The Tanning of America (2 page)

But the tale I'm here to tell is less about the music itself and more about the atomic reaction it created, a catalytic force majeure that went beyond musical boundaries and into the psyche of young America—blurring cultural and demographic lines so permanently that it laid the foundation for a transformation I have dubbed “tanning.” Hip-hop had come about in a time, in places, and through multiple, innovative means that enabled it to level the playing field like no other movement of pop culture, allowing for a cultural exchange between all comers, groups of kids who were black, white, Hispanic, Asian, you name it. Somehow this homegrown music resonated across racial and socioeconomic lines and provided a cultural connection based on common experiences and values, and in turn it revealed a generationally shared mental complexion.

Granted, the journey of tanning—as we'll be exploring it—didn't begin or happen solely with the advent of hip-hop. But without a doubt the trajectory was significantly altered on July 19, 1986, at Madison Square Garden during one of the final numbers performed by Run-DMC. Unlikely? Yes. Even more unlikely, tanning history was made that night, all because of a sneaker.

And not just any sneaker. Of course, I'm referring to that most coveted, finest of German imports, the white shell-toed Adidas athletic shoe with the iconic three black stripes, worn with either no laces or, later, with fat laces and a popped tongue. This was not only the sneaker that was part of Run-DMC's early signature style—along with track suits, big-ass gold chains, and black-brim fedoras—but a shoe that the trio had immortalized in a single they proudly entitled “My Adidas.”

So what exactly possessed the threesome to rap about their love for a sneaker? A logical question with a logical answer. No, it wasn't just how cool the shoes were or how even more f**kin' cool it was to wear them without laces, at the same time that you kept them blindingly white, spit-polished, tissue paper stuffed inside when you weren't wearing them to make sure not a wrinkle or a blemish ever marred the virgin leather. But the coolness of owning and wearing an elite brand that informed the owner's identity wasn't what inspired the song. As it turns out, the idea had come from none other than Russell Simmons, hip-hop impresario, founder of Rush Management and cofounder of Def Jam Records—not to mention Run-DMC's manager and Run's big brother. According to lore, Russell had glanced at Joey's sneakers one day and had thrown the suggestion out to the group, saying something like, “You should make a record about all the places where your sneakers have been.”

The concept, as I understand it, was to tell a story about their shoes as a metaphor for how far they'd traveled already, coming basically from nowhere along a path that was leading onto the largest, grandest stages of the world. Case in point: In 1985 Run-DMC was the only rap group invited to participate in Live Aid, the first-ever intercontinental telethon rock extravaganza, a fund-raiser to end starvation in Africa, starring marquee artists Sting, U2, Sir Paul McCartney, the Who, Madonna, Bob Dylan, and Led Zeppelin. Hence the lyrics: “
My Adidas walk through concert doors and roam all over coliseum floors / I stepped onstage, at Live Aid / All the people played and the POOR got paid . . .”

Released as the B-side to the megahit “Peter Piper”—a medley of nursery rhymes in rap—“My Adidas” didn't do much out of the box. That is, at first. Then something happened and suddenly it began to appeal and sell to consumers from zip codes where rap wasn't even on the radio, much less being stocked in the record stores. Suburban, white zip codes. Where before black-bred music that went on to appeal to the masses was known to cross over, moving from R&B to pop charts, records like “My Adidas” were beginning to hint that hip-hop (a term intended to refer to the music and the urban youth culture surrounding it) was different. Instead of adapting to the mainstream, it was causing something along the lines of a reverse crossover. Hip-hop was an invitation to join in the cool it embodied. It often required the audience to come to it, to travel beyond borders just to buy the records, to walk in somebody else's shoes. And meanwhile, with those buying patterns changing, with concert-goers arriving at shows sporting their own Adidas sneakers, Russell and the rest of Rush Management recognized immediately that the modest hit had sparked a fashion trend.

A risky plan came together to take advantage of that trend at Madison Square Garden. Not knowing how it would play out, Russell and his team convinced Adidas executives to fly over from Germany for the show. What specifically was said to get them to make the trip—not to mention attend a rap concert populated by a constituency not aligned with their brand—I don't know. What I can report is that in the mid-eighties, after dominating the world's sports shoe market for decades, Adidas was struggling.

Adi Dassler, the company's founder—who had spent sixty years putting Adidas at the front of the pack and who, early on, was the first to sign an African-American, Jesse Owens, to an endorsement deal—had passed away some years earlier. Internationally, elite athletes and soccer enthusiasts could still be counted in the Adidas camp. But in the United States, at a time when Nike was making its first couple billion with Michael Jordan and when Reebok was still raking in sales (thanks to the aerobics craze), Adidas was facing extinction. In fact, together Nike and Reebok controlled half the North American athletic footwear market, while Adidas was down to 3 percent of U.S. sneaker sales. Given the landscape, the decision makers at Adidas apparently figured they had nothing to lose by attending the concert, and even opted to send Angelo Anastasio, their head of marketing, along with an entourage of company heavyweights, across the Atlantic to see what was going down.

Up until the moment of truth when Run began to chant the first line of “My Adidas,” Russell and his people had to have been holding their breath. In other venues, the crowd reactions had been so ecstatic that there was no reason to expect this audience would be any different. But then again, this was Madison Square Garden, New York City, where concertgoers were unpredictable, even mercurial. So it was only when Run and DMC, backed by Jam Master Jay's spinning turntables, roared into the first verse and the crowd immediately chimed in, full-throated—twenty thousand strong—that they knew the Adidas guys would be wowed. Nothing could have prepared them, however, for what happened next.

As if driven by the fervor of the crowd, suddenly Run reached down and removed one of his shoes, rapping out its name in the singular—“My Adida!”—and held it high over his head, like a warrior holding up his blade for all to see. Egging the audience on, Run and the others dared them to respond. And they did. On cue, as hoped for, they all reached down to remove one of their sneakers and then held it in their hands above their heads, so that it looked like a pulsating sea of the black triplestriped Adidas emblem on white leather waving in unison over the heads of everyone at Madison Square Garden.

In the ensuing years, accounts of the events that followed took on mythical proportions. Though the details I'd hear as my career evolved would vary—what was said and by whom, when it was proposed, how much was offered—the central fact of the matter is that when the Adidas executives witnessed twenty thousand young urban fans jubilantly holding their brand aloft, they immediately saw the incredible economic potential that this new, raw form of entertainment possessed. Besides the vision of Russell Simmons and company in anticipating this reaction, I have to acknowledge how far ahead of his time Angelo Anastasio was. An Italian in his thirties, Anastasio would have been foolish to think Run-DMC in any way resembled the all-American mainstream images that global companies yearned to associate with their brands. But by all accounts, the cultural revelation that night at the Garden was as akin to a religious conversion as anything the Adidas brass had ever experienced.

According to Run (a.k.a. Reverend Run in later decades), the instant he walked offstage, one of the executives took him in hand and announced he was going to be given his own Adidas line. In a move that was completely unprecedented in the annals of marketing history, Adidas went on to negotiate an endorsement deal with Run-DMC to promote the company's sneakers, the threesome's own signature products, and an array of accessories. At upward of 1.5 million dollars, the deal made the rappers the first-ever nonathletes to become the international standard-bearers for what had theretofore been strictly marketed as an athletic shoe. The deal also transformed the fortunes of Adidas Group AG, bringing them back from the brink of marketplace irrelevance and infusing their brand with the unbridled energy and electromagnetic cool of urban youth, all of which translated into a quantum boost in revenue too.

This translation—a convergence between two entities from totally dissimilar, distinct cultural galaxies—was a foreshadowing of greater magic still to come. Not only did it school hip-hop artists and their promoters as to the opportunities to be seized in the cosmos of corporate marketing, but it was also an even bigger eye-opener for the corporate marketers. That said, I don't think anyone knew what the alignment of the two forces that had officially commenced that July of 1986 was going to do to accelerate the tanning effect and alter the landscape of America—racially, socially, politically, and especially economically. It's even more doubtful that anyone envisioned the extent to which hip-hop would take root—as a culture and a mind-set—for the younger generations it drew into its fold, becoming a way of life and, moreover, for all intents and purposes a religion.

As for me, it wasn't until November 2008—more than two decades after Run-DMC blasted off into pop culture history in their sneakers—that I grasped the personal significance of the momentous concert at Madison Square Garden. The relevance to my life and career finally dawned on me in the midst of a very memorable occasion—on November 18, 2008, to be precise—during a gala luncheon at Cipriani in midtown Manhattan where I was being inducted into the American Advertising Federation's Hall of Achievement. As I sat at a table surrounded by some of my most important influences—including my parents—it occurred to me that if not for the wheels set into motion by “My Adidas,” I might not have been sitting there at all.

At thirty-eight years old, as a relative newcomer to the advertising business, I was more surprised by the honor than just about anyone—that is, maybe, except for my father. After watching me switch in and out of five different colleges (without graduating) and try my hand at a series of occupations, he had every reason to think that I was never going to settle into a career.

Nothing had really changed his mind during the 1990s. Those were the years of my twenties, when I was working my way up in the music business. After starting out as a roadie-turned-road-manager for the rap duo Kid 'n Play, I launched my own company as an artists' manager and producer, overseeing the careers of artists like Nas and Mary J. Blige, before going on to head up a record division at Sony Records and ultimately being made president of urban music at Interscope/Geffen/A&M Records. The universe of hip-hop was expanding exponentially in those days and for me it was like being at the forefront of the action when the wild, wild west was won—while being in the mix with everyone from Jay-Z to Sean “Puffy” Combs, from Mariah Carey and Will Smith to Dr. Dre and Eminem, to name a few.

For the Queens teenager in me who grew up taping rap music on pirate radio at two in the morning, to have risen to the heights of the music industry as an executive, not even thirty years old, with a Grammy and an American Music Award as icing on the cake, I was living a dream come true. Not that it was all glory. From without and within, obstacles abounded.

Even in these big boom years for hip-hop, most of the major record labels had no idea how to market the music, much less understand the culture. Many powerbrokers—like the head of the record label at Sony, Don Ienner, who was known to have dropped both Alicia Keys and 50 Cent from their first label—seemed to uphold the status quo that continued to view black music, in general, as appealing mainly to African-American audiences ; rap continued to be seen by the industry as viable only with a subgroup of that niche demographic. As a result, for much of the nineties, getting radio play and music videos on TV had been a daily battle royale.

But against the odds and sometimes in spite of itself, rap and hip-hop culture couldn't and wouldn't be stopped. Incredibly, by the end of 1999 it was determined that rap music had outsold country music for the year. Crazy! The craziest part wasn't just the sales figures but where they were being generated: in those illogical zip codes in places like Orem, Utah, and Kennebunkport, Maine; in rural outposts and on Ivy League campuses; in suburbs and inner cities alike.

How was this possible? In short: It was the phenomenon that's at the center of this book,
The Tanning of America
. The cultural explosion occurring mainly under the radar made me wonder if there was some kind of millennial mind meld happening. Were younger generations disproving the conventional wisdom that was running corporate America and Madison Avenue? To unravel those questions and others, I decided to leave the music business at the top of my game and go in search of answers in a radically different direction—in the advertising world. As an outsider, this meant I would have to start at the bottom of the ladder in an industry that was driven by baby boomers, many stuck in mind-sets from yesteryear, none eager to give up the keys to the car. But there was also a new developing arena within the ad business, what has been called branded or entertainment marketing, that provided an opportunity for me to have a hand in its evolution. That's when the story of “My Adidas” and Run-DMC began to resonate.

Clearly, cultural tremors of the magnitude that were being generated in hip-hop's early glory days had caused changes in commerce—currents that had spread over time and were starting to cause seismic shifts in consciousness. So the convergence back in July 1986 wasn't a fluke or chance meeting. It was a mirror for what was happening on a broader scale in urban America and beyond, revealing how rap was a litmus test for where youth culture was going, and how a savvy marketer from Europe picked up on the cues—doing so in ways that much of Madison Avenue and corporate America hadn't yet figured out. (And many still haven't.)