Decoded (12 page)

That idea was at the heart of Rocawear, the clothing company we founded. In the late nineties I was wearing a lot of clothes from Iceberg, the European sportswear designer. After a while, I’d look out into the audience after my concerts and see hundreds of people rocking Iceberg knits. So it became clear to us that we were directly influencing their sales. Dame set up a meeting with Iceberg and we tried to strike an endorsement deal. I don’t even think my second album was out—and my first album hadn’t exactly set the world on fire in terms of sales—and the executives at Iceberg looked at us like we were speaking a foreign language. They offered us free clothes, but we wanted millions and the use of their private jet; we walked out of their offices realizing we had to do it ourselves.

In the beginning it was laughable, since we had no idea what we were doing. We had sewing machines up in our office, but not professional ones that can do twelve kinds of stitches; we had the big black ones that old ladies use. We had people sewing shirts that took three weeks each. We actually thought we were going to make the clothes ourselves in our own little sewing shop. Eventually, we got some advice from Russell and did the necessary research, got some partners, and launched Rocawear properly. Once we committed to the fashion industry, we were committed to doing it right. We didn’t want a vanity label. We wanted the top slot. I’m lucky that Iceberg didn’t give us the bullshit we asked for in the first place, an endorsement contract that would’ve run out a long time ago, because we might not have ever started a company that’s poised to bring in a billion dollars a year in revenue.

I’M A HUSTLER HOMIE, YOU’RE A CUSTOMER CRONY

The spirit of the Iceberg response was replayed years later with another company. From the first time I rapped the line
you like Dom, maybe this Cristal will change your life
on my first album, hip-hop has raised the profile of Cristal. No one denies that. But we were unpaid endorsers of the brand—which we thought was okay, because it was a two-way street. We used their brand as a signifier of luxury and they got free advertising and credibility every time we mentioned it. We were trading cache. But they didn’t see it that way.

A journalist at
The Economist
asked Frederic Rouzaud, the managing director of the company that makes Cristal: “Do you think your brand is hurt by its association with the ‘bling lifestyle’?” This was Rouzaud’s reply: “That’s a good question, but what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it.” He also said that he looked on the association between Cristal and hip-hop with “curiosity and serenity.”
The Economist
printed the quote under the heading UNWELCOME ATTENTION.

That was like a slap in the face. You can argue all you want about Rouzaud’s statements and try to justify them or whatever, but the tone is clear. When asked about an influential segment of his market, his response was, essentially, well, we can’t stop them from drinking it. That was it for me. I released a statement saying that I would never drink Cristal or promote it in any way or serve it at my clubs ever again. I felt like this was the bullshit I’d been dealing with forever, this kind of offhanded, patronizing disrespect for the culture of hip-hop.

Why not just say thank you and keep it moving? You would think the person who runs the company would be most interested in selling his product, not in criticizing—or accepting criticisms—of the people buying it.

The whole situation is probably most interesting for what it says about competition, and the way power can shift without people’s being aware of it. It’s like in chess, when you’ve already set up your endgame and your opponent doesn’t even realize it. What a lot of people—including, obviously,
The Economist,
Cristal, and Iceberg—think is that rappers define themselves by dropping the names of luxury brands. They can’t believe that it might actually work the other way around.

Everything that hip-hop touches is transformed by the encounter, especially things like language and brands, which leave themselves open to constant redefinition. With language, rappers have raided the dictionary and written in new entries to every definition—words with one or two meanings now have twelve. The same thing happens with brands—Cristal meant one thing, but hip-hop gave its definition some new entries. The same goes for other brands: Timberland and Courvoisier, Versace and Maybach. We gave those brands a narrative, which is one of the reasons anyone buys anything: to own not just a product, but to become part of a story.

Cristal, before hip-hop, had a nice story attached to it: It was a quality, premium, luxury brand known to connoisseurs. But hip-hop gave it a deeper meaning. Suddenly, Cristal didn’t just signify the good life, but the good life laced with hip-hop’s values: subversive, self-made, audacious, even a little dangerous. The word itself—Cristal—took on a new dimension. It wasn’t just a premium champagne anymore—it was a prop in an exciting story, a portal into a whole world. Just by drinking it, we infused their product with our story, an ingredient that they could never bottle on their own.

Biggs first put me on to Cristal in the early days of Roc-A-Fella. We were drinking it in the video for “In My Lifetime” in 1994. We didn’t have a record deal yet, but back then we’d show up at clubs in Lexuses and buy bottles of Cristal, while most people in the clubs were buying Moët. It was symbolic of our whole game—it was the next shit. It told people that we were elevating our game, not by throwing on a bigger chain, but by showing more refined, and even slightly obscure, taste. We weren’t going to stick to whatever everyone else was drinking or what everyone expected us to drink. We were going to impose our sense of what was hot on the world around us.

When people all over started drinking Cristal at clubs—when Cristal became a household name among young consumers—it wasn’t because of anything Cristal had done. It was because of what we’d done. If Cristal had understood this dynamic, they never would’ve been so dismissive. The truth is, we didn’t need them to tolerate us with “curiosity and serenity.” In fact, we didn’t need them at all.

IS THIS WHAT SUCCESS IS ALL ABOUT?

There’s a knee-jerk fear in America that someone—especially someone young and black—is coming to take your shit, fuck up your brand, destroy the quality of your life, tarnish the things you love. But in hip-hop, despite all the brand shout-outs, the truth is, we don’t want your shit. We came out of the generation of black people who finally got the point: No one’s going to help us. So we went for self, for family, for block, for crew—which sounds selfish; it’s one of the criticisms hustlers and rappers both get, that we’re hypercapitalists, concerned only with the bottom line and enriching ourselves. But it’s just a rational response to the reality we faced. No one was going to help us. Not even our fathers stuck around. People who looked just like us were gunning for us. Weakness and dependence made you a mark, like a dope fiend. Success could only mean self-sufficiency, being a boss, not a dependent. The competition wasn’t about greed—or not just about greed. It was about survival.

There are times when it gets exhausting, this focus on constant competition. There are times when it gets boring, especially these days when people use beef as a marketing plan. There’s something heroic about the winning boxer standing at the center of the ring alone with his opponent sprawled at his feet, roaring “What’s my name?” like Ali. But it’s tough never being able to let your guard down.

When I described the landscape of hip-hop to Bono that night—a perpetual battlefield with new armies constantly joining in—he just shook his head. It’s brutal, but if you step back from it, it’s beautiful, too. What you’re looking at is a culture of people so in love with life that they can’t stop fighting for it—people who’ve seen death up close, literal death, but also the kind of dormancy and stagnation that kills your spirit. They’ve seen it all around them and they don’t want any part of that shit, not at all. They want to live like they want to live—they want to impose themselves on the world through their art, with their voices. This impulse is what saved us. It’s what saved me.

I don’t scrap with every comer these days. I’ve got so many people coming at me that I’d never do anything else. I’m not just competing on records and I’m not just competing with rappers anymore. I look at things a little differently than I used to. The competition isn’t always zero sum like it was on the streets of Trenton; I’ve discovered that there really is such a thing as a win-win situation. And sometimes, I’m only competing with myself, to be a better artist and businessman. To be a better person with a broader vision. But it’s still that old sense of competition that motivates me. I’m still that nigga on the corner seven nights straight, trying to get back the money I lost. I’m still the kid who’d fight to be able to walk through a park in Trenton, the MC who’d battle anyone in a project courtyard or back room. This is what the streets have done for us, for me: They’ve given us our drive; they’ve made us stronger. Through hip-hop we found a way to redeem those lessons, and use them to change the world.