The Tanning of America (6 page)

Some might say that Sylvia Robinson had gotten lucky, having gone out to find gold where everyone else was looking for it and then coming up with the first catch. But I think it was much more than luck or great timing when she made the strategic decision to record and release “Rapper's Delight” as an almost-fifteen-minute extended-play twelve-inch single. Even as a novelty record that only sold on the street by word of mouth, it would have been brilliant. Yet the real brilliance was following up the street success by enflaming consumer demand for radio play. How else do you get DJs to disrupt rotation rules to play a fifteen-minute single other than by flooding the station's request lines?

So the gauntlet had been thrown down. The proof was in. If you were aspirational, you now believed in the possibilities. If you had seen what Sugar Hill Records had accomplished, going from nothing to being the hottest indie label for a genre that had yet to be defined—with the serious profits to go with that—your conclusion would be that you might have a shot too. If you had heard a nearly fifteen-minute hip-hop record on the radio at prime time and you were paying attention to its broad-based appeal, you had to know there was a lot more gold in them thar hills.

You probably would have been thinking those things if you were a charismatic young man from Queens with incredible instincts and entrepreneurial blood in your veins, say, by the name of Russell Simmons, and were starting to try your hand at managing hip-hop artists and producing rap records—now that the field had broken wide-open. Or at least that's what I would assume by the fact that just in time for the winter holidays at the end of 1979, one of Russell's artists, Kurtis Blow, was signed to Mercury Records—the first rapper to go with a major label—and they released his “Christmas Rappin',” which promptly sold four hundred thousand copies. Following that up with “The Breaks,” Kurtis soon went on to become the first rapper to have a gold record and to perform it on the popular music TV show
Soul Train
.

Of course, the increasingly corporate-run music industry and mainstream media should have now been on notice that hip-hop was more than a passing fancy, more than a disco afterthought tossing crumbs out to the ghetto kids. Even if it was conceivable that there was a hungry market behind the graffiti'd walls or on the other side of the tracks, the industry executives didn't speak that language—and, frankly, had no interest in learning to. As in any cultural disconnect, one could say that there was a degree of ethnocentricity in their lack of concern about urban blight and the fact that stretches of the inner city right in their backyards were beginning to look like war zones, with working-class families teetering on the edge. One could say that they saw but looked away, unable as they were to understand why it was that at the dawn of the 1980s, most of the symbols of aspiration, with a few exceptions, were turning out to be drug dealers and pimps.

The sociology of rap's future, however, wasn't really at issue. The music was simply not commercially enticing, nor was it justified to an industry really marketing to white kids in suburbia. The math told the story. With the sizable price tags for producing the music videos that were going to be mandatory for record promotion, given the advent of MTV, the costs of investing in an unproven genre like hip-hop, without superstars, made the discussion a nonstarter. Lest we forget, the MTV platform when it launched in 1981 was rock, mostly new wave and hard rock and later metal—with artists like David Bowie, Duran Duran, and, eventually, Bon Jovi. MTV flat-out refused to show the video of Rick James's smash “Super Freak,” and it wasn't until 1983 that Michael Jackson videos were approved for rotation.

All of this is to say that if you were betting the odds, as is the case for most businesses most of the time, after “Rapper's Delight” and Kurtis Blow's appearance on
Soul Train,
the assumption might have been that the fun had by hip-hop and its fans was over. But not everybody was betting the odds, thankfully.

Enter Blondie and their 1981 single “Rapture,” on the Chrysalis label—with its accompanying music video that took everyone by surprise. With a song that followed a rock model, out of nowhere, after the first verse, here was a white girl, a punk/pop singer, suddenly doing a change-up—rapping over the break. Not just rhyming, Debbie Harry was also talking about the sexy world of rap, even going so far as to name two of its celebrities, Fab Five Freddy and Grandmaster Flash. In fact, they were both supposed to be in the video but Flash couldn't make it, so Fab Five Freddy showed up with Jean-Michel Basquiat; the two can be seen to this day in the video, graff-writing on the walls. This was not the last time that Freddy would play a role in hip-hop's migration into the world of music videos, as we'll see later on. And meanwhile, the door couldn't have been opened at a better time. True, “Rapture” didn't make Debbie Harry's career. But what it did for rap music was everything. When the record charted at number one on the Hot 100
Billboard
list, it became the first rap-infused single to do so. Plus, the “Rapture” video made history as the first outing of rap on MTV. Coming from Blondie, it was a signal of how adaptive the genre was and how it would not be restricted to one kind of music over another. A creative liberation! What's more, by using her prominence at that time to shout out two hip-hop icons, Debbie Harry authenticated an art form.

The translation was that hip-hop proved that it was as akin to rock as it was to soul and funk. For those ready to push boundaries, it could be as full of protest and social relevance, and also as capable of creating a culture, a mind-set, a voice for the voiceless. The first record on which I heard a semblance of those properties was Melle Mel's “White Lines,” released in 1983 on Sylvia Robinson's Sugar Hill Records. The production, to me, was memorable, laying Melle's rock-laced voice over an addictive track. Once again, Sylvia Robinson was paying attention to the competition, and keeping one step ahead.

Well, not quite. Apparently, Sylvia Robinson made the mistake of turning down a video of “White Lines” starring a young Laurence Fishburne that was made on spec by an up-and-coming filmmaker. You might have heard of him: Spike Lee.

Hip-hop came of age in the mid-1980s, in the same era that members of the generation who couldn't remember a time without it were coming of age. We weren't in the record business and weren't watching from the sidelines taking notes about how many units of this or that release had shipped or what the demographics were that turned “Christmas Rappin'” into a huge hit or that allowed “Rapture” to be shown on MTV or that pushed “White Lines” up to number seven on the UK pop charts—yes, pop. For us, in our lives and concerns, we would have been like,
Where the f**k is the UK?

No exaggeration. Fab Five Freddy once told me a story about the early days when rap artists first started making money and then began touring overseas. Fab happened to run into a DJ he knew who was bragging about all the foreign places their crew had visited—“France, Italy, and London . . .” As if that wasn't the really big news, the guy quickly added, “And next year, we go to Europe!”

Encompassed in these anecdotes is one of the most important rewritten rules of the new economy that can be traced to hip-hop's formative years. For far too long the classic rags-to-riches stories had been told about dead guys with names like Ford, Rockefeller, and du Pont—all far removed from most people's reality. Now, suddenly, acts of wonder had come to pass and kids you knew personally or had heard about in your own neighborhood—who had come out of the projects or been born without wealth and stature—had become famous and were making money to go with that too. You could do that? Even if you couldn't shoot hoops or win the lottery? Suddenly, you could wipe away the stigma of poverty and lower-class status pinned on you by other forces because of color or immigrant background or all the other reasons for not making the grade. Now you could claim your unlikely beginnings as a badge of honor, of authenticity, as a way of saying, “I come from nothing and look where I am now.” Actually, as the culture congregated further with the force of tanning, you had to have a badge to make you credible, to prove that you had come up through hard times that were real—possibly that you had even held your own with killers and gangsters and drug dealers. But wait. Better yet, you could wear a badge of authenticity with trend-setting style, and at the same time be a poet and speak about experiences that the rest of the world seemed to be ignoring.

That was Run-DMC. With cuts like “Hard Times” actually talking about real-world problems and “Sucker MC's,” a record that compared the aspirational success of rappers authentically working on their skills to that of the wannabe “sad-faced clown” imitators and posers, the rhymes and stories echoed the feel of Sunday morning sermons. Those songs were transformational for me, especially “Sucker MC's.” They came from where I did and were calling themselves rap royalty. Who did that? Who had that kind of nerve? But that was the point—that if hip-hop didn't shout itself out, nobody else would. The idea was planted then and there that would take root and would later drive me as an entrepreneur to dare to take on the Goliaths of the competition—and would convince me that I could win.

And to top all that, Run-DMC had the bold confidence not just to borrow elements from rock but also to cast themselves as the rightful purveyors of it, that they together were the “King of Rock” as the title of a 1985 single and album (their second) put it. The video of that single was their second that MTV agreed to air and its success suggested there was a niche for a hybrid rock-rap genre ready for prime time.

Then the game changed with “Walk This Way”—the tipping point for tanning. Everything that had happened going back to DJ Kool Herc and 1520 Sedgwick Avenue had helped put hip-hop over the top, even if it had been an uphill climb over unknown terrain. “Walk This Way” was going to send the next moves into fast downhill skiing. Released as a single on the same album as “My Adidas,” it would also set the stage for history to unfold in August 1986 at Madison Square Garden.

When I talk about Run-DMC as being groundbreaking—for all kinds of reasons and especially for knowing that their art form was much bigger than two turntables and a mic—I am including the team that made their impact possible. Russell Simmons was the individual who proved to one and all (and has continued to do so since) that the ceiling for rap and hip-hop that everyone else believed was there really wasn't. Three others in the Rush/Def Jam circle who should have special mention are Bill Adler, Lyor Cohen, and Rick Rubin. Besides the fact that I know them and have a kinship to them personally and professionally, the three all happen to be white—yet have soul in their veins and urban sensibilities from Jewish and/or immigrant backgrounds. As a publicist, Bill Adler was way ahead of the curve in recognizing the mainstream marketing potential for rap artists. Lyor Cohen—now a top record-industry executive and a former Rush partner who started as a promoter and road manager for Run-DMC—believed early on in the cultural melting pot that was being brewed for and by the younger generation. The genius producer Rick Rubin, who launched Def Jam before joining forces with Russell, was a key contributor to the DNA of hip-hop. What's more, Rick was the audio architect and sound engineer of tanning—a bridge between rock and rap that worked because he sonically knew what was authentic to the mix and what appealed to young audiences, regardless of background.

From the start through his present-day post at the helm of a major record label—after working with everyone from LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys in the early years to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica, U2, and the Dixie Chicks (to name a few)—Rick never had any use for the color/demographic boxes used in creating and marketing music. Someone who has always understood the beats and rhythms of culture because he observes it authentically rather than packaging it, Rick Rubin is to me the Norman Rockwell of popular music—an artist portraying Americana at its heart and providing insights into the culture in the process.

As reports have it, the irony of “Walk This Way” was that when the team at Rush Management first proposed the idea for Run-DMC to use Aerosmith's 1977 hit single and merge rock and hip-hop elements on the record, there was hesitation. The main pushback was that just rapping over the tracks would be inauthentic and not original enough. So Rick proposed that Run-DMC do a cover of the single, a reinvention, and then the rockers could come in and add flavor from their rock roots. It was a true mash-up. Anyone betting the odds would say that doing a musical clash is risky, resulting in neither fish nor fowl. Yet when it works, it's not a musical clash at all but actually a cultural clash. In fact, the word “clash” is wrong. When it works, it's tanning, a synergy of music and attitude that swirls everyone into the same vortex and connects them.

“Walk This Way” did that musically, culturally, rhythmically, and lyrically. And, oh yeah, visually. Even though it was assumed that Aerosmith would benefit somehow from having one of the group's biggest hits back in circulation in a new form, nobody could have predicted to what extent. Lo and behold, when Steven Tyler and Joe Perry agreed to be on the record and in the video, all of a sudden the new “Walk This Way” reinvigorated
their
career and launched
them
to unprecedented heights, giving them a street pass with a whole new following in communities of color. And there was more. After being lured out of the 1970s rock 'n' roll mausoleum, their collaboration with Run-DMC returned them so much to the game that Aerosmith soon entered their most prolific decades. To date, they are considered the all-time top-selling American rock band, with more gold and platinum records than any other group—over 150 million albums sold around the world.