The Tanning of America (7 page)

And as for Run-DMC, when they appeared in their own video with rock legends as
their
guests, they made history in being instantaneously embraced by an audience that had never heard of hip-hop—let alone bought their records.

There was nothing earth-shattering in the song's story—about a loser who gets schooled in how to improve his odds with the opposite sex by changing his attitude and learning to “
Walk this way-ay-ay!
” and “
Talk this way-ay-ay!
” But in describing a situation that is universal in every neighborhood on the planet, it had a perfect message for bringing different audiences onto common ground. After all, beyond the things like having fame and money and being cool that were sought through aspiration, the super-objective was getting girls. Or appealing to guys if you were a girl. Maybe not for everyone. However, speaking for teenage males, as I was back then, and for young men too, in my experience, it was not just why you wanted to be successful but why you woke up every morning and why you even breathed in the first place. The translation was that everybody, regardless of color or background, wants to get some and to have the sexual confidence to get it. Who couldn't relate to that?

So “Walk This Way” was tanning at work at a primal level. On another deep, equally powerful level, the video spoke to cultural differences and similarities with a story that came down to a rock/rap battle. At the start, it had the two groups in two separate recording studios divided by a wall, each first annoyed at having their music co-opted by the other, and then in the end bashing through the wall to jam and dance together. Speaking now in one collective voice, even with different accents, Aerosmith and Run-DMC doubled down on the message to be who you are and not to be afraid to define yourself by your own style, authentically. It was all about having confidence in yourself and in how you walked and carried yourself, with individuality, pride, purpose, and insistence. The word popularized to describe this commodity and attitude, as we now know, is “
swagger
.”

The first strand of code in the cultural translation could now be identified. It combined within it the elements of aspiration, authenticity, relevance, cool, and confidence that were obtainable by association with the music. Oh yeah, and it came with a sexy, irresistible beat. For any smart marketing person, this concoction was made to order no matter what the product. Right?

Well, yes, if you cut to the future. Over the next two decades or so, as rap stars aligned themselves with status goods and services, they would indeed be a gold mine for marketing all manner of high-end consumer brands—as they voluntarily sang the praises of everything from Courvoisier cognac and Cristal champagne to Louis Vuitton and Versace to Range Rovers and Cadillac Escalades. Even the
Robb Report,
the magazine of conspicuous consumption for only the über-rich, would get a shout-out. And just like “My Adidas” back in 1986, because none of these endorsements were solicited or purchased, the marketing value was all the more meaningful. Expressions of brand loyalty, in short, were manifestly genuine—which, when embraced in culturally fluent ways, would make them incredibly effective.

Today, all of that is a foregone conclusion. But it would have read like a fairy tale if you had presented such a scenario to marketing people—even back in the go-go 1980s heyday of conspicuous consumption. Why? Frankly, because of two groups of haters who weren't interested in rap music or hip-hop culture or the demographics they represented.

Haters are reactionary, hate anything new or different, and see danger in venturing off into the unknown. They are certainly not friendly to creative expansion or marketing risk. In the 1980s, a decade of conglomerate takeovers and corporate megamergers, one group of haters who stood in the way of hip-hop's mainstream success was populated by the marketing power players at leading brands.

That's why it was so unprecedented when Adidas marketing executive Angelo Anastasio came to Madison Square Garden and was wowed enough by what he saw to strike the endorsement deal for the trio of rappers. As it was pointed out to me by Lyor Cohen (there that night as Run-DMC's road manager), the mainstream market appeal wasn't the main selling point for Anastasio. The crowd that night was still mostly African-American, with a smaller percentage of Hispanic and Asian concertgoers and a sprinkling of white urban kids. But what made Anastasio different from other corporate representatives, according to Lyor, was his curiosity. He was simply open-minded enough to contemplate the possibilities of introducing hip-hop to the marketing machinery behind Adidas sneakers.

When Lyor described that night and how everything fell into place, it occurred to me how important curiosity is in general for tanning to occur. And as a marketing 101 lesson, one that I had to learn and one I have to remind corporate clients not to forget, advertising dollars don't mean a thing without genuine curiosity about what consumers want and need. In fact, as Lyor recalled, while the Adidas/Run-DMC alliance did well for all concerned—saving the company from extinction—it could have been much more successful. Unfortunately, instead of gaining consumer insights and bringing Run, DMC, or Jam Master Jay in on designing the footwear and in on how to promote their line of sneakers, the company took over for Angelo and ran a campaign with the old-school “father knows best” approach. They let the designers try to figure out the culture and design into it without a true understanding of the consumer. They marketed via the monologue that dictates cool rather than inviting consumers to partake in the cool.

That said, the Adidas missteps were going to be lessons learned for certain entrepreneurs who were paying attention and whose business wheels were starting to turn. For them, it was fortunate that there were mainstream corporate haters who even by the late 1980s weren't curious enough to even consider hip-hop's musical future. Why do I say that it was fortunate for these entrepreneurs? Because it allowed them and local economies to benefit and prime the pump for everyone else to follow suit.

Surprisingly, the second group of haters who slowed rap music's mainstream success—and who weren't curious about its potential—actually came from within the African-American community. Typically older, wealthier, assimilated generations who had come out of the era of protest and civil rights, they reacted with discomfort to the bravado of youthful aspiration and the booming bass of rap blasting out of car stereos and trekking down the streets. Their position, it seemed, was that they had worked too hard for too long, following paths into higher education and into positions of influence in politics, business, and media, to support the hip-hop phenomenon that might outshine them or disrupt their means of having stature. Black media, usually the first to back African-American entertainment, was especially resistant to embracing hip-hop. Until rap music proved itself worthy of mainstream consideration, most of the top black radio stations and video programmers just weren't interested. In fact, there were radio stations that specifically said on air, “We don't play rap music,” in order to get more listeners. However, because of the mostly generational divide, it forced hip-hop to become bigger than just a genre of popular music with merchandise; it forced it to prove itself in mighty ways and to develop capacities for spreading into the worlds of fashion, beauty, art, dance, sports, gaming, language, lifestyle, and eventually politics.

And that's how the culture left behind its house party roots and really took on a life of its own to become bigger than the sum of its parts. It was like any other teenager, determined to grow up and become whoever it chose to be.

If you are a marketer hoping to attract new customers without losing your core consumers, this early phase of hip-hop still has relevance for how you appeal to aspiration and how you use code to do so. As we will see later on, consumers provide all the needed cues for how to do that—as long as attention is paid to them.

N
ot many years ago during a business-related trip to Monaco, at a time when I'd already left the music industry and had recently opened the doors of my own marketing/consulting firm, I had another one of those revelations about how small the world had become. Thanks to overlapping relationships, I found myself at dinner one night with a most distinguished gathering of individuals. We were from different places of origin, of different ethnicities and generations, and each of us worked in a different corner of the entertainment world. At Monte Carlo's Hôtel de Paris, at the top of this stunning one-hundred-fifty-year-old palace, there in the world-class restaurant with its retractable roof opened up to allow us to dine under the stars, I not only had one of the most delicious meals of my entire life but was in a state of amazement the entire time. The fact was, in spite of our differences, we could all understand great wine, all savor the experience, and all talk the same language.

It didn't mar my enjoyment in the least that I'd arrived without proper attire and had to put on a tie and blazer loaned to me by the restaurant management—even if it was a little snug. At the table with me were Jay-Z, Bono of U2, music mogul Jimmy Iovine of Interscope/Geffen/A&M Records, and Sir Roger Moore along with his very beautiful wife, Kristina. As men, our ages spanned the decades—starting with Jay-Z and me, then in our thirties, Bono in his forties, Jimmy almost fifty, and Roger Moore pushing eighty. And yet, much to the amusement of Mrs. Moore, the instant we finished our dinner, we all lit up cigars and started talking the same trash!

Dressed in white from head to toe, Roger Moore was as meticulous about his appearance as we used to be about our pristine white Adidas sneakers, and had every ounce of cool and finesse that had made him perfect to come in and take over the James Bond franchise from Sean Connery—reinventing the 007 mystique and owning it longer than anyone else. What I never knew until meeting him was that Sir Roger (he was knighted by the queen of England, as was Bono) debuted in the role at age forty-five and was fifty-eight when he made the last of seven 007 films. Absolutely unapologetic about owning his success, he radiated perpetual James Bond confidence. Moore had us on the edge of our seats, telling tales from the old days, describing what it was like to be one of the biggest stars on the international scene and be able to enter any room anywhere—into the finest, most rarefied air—and command total attention. And he still does! Of course, he was saying all this tongue-in-cheek—cigar lit up, eyes full of life. Next thing we knew, he went on to start discussing William Shatner, openly admitting there had been an unspoken battle for years over who was the biggest global superhero, 007 or Captain Kirk.

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.