Marketing street culture; bringing hip-hop style to the mainstream

American Demographics, Nov, 1996 by Marc Spiegler

The attraction, he says, is part admiration, part fascination, and part fear. "A lot of white kids suspect they wouldn't make it through what inner-city blacks do, so there's an embedded admiration that's almost visceral," Wimsatt says. "Fear is one of our strongest impulses, and poor black men are the greatest embodiment of that fear."

Skateboarders, snowboarders, and other practitioners of nontraditional sports were among the first white teens to adopt the accouterments of hip-hop culture. Yet they are also some of the culture's least devoted adherents. "Most of them don't really understand hip-hop," says Chicagoan Tim Haley, a Midwest sales representative for snow boarding gear. They want to come off as being bad ass, pumping their stereo around town," he says. "So you'll see a bunch of white kids in Podunk, Michigan, trying to cress 'hip-hop,' but really they're just jocks with rich parents."

GOT TO BE REAL

Turning teens like these on to hip-hop styles begins with a much smaller group--hard-core hip-hoppers. "If we develop the hardest core element, we reach middle-class blacks, and then there's a ripple effect," says Juzang of Motivational Educational Entertainment. "If you don't target the hard-core, you don't get the suburbs." For example, marketers for the 1995 Mario Van Peebles film Panther misfired by casting it "as JFK for African Americans," Juzang says. The flick bombed. Soon after, the comedy Friday came out, pitched as a straight-up ghetto laugh-fest, and scored big both inside and outside city borders. The lesson here: core hip-hoppers display an almost fanatical obsession with authenticity. Sanitizing any element of hip-hop culture to make it more palatable for middle-class suburban whites is likely to result in failure, because the core hip-hop audience will reject it. And other groups look to this core for their cues. This wasn't always the case. The pop-music audience was responsible for the commercial success of artists such as faux rapper Vanilla Ice and thinly disguised pop star MC Hammer. Both scored major hits by unimaginatively sampling 1980s pop songs and rapping bland rhymes over them. But now, even peripheral hip-hop consumers have grasped the difference between real and rip-off. If white kids realize a product has been toned down in a bid to make it "cross over," they'll avoid it. Instead they go for music with a blunt, urban sensibility--the harder-edged stuff Chuck D of the rap group Public Enemy once described as "CNN for black America." Soundscan sales statistics bear this out. In 1994, three-quarters of hard-core rap albums were sold to white consumers.

THE INNER AND OUTER CIRCLES

The hip-hop market encompasses consumers with varying levels of commitment to the culture. Millions of people buy rap records, but can hardly be called hard-core. Strictly speaking, a person must do at least one of three things to qualify: rap or be a disc jockey; breakdance; or paint graffiti.

Few white teenagers meet these criteria. Some are afraid to venture into inner cities or cities at all, many are restricted by their parents, and others are content to absorb hip-hop culture through television and other media. "Lots of kids' parents won't let them cross certain borders. So they're watching videos to see how to dress, how to look, how to talk" says black urban-sportswear designer Maurice Malone. "They can visualize the inner city. But they don't go there, so they can't fully communicate with the heart of the hip-hop movement."