The Tanning of America (16 page)

At Interscope, Steve Berman had just arrived at the company when the game plan for promoting “Nuthin' but a ‘G' Thang” was coming together. Steve later explained to me how churban was invented by saying that even though hip-hop wasn't fitting any of the traditional radio models, “it was so powerful in terms of how it was moving, people and units and money, that they had to grow these other formats.” Hip-hop had become such a powerful force for pop culture and for selling music that some of the radio stations that were paying attention to consumers and record stores in their own communities had no problem taking the leap.

A leading example in New York was Hot 97, an early adopter of churban programming. Not ready to be labeled rap or hip-hop, these types of stations welcomed a diverse audience of black, white, and Hispanic listeners. But even with this middle ground, there was trepidation that anything too cutting-edge would be off-putting to advertisers and some of the audience. When I recalled those days with Andre Harrell, the brilliant, pioneering entrepreneur who worked with artists at Rush Management before launching Uptown Records—where he would famously give one young hip-hop newcomer, Sean “Puffy” Combs, his first job in the industry—he could remember having to jump through those same hoops. Andre reminded me that a lot of the confusion in radio was a reflection of uncertainty on the part of the big record companies. They didn't know with clarity how to market the music.

So that was the tangled web of distribution obstacles in which Jimmy Iovine and his team at Interscope found themselves once the deal had been made to partner with Death Row Records. To complicate matters, as Jimmy recounted the story, everyone was telling him that the amount of money he would need to spend even to get the first single into serious rotation wasn't going to be worth it. In his words, “Everybody was telling me the sh*t is bigger than the cat.” An expression that came from his father, its point was that if the cat is bigger than the problems, you keep the cat. But when the “sh*t is bigger than the cat, get rid of it.” Well?

By his own admission, Jimmy was naïve. He had no resistance or baggage and was seeing only upsides. He was sitting in his office, continuing to listen through his prized speakers, and as he said, “I've never known from hip-hop before. I don't know anything about it. All I know is the Rolling Stones, Guns N' Roses,
Godfather, Goodfellas
.”

And so Jimmy went all in. The first thing that he did was to treat the deal as if it was being made with superstar rock guys. The deal was unheard of at the time for several reasons but more than anything it allowed Death Row to own their masters—which was the right thing to do because they had walked in the door with finished product. What was so unusual was that Jimmy wasn't betting the odds. He was funding the fledgling record company, giving them their own identity and autonomy, with the cockeyed belief that this was the beginning of much more to come. Crazy? If history had turned out differently, yeah. But then again, this was Dr. Dre, one of the most prolific, authentic producing virtuosos ever to grace recorded music. And there was something about Snoop Dogg's voice on “ ‘G' Thang,” with its iconic tone and phrasing, and how it jumped off any sound system and into any listener's nervous system on the very first hearing, that could not be denied. Written by Snoop, the single reminded Jimmy Iovine of “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. Same structure, same vibe. It felt like a classic, he told me, even before it dropped.

In the meantime, Interscope had written another very large check for the music video that Dre directed for “ ‘G' Thang.” Jimmy confirmed the cost by saying that in those days it was “a lot of money.” After appreciating early videos for being raw and real, viewers were getting choosier. But even the most aggressive hip-hop videos in the early nineties were in the range of $50,000 to $70,000. For the first single video release from
The Chronic,
Dre had a budget on par with a Guns N' Roses video production.

Now it got really crazy. Given the era's landscape, as we've seen in the shifting sands of radio, guess what? No radio station, urban, churban, rhythmic, or otherwise, would even touch “ ‘G' Thang” with a ten-foot pole. Nobody wanted anything to do with “gangsta” rap. Despite Jimmy Iovine's comeback that it was art, fiction, a story about gangsters, just like rockers would tell badass stories about themselves, the truth was that in that market lull no really serious new hip-hop artist could get arrested. Not that Jimmy or any of his team at the time, like Steve Berman, had expected any differently. Actually that was the reason for spending so much on the video.

Time for something drastic, bold, and daring, as in gangsta. Jimmy went to MTV's head of programming, Rick Krim, and personally played him the video for “ ‘G' Thang.” Raising all of the obvious objections, given the broadcast standards, Rick narrowed everything down to one issue: “Where am I going to play it?”

Jimmy then suggested that he put Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg on in between Nirvana, Guns N' Roses, and Madonna. Translation ? He wanted his video day-parted early. Rick Krim would have laughed him out of his office if Jimmy had not added, “I'll tell you what. Do it. And if it doesn't work, if I'm wrong about this, I'll never come in here asking you to play another Interscope record.”

Without calling it as much, this was a go-for-broke strategy known in marketing campaign terms as total disruption. The approach breaks all the rules of branding, authenticity, and consumer preferences. When introducing a new or reinvented brand, it is the kind of tactic that will make you or break you. Kamikaze marketing!

Rick Krim and MTV, after editing some of the more risqué images and bleeping a word or two here and there, went for it and put the video into early day-parting, toe-to-toe with rock and pop's biggest marquee names. And it worked. By the end of 1993, “Nuthin' but a ‘G' Thang” had become the third-most-requested video of the year.

But wait. There's more. Before that evidence came in, there were a few more moves in the total-disruption campaign that had to happen.

Although MTV immediately had success and increased rotation of Dre and Snoop's first video, reaping the rewards of an expanding audience and advertisers not about to miss the benefits of a phenomenon in the making, the next shocker was that radio still wouldn't play it. Oh yeah, as I remember all too well in my own promotional efforts, radio did not want MTV taking their hit-making power away from them. The unspoken agreement was that radio was supposed to lead, music television to follow. So what did Jimmy do?

What he did was, again, not what anyone in those days would have done in a million years. Jimmy went to his head of promotion and said, “Make me a radio spot that plays the hook for one minute.” He didn't want any voice-over, any talking, just one minute of “ ‘G' Thang.” Then he gave the department a list of fifty radio stations, starting with the top tier in leading markets, like New York's dominant Z100 and L.A.'s KISS FM, and instructed his people to buy enough airtime to run the one-minute spot on each station ten times a day. For real.

Steve Berman, currently vice chairman at Interscope, remembers it well. None of the team questioned Jimmy Iovine's sanity. The logic was clear. He wanted people to hear the song. Sure enough, they heard it. In fact, audiences heard it at the same moment as program directors who wanted nothing to do with anything called Death Row Records (maybe understandably so)—as they were driving home and radio commercials came on the air, on their own stations, playing one minute of a song they wouldn't program. Next thing everyone knew, phones started ringing off the hook at radio stations across the country, with people requesting the song in multiple formats, including regular radio.

In March 1993, “Nuthin' but a ‘G' Thang” peaked at number two on
Billboard
's Hot 100, after topping the R&B chart at number one. By November 1993,
The Chronic
was certified triple platinum after hitting number three on
Billboard
's list of the two hundred highest-selling albums. Artistically, most hip-hop aficionados consider the album to be one of the most influential of the genre.

But there was one other conversation Jimmy Iovine instigated that helped score the three loaded bases in the cultural paradigm shift of tanning that was afoot. Somewhere in the spring of 1993, with “ ‘G' Thang” and follow-up single releases from
The Chronic
still riding high and Interscope gearing up for its Thanksgiving drop of
Doggystyle,
Snoop's debut album, which Dre was in the midst of producing, Jimmy called up Jann Wenner—the illustrious publisher and cofounder of
Rolling Stone
magazine.

With no preamble, Jimmy told Jann he had to put Dre and Snoop on the cover of the magazine. As the Iovine-reconstructed story goes, Jann Wenner's response was something along the lines of
Are you out of your f**kin' mind?
Then Jann, the rock 'n' roll journalism icon, explained more calmly, “We're not a hip-hop magazine.”

Jimmy: “Hip-hop? This ain't hip-hop. This is
Exile on Main Street,
it's
The Godfather
! This is huge!”

Jann Wenner: “Whatever it is, this is not my customers.”
Click.

Actually, before Wenner got off the phone, he left the door open by suggesting that if Interscope and Snoop Dogg wanted to show him an idea for the cover, he'd be willing to look at it. So Jimmy went to Snoop and said, “Hey, we're going to get you on the cover of
Rolling Stone
and I want you to shoot it.” Made sense. This way they would be more likely not just to get the cover but to have it shot with a feel and look that matched the genre.

Snoop: “Man, give me the cover of
The Source
. What the f**k is
Rolling Stone
?”

All Mr. Iovine could do was to assure Mr. Broadus: “Trust me on this.”

In September 1993, Snoop and Dre appeared on the cover of
Rolling Stone
and, sure enough, it completed the grand slam that being day-parted early on MTV had begun. Even before the November release of
Doggystyle—
which would debut at number one on
Billboard
's list of the two hundred top-selling albums—Snoop went to see Jimmy to tell him about the strangest thing that was happening. All of sudden, wherever he was, whenever he walked down the street, white kids were coming up to him, saying his name, “Snoop Dogg!” in greeting, as if they were connected, like they knew him. Snoop was like,
What the f**k is that?

Obviously, having that kind of rapid, widespread fame is something that nobody can really prepare you to grasp until you've experienced it. But this was more than that. It was culture shock. As Jimmy pointed out, hip-hop up until that moment had already found an underground hip white audience. However, these weren't niche music consumers. They were white kids from regular, everyday, mainstream households. And the heads of those households, along with their counterparts in government and corporate America, were horrified.

The trouble began. Time Warner threw Interscope out and sent it, along with Death Row (until it shut down), into the arms of MCA, which was soon absorbed by Universal. Politicians, community leaders, and media figures representing the status quo went to war against what was seen as the dangerous Pied Piper of addictive beats and mind-altering poetry now leading their children astray.

As a disclaimer, I will say that during the years when the “gangsta” bravado was coming to a head—at the same time that I was becoming deeply ensconced in the record business—I didn't see how destructive it was. Only in hindsight can I attest that, yeah, it got ugly, particularly with the East Coast/West Coast nonsense that ultimately took lives. But I will also repeat that violence was not the true soul of the movement. A lot of the focus on beefs between leading hip-hop players was the result of propaganda—which artists would exaggerate to put themselves in the limelight because that was all that the media was covering. What was done for the entertainment value got carried away.

The best cultural parallel I can offer comes from what used to be called the WWF, World Wrestling Federation, which was later forced to change its name to World Wrestling Entertainment. World Wrestling Entertainment turned out to be more fitting since so much of it was staged to thrill and engage the masses. Cyndi Lauper told me a fascinating story about how she became part of that world. As a kid I used to watch the WWF and remembered seeing her on TV at the fights. When we met in recent times during a shoot for a commercial I was doing with Lady Gaga and MAC cosmetics, I asked Cyndi, “Why were you on those shows?”

“Oh,” she answered, “that's how I broke my record.” In the early eighties, Cyndi couldn't get any radio play for her song “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Then one day she found herself on an airplane sitting next to wrestler and promoter Lou Albano. The two struck up a friendship. Although the fight world appealed to a mostly male audience, young males in particular, she got to thinking that the WWF might offer her an avenue to get some kind of TV exposure. As this was happening, Cyndi Lauper had raised all of $35,000 to make her “Girls Just Wanna” video and, being creative, was connecting with lots of people who were doing favors for her at no cost. Cyndi decided to have her new friend Lou Albano play the part of the dad in the video. The pop song had nothing to do with wrestling, but when it was shown on MTV and on other video music outlets, the kids watching who knew Lou got excited and before long Cyndi Lauper was one of the WWF's leading celebrities—and her song got tons of exposure with that audience. Doing that at just the moment when wrestling was getting onto cable was the knockout punch for the record to blow up beyond her wildest dreams—and from there she was golden. As she came into her own, WWF benefited from having a pop star of her stature in their midst, and she benefited from having access to a much larger audience than traditional channels might have allowed. Cyndi became such a part of wrestling culture that the template for what she had achieved was soon borrowed by record labels to break their hard-rock songs—with the hopes that wrestlers would use their music for making their big entrances or that producers would play their records for interstitial drama. It was just another way to get records spun without getting traditional airplay. This was especially true as time went on for breaking countercultural records by groups like Limp Bizkit—for whom the WWF was a launchpad.