by Steve Stoute
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.
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, w
ould 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:Consider the numbers. In 1998, for the first time ever, rap outsold what previously had been America’s top-selling format, country music. Rap sold more than 81 million CDs, tapes, and albums last year, compared with 72 million for country. Rap sales increased a stunning 31% from 1997 to 1998, in contrast to 2% gains for country, 6% for rock and 9% for the music industry overall.
But the real eyebrow-raising data came a few lines later:
Hip-hop got its start in black America, but now more than 70% of hip-hop albums are purchased by whites. In fact, a whole generation of kids—black, white, Latino, Asian—has grown up immersed in hip-hop.
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?
Cool in Translation
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 wit
hin 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.