The Tanning of America (18 page)

Andre was explaining to the movie people why Mary's hip-hop style of songwriting was more suited to their movie's storytelling. And then he began to put into words what she represented, “her attitude, her struggle, and then the fashion.” Riffing away, he began to talk about her following, how Puffy had already dubbed her the queen of hip-hop/soul, because, Andre insisted, “she's singing about undying love, soulfully.” Her image, he told these movie people, “hair done blond, jewelry dangling, Louis Vuitton this and that, big sunglasses, Billie Holiday blue,” was, in short, “ghetto fabulous.”

No sooner had he coined that very phrase for Mary J. Blige than almost overnight hip-hop music, culture, and marketing opened a new door that was as wide and as historic as the tanning transformation achieved by MTV's day-parting of Dr. Dre's
The Chronic
. Andre Harrell asserted, “Ghetto fabulous allowed for women to get in it.”

Mary Jane Blige, on all fronts, was for hip-hop what Diana Ross had been for Motown. Andre—who later went on to run Motown after leaving his own Uptown Records, around the time that I started working with Mary—framed the need for a queen of hip-hop/soul by saying that in the general marketplace, it's “women who are the first to take to minorities in a big way and let us in the house. Men ain't letting you in the house with a new thing. They want the old thing, the same styles. Women are in touch with their girl, and their girl wants to see every new shiny thing that sings beautifully or dances wonderfully or looks handsome.”

In a marketing lesson not to be overlooked, the “ghetto fabulous” name gave Mary her own brand identity that sent her career skyrocketing, got women invested in hip-hop, and was infinitely merchandisable for all by all.

John Demsey, group president of the Estée Lauder Companies Inc., remembered how, when he was getting started as the head of MAC, ghetto fabulous fostered an aesthetic and values to urban culture that was the yin to the yang of what male rappers were doing. John told me, “All of a sudden hip-hop had a parallel track because the female side and the male side are very different.” Talking about the macho aspect of rap as being more violent and gang oriented, he went on to note that the female side might have had the same swagger, but it cultivated the values of belief and respect and sisterhood. The women were in the minority because in the genre, men were having the big success, John observed, and the women needed to talk to each other about how the men didn't listen to them. The first time John went to a Mary J. Blige concert in her early years, he remembered it was about 90 percent women, mostly African-American, all of them pointing and screaming back when she was singing. “It was like a dialogue,” he said, “basically like being in church, like a revival.”

I had plenty of experience getting to watch the female bonding when I was working with Mary as a manager and executive producer of her
Share My World
album—by which point she had become the first woman I'd ever seen who could headline a show and have legions of men show up too. Hard-core hip-hop guys would come to see Mary J. Blige. Why? Well, it didn't hurt that they could say,
I'm going to bring my girlfriend out for this
. But the fact was that Mary J. was embodying the essence of hip-hop—the beats that brought the feeling, that let you dance and show your authenticity, and the subject matter that she was speaking about was generally not too far from a man's understanding. Mary was speaking about it with a hip-hop tone, giving voice to issues that were in the rap code, not to mention that she had songs with rappers. In that big tent brought to you by Mary J. Blige, it was all coming together. Guys were going, women were in the mix, and tanning was about inclusion however you wanted to look at it.

As would become abundantly clearer to me in the later years of the 1990s when I went on to head up a division of Columbia Records (part of Sony Music Entertainment) and then landed the presidency of urban music at Interscope, those boxes and tags for genres limit their relevance. What name an artist or a brand of music or a product has is important, and production values do count, but why tanning happens en masse has to do with the fundamental truth that you can feel in the voice and hear in the lyrics. Mary J. Blige had lived the ghetto life that gave her the undeniable truth, that made her a pain icon everyone loved, along with the gifts of her amazing vocals and powerful poetry.

The Thinnest Slice, a term I employ, is that fundamental truth; it's what doesn't need to cross over to the mainstream because the mainstream comes to it, like moths to the flame. You can't hit it all the time. Rare artists and certain influencers do. Sometimes all the coordinates come together and the flame happens and all are drawn to it.

Ghetto fabulous took in everyone—women, men, rappers, soul singers, athletes, comedians, movie stars, TV hosts, everybody. One of the most iconic images that later appeared to encapsulate this time (when the battle to out-ghetto and outfabulous each other kicked into high gear) was by photographer David LaChapelle. As the story goes, after LaChapelle took this caramel-tinted photograph of Lil' Kim wearing nothing but a Louis Vuitton hat over blond hair, and showing her completely bare body stamped all over by the same Louis Vuitton logos, it was included in a gallery exhibit and spotted by then editor-in-chief of
Interview
magazine, Ingrid Sischy. As she was being shown David LaChapelle's work, the moment Ingrid laid eyes on the Lil' Kim photograph, she immediately said, “Take it down.” She wanted it for the cover of
Interview
. And when it appeared as a cover, as I can well attest, it stopped cultural time. This was blatant, unapologetic consumption mixed with fine art and the rare moment captured was a visual masterpiece.

And it galvanized attention in the midst of the heyday of party and champagne and bling culture. The power of Lil' Kim appearing with these logos on her body certainly did more for Louis Vuitton than anything inside or out of popular culture at the time. Those who were attuned read the image and thought that if she believed enough to have the logos on her in a way that said,
Look at me, this is how much I'm down for this brand, this is how much it means to me,
then it had to be important and worthy. It was certainly powerful whenever hip-hop artists vocalized their love for luxury brands and thus became walking billboards for them. Again, the fact that they came from the ghetto and had fabulous taste plus money to make luxury choices made the brand powerful by association. So the fact that Lil' Kim was literally wearing the brand and nothing else was a watershed moment, catapulting Louis Vuitton and doing so much for Marc Jacobs in the process, but pushing luxury brands further into prominence. What's more, it pushed the psychology of needing luxury brands even further into the cultural mind-set that already embraced the idea of needing luxury brands to establish who and what you stood for. The statement was that important. Not an endorsement deal, not an ad, not a record promo. Just a statement about starting in one place and journeying to another on the cover of probably the most prestigious, elite, cultural magazine of the era, expressed in one image, in code.

Long before that cover appeared, MAC cosmetics—through the reading of consumer cues by John Demsey—had understood where pop culture was headed and how the ghetto fabulous sensibility was the perfect match for the brand. Seizing the moment before anyone else, MAC leapt on the opportunity to use both Lil' Kim and Mary J. Blige in the first strongly supported ad campaign featuring female urban artists. From a marketing perspective, John remembered, “Up until then, no one had ever embraced hip-hop as being glamorous.” But the MAC team recognized that “urban music had become the music for everyone and urban culture had become the culture for everyone.”

Just as important—and what is too often ignored by Madison Avenue, corporate America, and the celebrity artists (brands unto themselves by this era)—is that MAC's company values were naturally akin to those of urban culture. Not only because of a shared consumer demographic mind-set but, more to the point, because of what John Demsey described as a shared consumer psychographic mind-set. Before Estée Lauder owned the Canadian-born company that became MAC, as it turns out, it was a business built by a professional hair care entrepreneur for the professional market that catered to the ethnic community—in partnership with Gladys Knight. John explained, “Their first product line was actually called Knight.” After distributing mostly through hair shows, “the makeup came as a side development for professional makeup artists.”

When Estée Lauder bought MAC in the early nineties, they kept a part of the professional line but made the consumer market their bigger thrust without losing their heritage of appealing to communities of color and to the makeup pros in the world of show business. With those professional roots, MAC was already known for having a huge array of pigments and shades. John went on, “That means whether you are porcelain white or darkest of dark, we can match skin tone, which most companies can't do.”

When John Demsey was given the MAC brand, he was told by the Lauder family “to go figure out what made it successful.” John understood that it embodied a beauty aesthetic that was in the company's original DNA from when it was born in Toronto, Canada. The ethnic community in Toronto—“the place where you go when you can't get into the United States as an immigrant”—was disproportionately large and included populations from the West Indies, India, Africa, different parts of Asia, and so on. In that multicultural mix, there wasn't the “notion of the traditional porcelain beauty.” So Demsey understood that being in an alternative market was part of what made MAC successful. Second, he also knew that the line already shared a following with “black divas” from the entertainment world. Besides Gladys Knight, many women of color in the music and movie business had been introduced to MAC by their makeup artists. Plus, it was known that the top drag queens in the eighties, like RuPaul, frequented the hair shows and were well acquainted with the line. In fact, one of the first campaigns that the Estée Lauder–owned MAC brand did was with RuPaul, looking, as John said, like “a glammed-up Amazonian woman.”

Without all that history, Demsey might have had trouble convincing the Lauders that for their big breakout campaign going to the hip-hop marketing well was certain to build on that success—as opposed to a more mainstream star, say, perhaps, Halle Berry. But the minute TLC name-checked the brand with a line in a song that said, “It doesn't matter how much MAC you wear,” John Demsey made the connection that hip-hop was the way to go. The bold, fierce persona of Mary J. Blige was the psychographic match for MAC and, he added, “we accelerated with the statement that we were the brand of record for any woman of color no matter what her ethnicity.” Mary J. and Lil' Kim bringing the ghetto-fabulous energy was not any old moment of tanning. In the words of John Demsey, “It was earth-shattering, earth-shattering.”

The list of other brands that were brought along on the ghetto-fabulous ride, either free of charge or through endorsement deals, is epic. The money definitely got poured for all to partake—making for some very cautionary tales in the process.

Let the games begin.

W
hat made you decide to leave the record business?”

That was the question asked of me by a lot of different people—especially in the early days of my first testing the waters in the advertising world. Sometimes I would try to explain my interest in how all the tanning and code-shifting had taken place by answering, “Cultural curiosity!” Or other times I'd go into a longer explanation about how, after more than a decade in the music industry, I'd been lucky to make it to the top and it was important to go in search of new adventures and new challenges. But most of the time I would simply say, “Sunglasses”—which is a story coming right up but that first requires some background.

Not too many years ago when I was skiing in Aspen I had an interesting conversation with a group of kids. In their late teens and dressed in a combination of urban cool and the latest athletic ski-wear, this group of white kids was next to me in the parking lot while getting ready to head up to the slopes. Because I heard them playing Wu-Tang Clan in the car, I was curious and gravitated toward them. At first, I assumed that one of them had probably downloaded a Wu-Tang song or two and had been playing it for his friends as a hip-hop authority.

Downloading? Yes, that term wouldn't have had much relevance back in the mid-nineties, when record executives' bonuses were reflecting all those CD sales we've talked about. Technology had always been the friend of the music business, prompting innovation in the studio and new ways to market existing catalogs as well as new product. But when the technology came along that would make file sharing possible—and in fact digitized music to fit a compact digital file, so it was a natural target—nobody reacted with alarm or stopped to consider how this could be the demise of an industry. Executives who ought to have used their own resources and found ways to control the kinds of things that Napster and later iTunes were doing, unfortunately, were complacent. As a result, unbeknownst to much of the business, the timeline for music sold mainly in physical units was coming to a close.