The Tanning of America

by Steve Stoute

  Fortunately, nothing about that punch line went over anyone’s head. They continued storytelling and joking, smoked the rest of their cigars, and agreed that certain rites of passage never really change. Perhaps that’s why global youth culture has made hip-hop so enduring.

  Hard Knock Life Remix

  There was a time not very long ago when I seriously wondered if the end of my generation’s story would be about how we created an art form, built it from nothing to become one of the most influential forces on the face of the planet, had it all, and then gave it away. That is what happens to relevant cultural forces when they become so popular that they’re not rooted to their origins or to the real and the true anymore—to the needs and the wants that summoned them into being in the first place. In fact, Nas wrote a song some years back called “Hip Hop Is Dead.” Later he spoke about what he meant in Michael Eric Dyson’s far-reaching book Know What I Mean? and went on to say that there were many who came forward to agree and disagree with him. His point was, “Although the voices may have clashed, the one constant in the clamor was that all of these people out there felt that hip-hop was worth fighting over and fighting for.”

  The solution that Nas recommended was, “We need to be able to learn from our history if we are going to take control of our future.”

  In fact, that’s exactly what’s happening at many of the country’s top universities that now offer hundreds of classes in hip-hop studies. Howard University offers an interdisciplinary minor in hip-hop history and culture. Boston’s Berklee School of Music offers a course in writing rap lyrics and creating beats. At UC Berkeley, political and legal scholars are writing doctoral theses on how urban culture has influenced law enforcement and the judicial system. A class at Columbia University taught by a leading cultural historian analyzes the poetry of hip-hop’s prominent voices. NYU’s music school 2011 schedule offers a class in The Business of Jay-Z. Courses across the nation cover aspects of hip-hop culture taught from the perspective of anthropology, ethnography, philosophy, linguistics, ethnomusicology, music history, poetry, literature, and more. The formal study of street dance now includes classes in everything from uprock and break-dancing to popping and locking.

  As Nas can attest, learning from the past to understand the future also means staying connected to the scene—which he does by touring and using his stature as a headliner to feature some of the young voices on the local level as opening acts for him. In the process, his own work becomes all the more relevant and informed by what kids are going through.

  It’s true that what they’re going through today may not be as apocalyptic as was the crack cocaine epidemic—the catalyst that accelerated the music’s journey into becoming a culture and a creed for survival, with its code for language and behavior that made it possible for a community to keep from becoming collectively insane and provided aspiration to move forward. But without a doubt these millennials are going through their version of hard knock life remix. Many of them have never had to face the challenges they’re experiencing now. I don’t just mean economic woes but also with everything coming to a head that has needed fixing in our country for a long time. Then they are dealing with issues that other generations never had to confront in their youth. Many millennials lived through 9/11 in the same way that earlier generations witnessed Kennedy’s assassination or that their parents got the news of Pearl Harbor—or whatever their equivalents are in other countries. Many in this group know better than other generations that climate change is real, that energy resources are dwindling, and that life on earth, if not valued, is not as forever as it once seemed.

  Let me quickly add, however, that I know every generation has had its own existential/economic crises and crossroads that have caused values to be recalibrated. This isn’t exclusive to now. The eighties had corporate excesses that led to a crash. In the nineties we had a dot-com boom that was bigger than the gold rush until it went bust as we entered the 2000s. Now we’re confronting the lawlessness on Wall Street that got out of control in the first years of the new millennium and emptied coffers across a lot of industries. With CEOs’ pay now being restricted and the opulence of earlier eras being scrutinized with a finer eye, questions arise about a culture of excess—Is that cool or is it too much? And those are cues brands should acknowledge as people’s values are reset.

  Millennials have adapted well to the shift from want marketing to need marketing—and that you should get what you can afford, not all that other stuff that’s not within your means. Cheap credit was everyone’s crack and it dried up. In some ways, it’s been easier for this more adaptive generation. You can hear it, in fact, in the values of music, which are shifting too. In rap, talking about how much money you have is still part of the code, but it’s starting to be downplayed or put into the context of other realities. Aspiration remains, first and foremost. How do you quantify the aspiration, connect it to authentic challenges of the present, and make it lyrical? Those are the questions that millennials are answering in their art today.

  With all the raw material coming out of life, hip-hop is humming as a music form, localizing and globalizing simultaneously, with a vibrant and diverse cultural scene that is as varied as the people who are increasingly being drawn into it. This rich diversity is a healthy outgrowth of tanning often overlooked in all the coverage of the death of the record industry.

  And just how bad is the music business? Well, the numbers ain’t pretty. In 2009, sales of CDs for all genres were down by 52 percent from where they were in 2000. Physical units of CD sales were the biggest decline, with an impressive 1.16 billion downloaded singles for the year. Digital, accounting for 40 percent of all purchased music, wasn’t going anywhere.

  All of this makes it clear that for millennials, the scene today is very much an online affair—with posted music and videos shared in a variety of networking sites that serve as the mix tapes of now. On MySpace alone, there are 1.8 million rock bands, 1.6 million R&B artists, and 4.9 million hip-hop/rap artists. As a result, the equivalent of yesterday’s underground counterculture is mainly Internet-type rappers who have developed followings with postings of their latest content, sometimes without monetizing it, and who don’t necessarily have local followings or many opportunities to perform live. Edgy music blog sites, such as Nah Right, post new songs, samplers, and videos daily, driving traffic and promoting greater circulation with listeners. There are also entertainment and fashion-news blogs with music too, like YBF.com and hypebeast.com, that provide connection for global youth culture.

  The question from brands that we often hear is, Where are the emerging youth markets for music and culture? The real question should be, Where aren’t they?

  Whenever I check in with Fab Five Freddy—who has his finger on the creative underground pulse as much as anyone—he reports on the latest new crew he has discovered in Brazil or in South Africa. Recent break-dance champions have come from places like Korea and Russia. Fab has also confirmed that here and abroad, it is an art form open to everybody: black, white, brown, yellow, red, male, female. As polyethnic as it has ever been. From younger artists, the talk that I hear says many of the MCs making names for themselves in local scenes still happen to be male and African-American, but there are increasingly exceptions, with more females, more artists coming up the ranks who are Latino, white, and Asian, crowds that are more multicultural and multiracial. The story of 8 Mile remains in the code in that when kids from different backgrounds connect, ethnic/racial differences pale once someone proves they can rhyme or shows their moves are real. Timeless and timely.

  Around the world, we’re seeing style moving as fast as information, sometimes driven by leading American artists and sometimes by local groups before being adopted elsewhere. This is another reason that I maintain that American culture and entertainment continue to represent out most profitable export. James Lassiter, who rose up from the grass roots of hip-hop as Will Smith’s manager, to become his business partner and now film pro
ducing partner at Overbrook Entertainment, has not only watched the evolution of the tanning effect in developed countries everywhere but is seeing it in the developing nations. Not long ago, he and Will came back from Tanzania and reported seeing huge painted likenesses of hip-hop and pop culture icons on the different buses and the barbershops. Instead of even having business names, the barbershops are simply known by whoever’s likeness graces the front window—like Ice Cube or Snoop Dog barbershop. James and Will saw a bus go by and that was Beyoncé’s bus. James said, “Tupac is omnipresent.” So you could go to Tupac’s barbershop or travel on Tupac’s bus route, seeing his face everywhere. Of course, in bigger cities, like in Kenya, they have similar iconography, only the pictures are real photographs, as James said, “High tech.”

  None of this should have surprised Will Smith or James Lassiter, given their respective journeys. In his own way, James had been a pioneer for a new generation of entertainment industry executives to follow nontraditional paths to success. He once told me about the amazed reaction he got from Howard Stringer, the CEO, president, and chairman of Sony Entertainment Corporation, who hadn’t realized until then what a significant role that hip-hop had played in James’s career. Unlike most black executives who go to Wharton or get their MBAs at Harvard or degrees at law school so they can compete at the highest levels, James had taken his own route to the top through hip-hop—but without the ten-year delay. He recalled to me that “had I done those other things and then had to work my way up through the corporation, it would have been that much more difficult because it’s not easy to be the third man in the room with Howard Stringer.” But coming in with the expertise and experience that managing a hip-hop duo had given him, James was able to walk through any room and sit at any board table with any chairman and hold his own, at twenty-two years old. How? Mostly, James remembered, it was because “I was smart enough just to listen and not talk my way out of those rooms.”

  As hip-hop expands its reach and germinates in different cultures and economies around the world, we’re seeing others follow similar routes—with young entrepreneurs coming out of music and entertainment to be influential business leaders. The millennial path to success has been redefined and repurposed—as have the signifiers of style and status.

  After Jay-Z wrote “Change Clothes” and the retro jersey days were left behind, there was actually a swing in the other direction toward more tailored shirts, tight-fitting apparel, and skinny jeans that briefly became a cross-cultural millennial uniform. That soon went the way of the baggies and has now settled into looser but better-fitting silhouettes. Reflecting the economy, millennials seem to be searching for classic, dependable brands that have quality and some scarcity—or for the latest find that isn’t overpriced but has been anointed with a level of cultural cool. In some circles that sustains demand for Louis Vuitton and most high-end brands or helps down-to-earth brands like Converse, while within other circles it’s harder to find names like Diamond Supply Company and the Supra sneaker line, which are a couple of the hot sellers at this writing.

  One of the coolest things I see about this tan generation and the scene they’re cultivating now is that there is no uniformity and that’s a style unto itself. The unapologetic attitude of today draws from that permission to lead and to be different. That’s in the DNA.

  As for the language being spoken in this culture by young America today, I think that Mike Bentley had it right when he talked about the evolution of urban culture into digital culture. Read any texts or posts online by the under-thirty set and you will pick up an intonation that can only be described as tan—it’s a cultural mash-up of code. Madison Avenue loves to drop in on this language or pick up the latest street slang and turn it into advertising. Again, that runs the risk of losing its shelf life of cool faster than you can shoot the commercial.

  What I try to say diplomatically, whenever the occasion allows, is that, first, you can’t visit the topic and expect to become conversant with how to speak to young America, or it becomes a situation of going to Paris and seeing the Eiffel Tower and then coming home. You didn’t experience Paris. The executives try to have the Cliffs Notes to culture, as if having a Facebook page, owning an iPad, and listening to Lady Gaga is enough, when they are really skipping the process. Besides the problem that too many executives are stuck in their boardrooms, not going out and immersing themselves in culture, the act of simply listening to the consumer is so much more important than trying to pick up the lingo.

  By the way, the language of cool right now is so amorphous, trying to jump in on that group megalogue in the middle of it can really be, as they say, awkward. There are numerous hip-hop slang books and even pretty funny flash cards that break down old-school and new-school expressions. But they too are only as relevant as the date on which they were printed. It is, therefore, a misconception that at any given time there exists certain slang that is universal to urban youth culture as a mind-set. Language is and has always been a very regional thing. Variances show up between cities and even neighborhoods.

  This diversity has only enhanced the musical storytelling. Not only that, but as Fab puts it, “The resources for creativity for young artists today are unlimited, especially with everyone having equal or similar access to technology.” For instance, the availability of beat-making software and downloadable beats has given rise to waves of new young rappers—who can become producers with little money invested in equipment. In 2009, SoundScan reported a record-high sale of vinyl records, leaving no doubt that the format is in the midst of the biggest revival since Berry Gordy invited Detroit teenagers in to listen to the latest vinyl pressing of a Temptations hit, “My Girl,” and asked them the question “If you were hungry and broke and only had enough money for this record or a hot dog, what would you buy?”

  At one point, not long after Jimmy Iovine had to make the argument to iTunes that most kids didn’t even know to associate guitars with music, I heard that the international chain Guitar Center was actually selling more electronic turntables than guitars. DJs have all kinds of new tools and technology for mixing—including a very cool HP console that Translation helped develop and market in its early stages. There are also programs like Serato that will let anyone with a turntable that hooks up to their computer mix any song on their hard drive as if it was literally on vinyl—basically allowing you to scratch a computerized “blank” of the record and mix it for repeated usages.

  Fab Five Freddy went so far as to say, “There’s no excuse not to be creative with the resources available.” The climate now, he feels, has close parallels to the early days when the scene and the music achieved liftoff on extremely limited resources.

  With all this resilience and resourcefulness in the music scene today there is one dramatic difference that had bothered Jimmy Iovine for years. Whenever he and I used to talk—catching up on this and that, as well as projects we had in the works together—he would happen to mention how frustrated he was becoming with the dismal quality of the sound that kids today were getting from listening to music on their laptops and with cheap earbuds. Remember those beloved speakers of his that he always used to discern whether a record had transformative powers? After all these years, the importance of the sound experience was still an obsession.

  And there is a deep-seated reason why he is right. The globe-shaking and mind-changing power of music, the force that draws together people from all kinds of different backgrounds and weaves them into communities, lies purely in the emotion that is carried by sound. When Carlos Santana said that music has the capacity to rearrange the molecules in the psyches of listeners, he was referring to the emotional relationship between music and audience that comes from the sound. The magic happens in the feeling.

  Experts disagree about how the shift from analog to digital has impacted recorded music’s sound. Some feel that the computerized and digitized sound, not unlike high-def video, has helped to refine and perfect all the parts of the whole—creating as close
to a live and in-person experience as possible. Others say the opposite is true. They argue that technological improvements have blurred the raw and gritty emotional components that were captured more truly on vinyl and in vintage recording studios. Such is the thinking that has to do, in part, with vinyl’s resurgence. Where everyone agrees, however, is that with most music being heard through laptop or low-quality computer speakers or through inexpensive earbuds, the sound is hugely diminished.

  That is the backdrop to a revelation that happened one day, back during the time when 50 Cent was blasting off with his G-Unit sneakers and Jimmy was shooting the sh*t with Dr. Dre—who was half-joking about how he wished there was a sneaker he could promote. All of sudden, Iovine got an idea. “Forget sneakers,” he told Dre, “we’re going to do speakers.”

  With that, the two of them started working with engineers to develop state-of-the-art headphones as a product line that was perfect for Dr. Dre—perhaps the most iconic music producer of our time. During this development process Jimmy learned of a study that showed them what they were up against. The question posed by a team of researchers to different age groups was whether they could tell the difference between music played on the most state-of-the-art speakers that cost $100,000 versus a similar-looking set of speakers that cost $1,000. With the 40-to-50-year-olds, 85 percent could identify the better speakers. With the group of 30-to-40-year-olds, about 80 percent could also tell the difference and identify the higher quality. When they got to the younger group of 15-to-30-year-olds, only 25 percent could tell the difference and identify correctly which were the $100,000 speakers and which were the $1,000 ones.

  These findings alerted Jimmy and Dre and their partners at Monster Cable that they were veering into uncharted waters. Would their target consumer—millennials—have a need for headphones retailing for over three hundred dollars and would they even care about the improved technology? Well, what they were betting on was the idea that it’s not about the technology but about what it allows you to experience. And that was the story that needed to be told, with a fashion and style component that made them cool. Very simply, authentically, Monster Beats by Dr. Dre arrived after two years in development with a statement from Dre that explained his passion, why this product filled a need—because “people aren’t hearing all the music.” Who has greater credibility on that point than Dre? No one to my knowledge. Dre’s statement went on, “With Beats, people are going to hear what the artists hear, and listen to the music the way they should, the way I do.”