by Jeff Chang
In 1986, Run DMC had turned Adidas into a hip-hop brand with a song. Two years later, Spike Lee and Michael Jordan took hip-hop branding to the next level. Nike, then the number-two company in the shoe business, was in a bruising but losing battle with Reebok. They started by refocusing small management teams on developing or revamping their shoe lines in narrow niche markets.6 Then, in 1986, they fired their ad agency and hired Wieden and Kennedy and put $40 million into brand marketing.7
One night, two W&K admen saw She’s Gotta Have It, in which Spike Lee’s oddball character Mars Blackmon stomped around in Air Jordans. A light bulb went off. They called Lee and told him they wanted to pair him with Jordan. In 1988, when Spike and Mike began filming a series of spots that would shock the advertising world, Reebok was a $1.8 billion company, and Nike trailed at $1.2 billion. A year later, Spike and Mike’s ads helped propel Nike past Reebok, and the company never looked back. Not only did Nike’s success confirm that niches were the future, it also confirmed that a massive shift in tastes was occurring—from baby boomer to youth, from suburb to city, from whiteness to Blackness.
Black advertising agencies were also being forced to retool. Noticing that Black-targeted advertising budgets had begun to decline, industry leaders like the $60-million Mingo Group began to push for “urban marketing.” The idea had come from Black radio, which, during the ‘80s, had shifted to describing itself as “urban radio,” a transparent ploy, Nelson George writes, “aimed as much at Madison Avenue as at Black listeners.”8 “Urban” still signified “crossing over,” but in the ‘90s, the process reversed. Back then, Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson sold a softened “urban,” moving up and out from the ghetto, from afro-picks to Alfa Romeos. Now hip-hop sold a hardened “urban,” drawing back in to the ghetto, from Sperry Topsiders to Nike Dunks.
What was a concession to white corporate interests in the suites during the 1980s was a recognition of the new racial dynamics in the streets of the ‘90s. Now the word “urban” described how cultural change was emerging from cities like New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, where young Blacks seemed to initiate style shifts and a cohort of hip, multiracial youth spread them. Or perhaps the process was reversed. “You go to a city like Philadelphia, which is largely Black, or Washington, or New York for that matter, and wonder who’s driving social changes,” said Mingo Group head Samuel J. Chisholm.9
The emerging leaders of the rap industry were often whites comfortable and conversant with a nonwhite world. Monica Lynch, who ran Tommy Boy’s operations, was a feminist ex-go-go dancer with a canny eye for urban style and a golden ear for leftfield acts. Dave “Funken” Klein, The Source columnist, left Def Jam to start the first globally minded hip-hop label, Hollywood/BASIC, where he plucked artists from Zimbabwe and England, and signed seminal acts like Organized Konfusion, Peanut Butter Wolf, and DJ Shadow. Dante Ross was a Lower East Side red-diaper-baby-turned-skate-punk who had grown up with the Bad Brains and the Beastie Boys. Ross was the first hip-hop A&R to leave the indies for a major, jumping from Def Jam and Tommy Boy to join rock-oriented Elektra Records. There, he championed Afrocentric rappers like Brand Nubian, KMD, Leaders of The New School, and Pete Rock and CL Smooth, against hostile Black R&B execs still caught in an ‘80s idea of what it meant to be “urban.”
Five years after Michael Jackson, then the still unreconstructed King of Pop, broke the color line at MTV, white production assistant Ted Demme brought a concept for a rap video show to MTV heads. Dozens of local shows, led by Ralph McDaniels and Lionel Martin’s Video Music Box in New York City, had attracted strong followings, and the cable, pay-request Video Jukebox (later “The Box”) channel had expanded its rap videos on offer. Demme thought the time was right for a national show. The Yo! MTV Raps pilot debuted on August 6, 1988, with Fab 5 Freddy as host. Within months it was the network’s most-watched show.
MTV added former WBAU DJ and Original Concept leader Andre “Dr. Dre” Brown and radio host Ed “Ed Lover” Roberts as additional hosts, and gave Yo! MTV Raps daily airings. Within a year, MTV had gone from almost no rap videos to twelve hours of rap programming.10 Urban style no longer trickled up from multiracial networks of cool, but was instantly available via remote control to vanilla exurbs where teens were adjusting to lowered life expectations. Fab 5 Freddy understood what those kids liked about it. “People identify with rap,” he told a Time reporter. “You feel that you can look like that, that you can be a part of it immediately.”11
At Tommy Boy Records, Lynch and her boss, Silverman, realized that they were not in the record business anymore, they were in the “lifestyle” business. They diversified into clothing, designing brand-name gear and partnering with lines like Carhart and Stussy that hip-hoppers had already made popular on the street. A decade before, hip-hop sold Absolut vodka, Williwear clothing, Swatch watches, even Honda automobiles. But few then thought hip-hop was anything but a passing youth fad. Now it was clear that hip-hop was not only selling $400 million dollars worth of records a year, but hundreds of millions of dollars worth of other products—shoes, jeans, haute couture, soda, beer, liquor, videogames, movies and more. In marketing terms, hip-hop had become the urban lifestyle.
The Post-Gangsta Crossover
At the end of 1992, as Los Angeles still recovered from the riots, ex-NWA producer Andre “Dr. Dre” Young dropped The Chronic. Television had brought middle America closer to a generation’s rage than ever before, and Ice T had brought media multinational Time Warner closer to the establishment’s rage than ever before. The Chronic seemed a heaven-sent balm.
Dre and Snoop’s videos for “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” and “Let Me Ride” drove the album beyond triple platinum. Dre was finally moving on up—out of Compton and into the Valley, not far from Eazy E’s and Jerry Heller’s mansions—closer to the growing fanbase. In a strange, somewhat disquieting way, Dre and Snoop had become reassuring, as if their presence now signified that the difference between the ghetto and the exurbs needed not be measured in social indicators but in degrees of cool.
The formula for The Chronic had not been all that different from the formula for Efil4zaggin. But the riots had changed mainstream reception. Before then, “Lil’ Ghetto Boy” and “The Day the Niggas Took Over” might have garnered most of the critical attention, while the third single, “Dre Day”—a brutal dis of Dre’s former partners, Eazy E and Ice Cube, but interestingly, not Jerry Heller—may have stirred outcry.12 Instead, Dre’s songcraft, rather than his sociology, was now the focus. He was hailed as Spectorian in his pop majesty, and “ ‘G’ Thang” and “Let Me Ride” were celebrated as all-American music, compared to the endless summer vibes of the Beach Boys an The Mamas and The Papas.
The irony was that these songs clearly spoke to the outbreak of gang peace and the truce parties, the ecstatic sense of freedom of being able to drive down the street without worrying about cops or enemies. Just as the gang peace movement desired to mainstream hardcore bangers into civic society, The Chronic wanted to drive hardcore rap into the popstream. It could be heard as as guiltless, gentrified gangsta—no Peace Treaties, rebuilding demands, or calls for reparations, just the party and the bullshit. The video for “ ‘G’ Thang” seemed to ask: didn’t all boys everywhere just want to bounce in hot cars to hotter beats, hang out with their crew, party all night, and spray conceited bitches with malt-liquor?
In 1993, the popularity of Yo! MTV Raps was fading, and majors were clearing their rosters of potential political liabilities. But “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” and “Let Me Ride” propelled the post-gangsta aesthetic into heavy rotation. Later, on Doggy Style, Dre and Snoop largely ditched the inner-city blues for more smoothed-out roughness and gangsta parties, and sold even more records.
Artistically, The Chronic and Doggy Style were remarkable achievements because they synthesized contradictory vectors—inner-city and suburbs, street and tech, First World and Fourth, like a Gehry building covered in graffiti. But these albums also distill
ed a shift in corporate thinking, a growing conviction that these massive paradigm shifts—demographic change, broadcast to niche, whiteness to post-whiteness, the rise of the “urban”—were not such a bad thing after all. Hip-hop offered a way this elusive generation could be assimilated, categorized, made profitable.
The disposable could become indispensable. The Black thing you once couldn’t understand had now become the G thang you could buy into—the chronic, the crip walk, condoms, ConArt, Chevrolet, Pendleton, Zig-Zag, Seagram, Remy, Hennessey, Tanqueray, Desert Eagle, Dogg Pound, Death Row. Here was the short-lived post-truce freedom recast as the sweet sound of rapsploitation and a new corporate multiculturalism:
Rollin down the street smokin indo
Sippin on gin and juice
Laaaid back
With my mind on my money
And my money on my mind
Polyculturalism and Post-Whiteness
Now that corporations were climbing aboard the urban, multicultural gravy train, what would happen to cultural desegregation? Historian Robin D.G. Kelley and scholar Vijay Prashad believed that the idea of “multiculturalism” had been co-opted by the state and capitalism. During the ‘80s, multiculturalists had pushed for inclusion and representation. But post-Chronic corporate multiculturalism reinforced backward notions of identity. Kelley coined the term “polyculturalism” to try to revive a radical vision of integration.
Polyculturalism built on the idea that civil society did not need Eurocentrism or whiteness at its core to function. In the real world, cultures layered, blended, and sounded together like the polyrhythms of a jazz song or a DJ riding the cross-fader. In its truest sense, this kind of integration could lift everyone. But urban marketing threatened to confer the trappings of integration while preserving the realities of segregation and inequality. So rap’s big crossover set off paroxysms of self-examination in the hip-hop nation.
In a much-discussed essay in The Source called “We Use Words Like Mackadocious”, white Chicago graffiti writer William “UPSKI” Wimsatt ripped on the sudden influx of what he called “wiggers” into hip-hop culture that the success of The Source and Yo! MTV Raps had made possible. “One day the rap audience may be as white as tables in a jazz club, and rap will become just another platform for every white ethnic group—not only the Irish—to express their suddenly funky selves,” he wrote.
Wimsatt followed the article with a book entitled Bomb the Suburbs, and, in its perceptive rage over race and generation, it became an instant classic. “The suburbs is more than just an unfortunate geographical location, it is an unfortunate state-of-mind,” he began. “It’s the American state-of-mind, founded on fear, conformity, shallowness of character and dullness of imagination.13
“I say bomb the suburbs because the suburbs have been bombing us for at least the last forty years. They have waged an economic, political and cultural war on life in the city,” he wrote. “Bomb the Suburbs means let’s celebrate the city. Let’s celebrate the ghetto and the few people who aren’t running away from it.”14
Here was the idea of the “urban” addressed with a thorough-going optimism. Hip-hop separated from marketing imperatives was still something his generation could control and define. Suburbanites could unite with ghetto-dwellers. Whites could learn to respect Blackness, not merely consume it. Wimsatt, the militant dreamer, wanted a world that was not just polycultural, but postwhite.
Strictly Underground
Wimsatt appealed to the highest aspirations of the hip-hop generation: intellectual honesty, independent-mindedness, principled realness. Wimsatt self published Bomb The Suburbs and hawked it by hand to Blacks, whites, Latinos and Asians on subways and in the streets as he criss-crossed the country, selling 23,000 copies. To him, hip-hop nationalism was about staying true to yourself and your peers, backing up your words with your life.
If the city street was hip-hop nationalism’s mythical wellspring, the college campus was its hothouse, the hub of the local underground. In the ‘60s, during the long economic boom, the youths had marched. In the ‘90s, with the bleakest prospects since the Depression, the youths got creative.
Around nearly every college radio station, a hip-hop underground popped up—supporting energetic enterprising networks of radio shows, b-boy, MC and DJ battles, poetry slams, cafés, clothing stores, indie record labels, and hip-hop zines. By the mid-’90s, these networks were vibrant and thriving. At national conferences like the Gavin Convention, Jack the Rapper, or How Can I Be Down, mixshow and college radio DJs, street promoters, and hip-hop journalists got organized. Grass-roots groups like the Bay Area Hip-Hop Coalition became a model for underground radio DJs, influencing national radio playlists and press coverage, and propelling grassroots artists into the mainstream. Independent music distribution networks, particularly in the South, generated million-dollar-grossing artists and labels.
Inspired by the do-for-self energy, hip-hop journalism exploded. Some zines, like The Bomb, Flavor, Straight From the Lip, Divine Styler, 4080, Stress, On The Go, or One Nut Network, were basically bedroom projects handed out to industry insiders or sold in specialty record, graffiti, skateboard and clothing stores. Others, like Rap Sheet, URB, The Kronick, and Ego Trip began as free newsprint offerings. Some featured high-end design and edgy content, but all offered low-cost ads that attracted the new pool of major-label promo capital and, more important, local, independent start-ups, including clothing lines, record labels and club and rave promotions. Especially after The Source dumped its regional reports, these local magazines proliferated. Some, like URB, Rap Sheet, and Rap Pages works become newsstand sellers. Through their content and their commerce, they helped to consolidate the local scenes.
So while hip-hop’s crossover had created new problems, there was also a sense that bigger opportunities than anyone could imagine awaited. Hip-hop had reached the point where it was ready to flow out of its niche into the mainstream. The only question left was whether reaching market potential and fanning potential militancy could remain consonant goals.
Vibe and the Triumph of the Urban
In 1993, The Source’s advertisers expanded beyond record labels to include Nike, Reebok, Sega and Bugle Boy. Its circulation was up to 90,000 readers; the average reader was a twenty-one-year-old male. Over half were Black, over a quarter were white.15 “This isn’t a niche market, or just an ethnic market,” Mays told magazine industry people. “Hip-hop is like rock and roll was twenty-five years ago. It’s a music-driven lifestyle being lived by an entire generation of young people now.”
He added, “This market is dying to be marketed to.”16
Quincy Jones, Russell Simmons and Time Warner agreed. In 1991, they had entered into discussions with Mays, Shecter and Bernard to buy The Source. “Their thing was we were too narrow,” says Bernard. “I think the Time Warner people didn’t think that there was going to be a big enough magazine for a hardcore hip-hop magazine, which they were wrong about. They also thought that there was a market for a mainstream Black music magazine that came out of hip-hop, which they were right about.” Bernard says the negotiations ended after Time Warner lowballed them.
Instead, Jones and Simmons took a $1-million investment from Time Warner and began developing an upmarket hip-hop magazine. How upmarket was a key question: Simmons liked The Source’s raw edginess, Jones wanted a slick Rolling Stone–styled glossy. Jones installed Carol Smith as the publisher, a white forty-three-year-old founder of Parenting magazine who admitted she had never seen Do the Right Thing or Boyz N The Hood. Jonathan Van Meter, a white, gay twenty-nine-year-old, was hired as editor-in-chief. Simmons quit, famously complaining, “They didn’t hire one straight Black man to work on that magazine.
“I don’t think anybody who knows me would accuse me of homophobia,” he added. “The idea that [this]’ll be the bible for the hip-hop community is dead.”17
With Simmons gone before Vibe’s September 1992 test launch, all of the principals admitted they had no idea
what to expect, or even who would buy the magazine. They just figured their “Black music Rolling Stone” would be huge. On the advertising side, they had picked up The Gap, Swatch and Nintendo, but they also landed Benetton, Armani Exchange, Gianni Versace, four pages of Levi’s and five pages of Nike. Ad pages sold for between $5,000 and $6,000.18 Their 144-page tester had fifty-four ad pages and hit the stands with 200,000 copies, twice the circulation of The Source. The response was strong enough for Time-Warner to make the full plunge.
Vibe began as a high-brow experiment, mixing celebrity and investigative journalism with minimalist high-concept photography and disorienting Madison Avenue-goes-Uptown fashion spreads. The writing was often superb: Joan Morgan challenging Ice Cube on his nationalism, Kevin Powell confronting Death Row Records at its peak, Danyel Smith both documenting and mourning Tupac’s tragic career. Vibe’s elegant photography and design now looks groundbreaking, pointing forward to the pre-millennial rush of hip-hop culture-as-post white haute couture, 1982 eternal. The Avedon-influenced photographs presented their subjects against blank, decontextualized backgrounds, emphasizing their many shades of nonwhiteness. No gritty street-scene backgrounds here, Vibe was all icon-making foreground. At the time, Vibe left many heads cold. To them, the magazine seemed to be turning hip-hop into a museum piece—cool but cerebral, artful but funkless, gorgeous but bourgeois.
Yet Vibe did not just survive, it thrived. The demand for hip-hop was larger than anyone had imagined. When, at the end of 1993, advertising execs realized that The Source and Vibe, and a host of smaller competitors like Rap Pages and URB, had not killed each other off, they turned on the tap. Brands that hiphop heads had long embraced—like Tommy Hilfiger and Timberland—belatedly returned the attention. Other brands—The Gap, Sprite—jumped in, hoping to rebrand themselves by generating tremors from the inner city out to the exurbs. Sony, AT&T, even the U.S. Army began pouring money into hip-hop magazines, which suddenly became consumer catalogs to the hip-hop lifestyle.