The Tanning of America Read online

  There is only one other time when, I think, a strategy was pulled that was even more bold and more daring that caused a tanning shift that was truly seismic. The economic reverberations of it can still be felt to this day. It also helped create a new tier of powerful hip-hop moguls who really did have a say on behalf of their generation, who lived up to the promise of “for us by us.” That was back in 1992 when Jimmy Iovine masterminded a way to get Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre what is known as day-parted on MTV. With a little help from his friends.

  CHAPTER 4

  ALL BUSINESS IS SHOW BUSINESS

  When I first moved into the offices that my company, Translation, now occupies, I remember wondering what to do about a two-story white blank wall. Instead of hanging up a piece of art or having kids come in and do street graffiti on it, I decided to use the wall as a reminder of the power that culture can have in transforming hearts and minds and chose to have it inscribed with the words of Sidney Poitier. From a speech he delivered upon receiving an honorary Academy Award in 2002 for lifetime acheivement, the words are especially meaningful to me not only because of the seismic tanning shift Poitier created but also because of the towering barriers he overcame in his personal journey.

  I never forgot the story of how, in 1943, at age fifteen, Sidney Poitier had come alone to the United States from the Bahamas, three dollars to his name, to find work in Miami. Unprepared for the indignities of racism, he was given a crash course over a short period of time. It culminated one evening when a job interview the following day meant he had to go pick up his clothes from a dry cleaner in a white part of town about ten miles from where he was staying. The bus got him there but by the time he paid for the dry cleaning, there were no more buses for the night. Not knowing any better, he tried to hitchhike back to the black neighborhood. The next thing he knew, Poitier had mistakenly flagged down an unmarked police car with five white officers inside. They took him into an alley, put a gun to his forehead, and told him that instead of killing him then, they would follow him all the way to where he was staying and if he turned back to look at them they were then going to shoot him dead. I can only imagine what must have gone on in his mind as he looked for their reflections following him in shop windows the whole way home.

  Even though Poitier didn’t speak about that experience in accepting his honorary Oscar or the fact that he was the first African-American to receive a Best Actor Academy Award (for Lilies of the Field in 1964), that story was undoubtedly part of the subtext when he spoke of the distance he had traveled:I arrived in Hollywood at the age of twenty-two, in a time different than today’s. A time in which odds against my standing here tonight, fifty-three years later, would not have fallen in my favor. Back then, no route had been established for where I was hoping to go. No pathway left in evidence for me to trace. No custom for me to follow. Yet, here I am this evening at the end of a journey that, in 1949 would have been considered almost impossible, and, in fact might have never been set in motion were there not an untold number of courageous, unselfish choices made by a handful of visionary American filmmakers, directors, writers and producers, each with a strong sense of citizen responsibility to the times in which they lived. Each unafraid to permit their art to reflect their views and values—ethical and moral—and moreover, acknowledge them as their own. They knew the odds that stood against them and their efforts were overwhelming and likely could have proven too high to overcome. Still those filmmakers persevered, speaking through their art to the best in all of us. And I benefited from their efforts, the industry benefited from their efforts. America benefited from their efforts, and in ways large and small the world has benefited from their efforts.

  Therefore, with respect, I share this great honor, with the late Joe Mankiewicz, the late Richard Brooks, the late Ralph Nelson, the late Darryl Zanuck, the late Stanley Kramer, the Mirsch Brothers, especially Walter whose friendship lies at the very heart of this moment. Guy Green, Norman Jewison and all others who had a hand in altering the odds, for me and for others. Without them, this most memorable moment would not have come to pass. And the many excellent young actors who have followed in admirable fashion might not have come, as they have, to enrich the tradition of American filmmaking as they have. I accept this award in memory of all African-American actors and actresses who went before me in the difficult years. On whose shoulders I was privileged to stand to see where I might go. My love and my thanks to my wonderful, wonderful wife, my children, my grandchildren, my agent and friend Martin Baum. And finally, to those audience members around the world who have placed their trust in my judgment as an actor and filmmaker, I thank each of you for your support through the years. Thank you.

  I wanted the speech to be on the wall as a reminder that the best storytellers—whatever their medium—are those who have that sense of citizen responsibility to the times in which they live. And I also wanted to be reminded every day of one of my heroes who embodies the transcendent power of popular culture.

  For the world audience, seeing a person of color through the motion picture lens provided that transcendence. But it was a much different force that enabled hip-hop to finally overcome external and internal challenges to find its transcendent power. What was it? The answer is short and sweet: music television.

  MTV

  In 1987, when Van Toffler arrived at MTV and started moving through the ranks to eventually become president of MTV Networks—which today includes MTV and MTV2, VH1, among other cable channels plus departments for feature films, TV series, and video games—he had a vision that both appealed to advertisers and also scared them. Van was on a quest to make MTV the number one entertainment destination for the most sought-after yet elusive consumer demographic: youth comprised of 12-to-29-year-old viewers. What advertiser wouldn’t love that goal? But the part that scared them was how MTV intended to attract and keep their audience. Unapologetically, Toffler and the team at MTV believed they could cultivate a discerning, loyal, constant viewership by offering culturally relevant music.

  No, that didn’t sound scary when you were talking about videos from mainstream rock stars. But issues came up immediately once rock started veering into grunge and heavy metal, or when pop artists like Madonna started pushing the envelope with sexually explicit content and images. Anything new, as usual, took advertisers out of their comfort zones and made them worry whether it was worth it to associate their brand with certain artists in order to win favor with the younger demographic but then run the risk of turning off other core consumers in older demographics.

  From the start, Van Toffler was used to helping advertisers get past their issues. “For us,” he explained to me, “it was always trying to reflect what the artists were seeing in the lives they were leading and the cultures they were reflecting. That’s what we ultimately stood behind when talking to advertisers—that this is going on in the world. And musicians always set the cultural barometer for everyone else.”

  The strength of that argument had prevailed until edgier rap came along. Though the lines had long been blurring in the marketplace, the old divisions segregating black and white music that had confused the record industry were still impacting the thinking of music television programmers. As a result, videos by hip-hop artists tended to make it onto MTV by a kind of hit-or-miss process. That would change as the genre gained popularity and programmers and advertisers started to relax—at least with anything in the spectrum of the more rock-infused and pop-laced hip-hop. In fact, thanks to market testing, by the late eighties everybody arrived at the happy conclusion that white kids in suburbia who watched rock videos also liked rap. But then, right at the turn of the decade, red flags went up. Artists were being prosecuted on obscenity charges, some were fighting allegations of misuse of copyrighted materials, and all of a sudden hip-hop was back in the not-ready-for-prime-time category.

  For a minute, as all of this was coming to a head in the late eighties, it looked as if the inroads that rap music videos had made toward legitima
cy had come to dead ends. Not willing to give up, as Van Toffler recalled, the creative voices and programmers at MTV came together and made a strong case not to abandon the genre. Leading the way in the discussion was the late Ted Demme, then a recent college graduate who had begun his career in media as the host of a radio show on WSUC-FM. When Ted left the freedom of college radio—where he could mix music, talk, and comedy—he brought his underground, countercultural sensibilities with him to MTV.

  Van noted that in 1988 he started hearing more and more from Ted and fellow up-and-coming MTV executive Pete Dougherty about how both the music and culture of hip-hop were percolating in urban streets across the country. In D.C., there was almost a dance subculture within the culture, known as go-go, and then there were the local underground economies on certain streets there and in Brooklyn where you could only find particular mix tapes in particular locations, just as in neighborhoods of Queens and the Bronx, all of them part of a phenomenon spreading similarly into different regions of the country. At a moment when the art form was about to be sequestered to the past, mix tapes were turning into the underground railroad for cultural expression. Ted and Pete argued that this new street music and culture, rich with language and customs of its own—something that was, as Van described, “really real with not that many filters”—ought to at least have its own regular MTV segment.

  Toffler and the rest of the decision makers agreed. “Ultimately,” he told me, “we felt that though we weren’t going to be the first ones to feature hip-hop and rap, we were going to be the first big media company to shine a light on it and talk about it.” In those days, the network was developing weekly shows devoted to certain “alternative” segments of their audience. The segmented shows that were developed over the years included 120 Minutes, Alternative Nation, and later, Subterranean. Usually they would air once weekly, later at night, not during peak viewing hours or in regular day-parted programming. Basically, broadcast hours are broken into daily blocks of time and programmers select content that is seen as most appropriate for that part of the viewing day. Getting day-parted at MTV meant reaching the general, wider audience, the same times when advertisers saw the biggest bang for their buck in reaching the best target audience for their product. So the weekly nighttime shows were intended to build an audience among a specific segment of viewers and also boost popularity for each show’s genre. Made sense. Rather than putting hip-hop music videos into general rotation, Ted Demme and Pete Dougherty were given the green light to add a new series, Yo! MTV Raps, to the lineup of segmented programming. While this had to be a feel-good decision for the culturally curious, I don’t believe anyone had a clue as to how much the segment would blow up. To mainstream eyes, the couple of other music video outlets that were including hip-hop in their programming in this period had seemingly not amassed much more than a fringe or niche following. Over at BET—Black Entertainment Television—in the late eighties and early nineties, after facing resistance even from within the African-American community, rap videos were now infiltrating the mix. But as a cable channel still in its infancy BET didn’t yet have the household count, exposure, or audience reach to be a market force.

  However, there was one other TV entity that predated all the rest in its airing of rap videos and is too often overlooked in the history books for everything that it and its creator, host Ralph McDaniels, did to give hip-hop a footing—not just in music television but for its ultimate survival and growth.

  Originally from Brooklyn before he moved to Queens—where he cut his teeth in the early days of hip-hop as a DJ for local MCs—Ralph went on to pursue a formal education in communications and broadcasting. After earning a college degree from the New York Institute of Technology, he came up with a radical concept he called “edutainment” that would allow him to combine his passion for hip-hop with his communications acumen. His idea for creating a hybrid of education and entertainment was to layer rap music on top of news-style camera footage of the city’s diverse street scene, complete with local interviews of artists and fans alike. Ralph is African-American, but his pitch wasn’t about color, minority status, or the need to feature black music. What he was seeing, rather, was an emerging, important kind of American folk music. It was complete with a culture and an attitude that happened to be bubbling up ahead of the curve right there in the New York area.

  Part of what really motivated him, Ralph explained to me, was the culture of B-boys, which was all about code: “The way you wore your sneakers, your hat, or cap to the side, and the colors. B-boys led the way. But they were outcasts. They were trendsetters, but club owners wouldn’t let them in the club. And I saw this look nowhere on television.” There were also videos being produced by the music companies for artists like the Fat Boys, Grandmaster Flash, and Whodini, as well as for Run-DMC, Rick James, and Michael Jackson. But as then twenty-two-year-old Ralph McDaniels realized, “There were no real outlets for them. They weren’t on Soul Train or on The Dick Clark Show.”

  To do a local TV show on something that was beginning, something as transformational as ragtime was in its day—as one example—ought to have rung all sorts of bells with network affiliates in and around Manhattan. Nope. Not in the for-profit media apparatus. Fortunately, however, Ralph’s energy and conviction were so appealing that the public station WNYC-TV, Channel 31, brought him on as an engineering intern. Ralph’s fortunes changed one day when a promotional reel arrived from SOLAR Records, owned by Dick Griffey, with footage of the roster’s mostly West Coast R&B artists. Ralph said, “The reel wasn’t a video, just footage shot in the studio, not live performances at a venue.” The label had simply sent out the reels to radio and TV stations. Ralph proposed to his bosses that they use it during the annual station fund-raiser. “I rounded up more videos,” he recalled, “and what we found was that when the music videos were played, we got more fund-raiser calls.”

  When he proposed to turn that into his big idea for a music video show, the station still balked. They did, however, opt to hire him as a host of a show that played an eclectic mix of danceable music called Studio 31 Dance Party. That went so well, by the end of 1983 when he pitched a public interest angle for his edutainment idea, it held sway with the station heads. Thus, Video Music Box was born.

  Because there were so few hip-hop artists at the time with videos broadcast-ready, Ralph McDaniels often developed his own visual component to the music as part and parcel of his storytelling. Pioneer of music videos that he was, Ralph realized that the best place to do that was in the clubs. He remembered, “I’d go into the clubs and tape the acts.” There was a rich diversity in the different outposts for cultural sharing—the hip-hop and punk clubs downtown at the Roxy, the uptown clubs where you had to have money to get in, and all the different neighborhoods where fashion was being created. His next brainstorm was to host the first ever concert lineup of rappers—with the likes of Run-DMC, Kurtis Blow, and a very young LL Cool J—and then to shoot video of that. From the very first performance, Ralph noted somewhat to his surprise that the crowd was composed of both inner-city kids of color and suburban white kids. Something very real and relevant was clearly happening.

  Video Music Box soon became as much a part of the upbringing of area teens like me as Sesame Street had become for preschoolers. For one hour in the afternoon, six days a week, urban teens would rush home from school (or wherever we happened to be) and watch stories set to music that actually resembled and reflected our lives in ways nobody else was offering on mainstream TV. Out in the suburbs, as Ralph McDaniels realized, kids who weren’t growing up in the culture also rushed home from school (or wherever they happened to be) to watch stories set to music that spoke to them too. Why?

  And it wasn’t just attracting kids in New York City and environs. Video Music Box was so popular it gained national attention. When I asked Ralph how a local public access show did that, he explained that there was a signal from the station that was picked up in the D.C./Virginia area, as well as i
n North Carolina and in Detroit. Then, those viewers started recording the show onto VHS tapes and selling them around the rest of the country. That was how, he said, early hip-hop videos became a national phenomenon. Another part of the drawing power was that cable was in its infancy, and not everyone had access to MTV. And because public television was free—accessible to anyone with a television set—curiosity alone must have been enough to motivate teens of all backgrounds to check out a format completely different from anything on the other channels. For many, Video Music Box was where they could hear rap for the first time, with the added bonus of having visuals to go with the audio experience. Besides the appeal of poetry set to beats, Ralph’s video footage provided a minidocumentary—a real, honest portrait of another world that existed not so many subway stops away. And the reason that it resonated both with those who were living it and those who were outside of it was not a fluke or happenstance. It had everything to do with Ralph McDaniels’s prescience that there might be a tan mind-set waiting to be tapped by the possibilities of the new cable medium.

  In time, the creator of Video Music Box would be affectionately known as Uncle Ralph for everything that he had done to provide a platform to up-and-coming artists, fledgling crews, and even nominal figures in hip-hop culture. With Uncle Ralph’s man-on-the-street interviews, where he would stop passersby to say a few words for the camera, legend has it that Ralph McDaniels coined the phrase and practice of giving “a shout-out.” Some of the shout-outs became local headline news—like who did somebody wrong, or the name of somebody’s good-for-nothing ex about to be pursued with a paternity suit! Of course the language was part “localese” and part generational slang, both old-and new-school ghetto vernacular. All that code was now getting passed by Video Music Box to other neighboring locales, even to communities where the culture was very different.