had written another very large check for the music video that Dre directed for “ ‘G’ Thang.” Jimmy confirmed the cost by saying that in those days it was “a lot of money.” After appreciating early videos for being raw and real, viewers were getting choosier. But even the most aggressive hip-hop videos in the early nineties were in the range of $50,000 to $70,000. For the first single video release from The Chronic, Dre had a budget on par with a Guns N’ Roses video production.

  Now it got really crazy. Given the era’s landscape, as we’ve seen in the shifting sands of radio, guess what? No radio station, urban, churban, rhythmic, or otherwise, would even touch “ ‘G’ Thang” with a ten-foot pole. Nobody wanted anything to do with “gangsta” rap. Despite Jimmy Iovine’s comeback that it was art, fiction, a story about gangsters, just like rockers would tell badass stories about themselves, the truth was that in that market lull no really serious new hip-hop artist could get arrested. Not that Jimmy or any of his team at the time, like Steve Berman, had expected any differently. Actually that was the reason for spending so much on the video.

  Time for something drastic, bold, and daring, as in gangsta. Jimmy went to MTV’s head of programming, Rick Krim, and personally played him the video for “ ‘G’ Thang.” Raising all of the obvious objections, given the broadcast standards, Rick narrowed everything down to one issue: “Where am I going to play it?”

  Jimmy then suggested that he put Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg on in between Nirvana, Guns N’ Roses, and Madonna. Translation ? He wanted his video day-parted early. Rick Krim would have laughed him out of his office if Jimmy had not added, “I’ll tell you what. Do it. And if it doesn’t work, if I’m wrong about this, I’ll never come in here asking you to play another Interscope record.”

  Without calling it as much, this was a go-for-broke strategy known in marketing campaign terms as total disruption. The approach breaks all the rules of branding, authenticity, and consumer preferences. When introducing a new or reinvented brand, it is the kind of tactic that will make you or break you. Kamikaze marketing!

  Rick Krim and MTV, after editing some of the more risqué images and bleeping a word or two here and there, went for it and put the video into early day-parting, toe-to-toe with rock and pop’s biggest marquee names. And it worked. By the end of 1993, “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” had become the third-most-requested video of the year.

  But wait. There’s more. Before that evidence came in, there were a few more moves in the total-disruption campaign that had to happen.

  Although MTV immediately had success and increased rotation of Dre and Snoop’s first video, reaping the rewards of an expanding audience and advertisers not about to miss the benefits of a phenomenon in the making, the next shocker was that radio still wouldn’t play it. Oh yeah, as I remember all too well in my own promotional efforts, radio did not want MTV taking their hit-making power away from them. The unspoken agreement was that radio was supposed to lead, music television to follow. So what did Jimmy do?

  What he did was, again, not what anyone in those days would have done in a million years. Jimmy went to his head of promotion and said, “Make me a radio spot that plays the hook for one minute.” He didn’t want any voice-over, any talking, just one minute of “ ‘G’ Thang.” Then he gave the department a list of fifty radio stations, starting with the top tier in leading markets, like New York’s dominant Z100 and L.A.’s KISS FM, and instructed his people to buy enough airtime to run the one-minute spot on each station ten times a day. For real.

  Steve Berman, currently vice chairman at Interscope, remembers it well. None of the team questioned Jimmy Iovine’s sanity. The logic was clear. He wanted people to hear the song. Sure enough, they heard it. In fact, audiences heard it at the same moment as program directors who wanted nothing to do with anything called Death Row Records (maybe understandably so)—as they were driving home and radio commercials came on the air, on their own stations, playing one minute of a song they wouldn’t program. Next thing everyone knew, phones started ringing off the hook at radio stations across the country, with people requesting the song in multiple formats, including regular radio.

  In March 1993, “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” peaked at number two on Billboard’s Hot 100, after topping the R&B chart at number one. By November 1993, The Chronic was certified triple platinum after hitting number three on Billboard’s list of the two hundred highest-selling albums. Artistically, most hip-hop aficionados consider the album to be one of the most influential of the genre.

  But there was one other conversation Jimmy Iovine instigated that helped score the three loaded bases in the cultural paradigm shift of tanning that was afoot. Somewhere in the spring of 1993, with “ ‘G’ Thang” and follow-up single releases from The Chronic still riding high and Interscope gearing up for its Thanksgiving drop of Doggystyle, Snoop’s debut album, which Dre was in the midst of producing, Jimmy called up Jann Wenner—the illustrious publisher and cofounder of Rolling Stone magazine.

  With no preamble, Jimmy told Jann he had to put Dre and Snoop on the cover of the magazine. As the Iovine-reconstructed story goes, Jann Wenner’s response was something along the lines of Are you out of your f**kin’ mind? Then Jann, the rock ’n’ roll journalism icon, explained more calmly, “We’re not a hip-hop magazine.”

  Jimmy: “Hip-hop? This ain’t hip-hop. This is Exile on Main Street, it’s The Godfather! This is huge!”

  Jann Wenner: “Whatever it is, this is not my customers.” Click.

  Actually, before Wenner got off the phone, he left the door open by suggesting that if Interscope and Snoop Dogg wanted to show him an idea for the cover, he’d be will
ing to look at it. So Jimmy went to Snoop and said, “Hey, we’re going to get you on the cover of Rolling Stone and I want you to shoot it.” Made sense. This way they would be more likely not just to get the cover but to have it shot with a feel and look that matched the genre.

  Snoop: “Man, give me the cover of The Source. What the f**k is Rolling Stone?”

  All Mr. Iovine could do was to assure Mr. Broadus: “Trust me on this.”

  In September 1993, Snoop and Dre appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone and, sure enough, it completed the grand slam that being day-parted early on MTV had begun. Even before the November release of Doggystyle—which would debut at number one on Billboard’s list of the two hundred top-selling albums—Snoop went to see Jimmy to tell him about the strangest thing that was happening. All of sudden, wherever he was, whenever he walked down the street, white kids were coming up to him, saying his name, “Snoop Dogg!” in greeting, as if they were connected, like they knew him. Snoop was like, What the f**k is that?

  Obviously, having that kind of rapid, widespread fame is something that nobody can really prepare you to grasp until you’ve experienced it. But this was more than that. It was culture shock. As Jimmy pointed out, hip-hop up until that moment had already found an underground hip white audience. However, these weren’t niche music consumers. They were white kids from regular, everyday, mainstream households. And the heads of those households, along with their counterparts in government and corporate America, were horrified.

  The trouble began. Time Warner threw Interscope out and sent it, along with Death Row (until it shut down), into the arms of MCA, which was soon absorbed by Universal. Politicians, community leaders, and media figures representing the status quo went to war against what was seen as the dangerous Pied Piper of addictive beats and mind-altering poetry now leading their children astray.