The Tanning of America Read online

  No one was taking sides. In reality each had accomplished a lot with his respective franchise, but Roger Moore was our guy. Jay and I were as hell-bent on winning the duel as he was! So what if Star Trek had gone around the universe on global television and had Trekkies showing up by many thousands at conventions scattered everywhere on Planet Earth? We weren’t saying anything.

  “You know what?” Moore said. “F**k William Shatner!” He described the luxury building where both he and Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise (a.k.a. William Shatner) had lived. His point? “I had the penthouse. I lived above Shatner!” With that, Roger Moore cast his eyes down in another direction and all of our glances followed as he nodded right toward his wife’s crazy huge diamond ring. Like an ice cube sparkling under the stars, perfectly crystal clear. His expression said, Need I say more?

  We were all falling out, laughing our asses off! Jay and I probably laughed harder, mainly because of how far hip-hop’s language and its unspoken, unwritten rules had traveled. Besides that, not one of us at the table, to my knowledge, had come from privilege or any semblance of affluence. Roger Moore had grown up in a small working-class town in England before going off to fight in World War II, no auspicious destiny ahead of him whatsoever. There was Jimmy Iovine, Italian-American, from a rough-and-tumble Brooklyn neighborhood. Jay-Z, a.k.a. Shawn Corey Carter, also came from Brooklyn but from the Marcy Houses projects—a notorious war zone in the impoverished ghetto where he grew up without a father, raised by a single mother. And Bono had come from the outskirts of Dublin, an actual war zone at times, where bombings were familiar signs of the age-old bloody conflict between Catholics and Protestants. The son of a Catholic father, a taskmaster with a temper, and a Protestant mom who died when Bono was growing up, he experienced the Irish brand of lack and dysfunction in the streets and at home.

  As for me, my three siblings and I were lucky to be raised in a household in Queens Village with two parents—something that was becoming less and less the norm. Both immigrants from Trinidad, my parents had a relentless work ethic that drove them to each work full-time jobs with second and sometimes third jobs to make ends meet. Still, we lived paycheck to paycheck and knew what it meant to go without—from our own situation and from watching what was happening around us.

  So, yeah, my dinner companions and I recognized through code, without any biographical data necessarily being exchanged, that we’d all walked very different but rugged roads to get to the top of the Hôtel de Paris, where we could talk trash and smoke ridiculously expensive cigars. We could understand why it mattered to Roger Moore, because of where he had come from, to be able to sit there dressed like a prince all in white and say, “F**k Shatner, I lived above him!”

  We could understand, because of the spirit of the whole hip-hop cultural platform that had now circled the globe far beyond anything Star Trek could ever attempt through fact or fiction, that Roger Moore’s rap actually had nothing to do with William Shatner or the friendly rivalry of that relationship or the stuff he’d acquired that was superior to his rival’s. He was saying in his own way, Here I am, here we are, look at me, look at us, remember where we came from? Of course you want to have someone else whose status you can one-up. That’s how you win. And Roger Moore, with a totally unapologetic approach to life, spoke that language.

  Yeah, I remember thinking, the unapologetic approach, now that is the definition of cool!

  As I thought about it more, the realization helped me see how the unapologetic hip-hop mind-set—which had started to become much more vivid in the music and the culture in the mid-to late 1980s and early ’90s—had given tanning a turbocharge. First of all, the artists gaining the most popularity came from diverse backgrounds with distinct points of view. We had Salt-n-Pepa, female rappers from Queens unapologetically taking on the guys, talking street and sexy with infectious hits like “Push It” on their first album release, Hot, Cool and Vicious. We had the Beastie Boys, white suburban Jewish kids from Long Island, unapologetically bringing their punk-rock roots along in their reverse crossover to rap and then telling like-minded youth that you have to “fight for your right to party” on the album Licensed to Ill (interestingly enough, the bestselling rap album of the entire 1980s). We had another Long Island group, Public Enemy, who unapologetically pushed the genre to address political and racial issues (not without controversy) with anthem songs like “Fight the Power”—which Spike Lee used as a setpiece in his unapologetic Do the Right Thing.

  Lack of apology was nowhere more audible than in gangsta rap, a.k.a. reality rap, which was just warming up in the 1980s with West Coast rappers Ice-T and Ice Cube of NWA coming onto the scene. Nor was there anything apologetic about any of the new voices being heard in cities like Oakland, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami, Houston, and New Orleans, and in places least expected.

  The other thing to consider was that even with diverse points of view appealing to an increasingly diverse audience, the common story line was no less than a remix and reinterpretation of the American dream. It was the most gangsta—as in bold and daring—thing that a movement could have dared to do at the time. The eighties, let’s not forget, were disastrous for anyone growing up in the inner city. Reaganomics and the corporate free-for-all that were supposed to send some trickle-down into the streets only exacerbated unlivable conditions. The crack epidemic in the midst of hard times opened the floodgates for cheap drugs, guns, and other illegal businesses to set up stands at every corner. As crack cut a swathe across inner cities of America—turning neighborhoods into third-world countries, dealers into glamorous high rollers, and loved ones into crackheads—the reality was so negative and so full of despair it couldn’t help but alter the tenor of the poetry. In the process, the crack epidemic that created so much pain and destruction enriched the storytelling about how terrible it truly was—through the characters, villains, and even heroes it created. And so, to be a poet, to come out of that kind of poverty and violence and make it, was literally miraculous. Yet it was possible.

  Hip-hop, in marketing a new brand of hope, was simply doing what it always did well by borrowing from the classics and adding its own twist. Once an updated version of rags to riches was in the code, part of America’s DNA, the art form widened its audience exponentially. If you were generationally attuned, had an understanding or empathy toward impoverishment and/or dysfunction, and were aspirational, you were in. With no one even imagining the numbers that this marquee was going to attract, the cultural infrastructure had to quickly adapt to address the demand.

  And one of the ways that it did, as it became clear to me that night in Monte Carlo, was by inventing the outlines of a creed or belief system or, yes, a religion for itself. Music, interestingly enough, developed originally to connect tribal members to one another and allow religious adherents to commune with a higher power. This is to say that music, by its nature, breeds culture. On top of that, hip-hop is a kind of confession, at times a soul-baring about stuff you’re not even supposed to say in public, sometimes inappropriate, sometimes gut-wrenching—My mother’s on drugs, my father abandoned me, I’m broke, I’m f**ked up, what am I supposed to do?

  So, as the art form became a culture and began to fulfill the same functions that religious institutions have served throughout history, the most obvious thing it did was to provide governance. Religion has always been influential in governing people without hope and who are in despair, giving them a reason to believe, to go on. Incredibly, that’s what hip-hop did, stepping into the void of meaninglessness to provide governance for people without anything, riddled with crack, dope, and hopelessness. Rap music, using language that was old and new, literal and metaphoric, was like scriptures, full of vivid, accurate depictions of life that gave people who were poor and powerless a way to feel better. As the poets were telling the real stories, speaking over beats that you loved, the impact happened at a cellular level, elevating your emotional /spiritual metabolism. Sports heroes were still lar
ger than life, but now another class of hero, by the laws of this system, could come from nothing and find purpose with just their words that would lead toward redemption, with all their sins and baggage included. The fact that they had no resources made their journey to fame and fortune even more epic. Rappers—the street poets—now became legends, not just locally but everywhere, and gave the culture a winning history, a bible.

  The impoverished-yet-unapologetic mind-set thus became the hip-hop religion’s unifying concept. Who knew that way of thinking could turn a profit?

  The Business of Culture: An Intro

  One reason I believe hip-hop was able to grow from a small niche market (seen as a subgenre of black music at the record companies) to a full-blown dominant musical force and industry—a mainstay of popular culture capable of impacting the worldwide economy—is that it began in the bedrock of hard times. With that as a draw pulling in everyone, the color lines dropped, and there was a common language and attitude to share that created a sense of unity, of community.

  To clarify, this new urban religion—which, after “Walk This Way,” had begun to infiltrate most major cities and parts of their suburbs—was not a rallying cry for an almighty being, or for “the One.” The rallying cry, at first, was just to tell and hear the truth—that being poor f**king sucks. It was a call to confront the other truth that in coping, the ways of the old institutions—the church, the schools, the government, the law, and the parents—had failed.

  Then it became more than just a badge of credibility to be the rapper who could stand up and say, I come from nothing and look at my success. Technically, not all hip-hop artists were from abject poverty or gang-infested turf either. The cry accommodated that fact and it became enough to say, Hey, I know the life, I know being poor, I know injustice, hypocrisy, I know the pain, the crack, the burned-out buildings, the terror of the hallways, the killings, the drivebys. Or, later on, if you’re white and you’re Eminem—Hey, I know the drugs, the emptiness, the trailer parks, and I hate my mom. That, by the way, was just crazy, especially in the African-American community, because, as you may know, all our mothers are saintly.

  Plainly, the core experience of poverty, however it was described, had a dog-whistle effect in the frontal lobes of youth around the world. Ghetto and barrio kids would hear the stories of trailer parks and get it. Kids in affluent homes or in sleepy suburbs heard the call of generational despair and understood it. The commonality no longer had to be shared experience per se but was about the linkage of feelings—all kinds of emotions that could be conjured by a thumping beat, rhymes, wordplay, anger, humor, arousal, resentment, boredom, joy, excitement, curiosity, you name it.

  All of this was a rallying cry that crossed so many color, class, and even age lines and drew in so many followers that by the time Jay-Z came along in 1998 with “Hard Knock Life”—in which he sampled none other than a song from the Broadway show Annie with little orphan voices singing “instead of kisses we get kicks”—coming from poverty was the status symbol that gave definition to all the other status symbols. Later, Jay-Z and Will Smith would team up to produce a remake of the movie musical.

  The impoverished, unapologetic mentality was seductive. The attitude became viral. Coming from nothing and having a reason to push, to grind, the “can’t stop won’t stop” part of the hip-hop creed, gave life meaning and light in dark times. And the attitude was f**king hot. It had a look, a language, gestures, a posture, a dance, such that kids who didn’t come from nothing wanted to have the badge too, to dress like it and act like it. That was the mix that became contagious. Because of the music, and, as we will see, especially music videos, it caused contagion that would lead to consumption in order to have the badge. Mass consumption.

  It was only natural that brands were destined to become the beneficiaries of aspiration when the common message was one of going from poverty to success. Brands, after all, were being used by hip-hop to chart growth and proclaim the possibilities. I can play a thousand rap songs from every era that all say the same thing—I went from this to that. Brand alignment was your proof: See, I made it here, I have a BMW. (Or fill in the blank.)

  Your imagined or real rival for supremacy could then answer: A BMW? Wow. Guess what? I got a Mercedes.

  The dialogue required you to top that: Mercedes? Oh yeah, well, I have a Maybach.

  Next? Look, you drink Moët & Chandon, but I’m drinking Dom Perignon.

  Here comes the opening for someone else to jump in—Well, I’m drinking Cristal!

  And the chorus from the megalogue of everyone listening: Wow!

  When you come from nothing, you have license to have this duel without being uncool—Oh, your diamond’s real? So’s mine and I got a VVS (Very, very slightly imperfect, almost flawless).

  Oh? My whole sh*t is diamond.

  Oh? I’m bling the f**k out.

  Yeah? I got rims.

  Well, I got 20-inch rims.

  So? I got 22s.

  Whatever. I got 24s!

  Of course, this level of unapologetic jousting evolved over a period of time. Thanks to proximity, the code borrowed attitude from ballers on the court, along with rules of the game lifted from drug dealers, pimps, and gangsters, and especially the sense of style that the rappers came to epitomize.

  Let me emphasize here that being brand-conscious was nothing new for African-Americans—or honestly any oppressed race as they notoriously use badges to show they have arrived. African-Americans, I contend, are the absolute best consumers in the world. How so? Because they buy products that aren’t even marketed to them, over-indexing in commodities and brands that are aspirational. A scene in the TV series Mad Men dealt with this phenomenon in 1960s terms. In it, Pete, the ambitious junior ad executive, suggests to clients at Admiral, a popular television brand of the day, that they market to Negroes by buying ad space in black media such as Ebony and Jet. One of the Admiral executives acts surprised that Negroes even own TVs. Then the point is made that the reason blacks buy their brand is because Negroes think Admiral TVs are what whites want. That being the case, they conclude, advertising in black newspapers and magazines would hurt that dynamic and so the idea is rejected. Even though Pete gets nowhere with his pitch and is berated by his bosses for trying, the British character at the firm warns the team that they’re not paying attention to cultural changes and ought to think again about capitalizing on the emergence of “Negroes.”

  Besides the power of brands as badges for minorities, in the increasingly diverse hip-hop mix you also had younger generations of consumers for whom brand awareness wasn’t a new concept either. What was new was the market impact of a movement that embraced coming from poverty as part of its creed—a movement with a growing army poised to seriously influence the success of brands.

  If really smart corporate executives had wanted to save money on all that market research about what the next new new thing was going to be, they would only have had to turn to the hip-hop community—who were doing the research anyway, selecting trends that looked promising, creating overnight word-of-mouth promotion, and even adding their own product development ideas. When I talked to Russell Simmons about how urban culture came to influence the mainstream economy, he noted, “If the hip-hop community decided that Ralph Lauren was cool, even if that company had become a little stale or those Polo jeans were cold, it was instantly trendsetting and Ralph Lauren got hotter than ever. The core hip-hop community is the best brand-building community in the world.”

  Being first to discover the new cool brand carries huge weight, Russell pointed out. The prime example of the brand-building power that would reverberate across the 1990s was the mutual love affair between hip-hop and Tommy Hilfiger. In spite of a lover’s quarrel later on that arose from a rumor of a comment by Tommy that was seen as disparaging the hip-hop market (which he fervently denounced as not true), it could still be said that the hip-hop stamp of approval for all products Tommy Hilfiger helped build the brand from the groun
d up into a multibillion-dollar mainstream American company. (More on this later, along with the problem Cristal caused and didn’t redeem.)

  Then too, Russell reminded me, beyond discovering the new, the hip-hop tastemakers and thought leaders love to rediscover and rebuild brands like Versace, waving the wand of go-ahead coolness. Making something old new, vital, and relevant again—by putting an original spin on it—is a power of the hip-hop consumer too few companies recognize.

  Putting on a different spin could take all forms and manifestations. For instance, there was the sudden craze for wearing eyeglasses without the lenses. Imagine that conversation at retail when hip-hop consumers showed up in droves and bought designer eye-wear, and would insist, “Take out the lenses. Don’t want ’em.” Or then there was the shift from wearing sneakers without shoelaces to the even more popular fat shoelaces. Hip-hop design would take something popular like that and push the boundaries, like Ben Franklin using a kite to harness electricity, and puzzle over how to make one cool usage even cooler. Fat shoelaces; why not?