Steve Stoute’s book The Tanning of America: How Hip-Hop Created a Culture That Rewrote the Rules of the New Economy came out last week and not surprisingly, it sold out everywhere. Steve Stoute is a marketing, branding and advertising genius who has the support of industry heavyweights like Russell Simmons, Diddy, Jay-Z, Jimmy Iovine, Swizz Beatz, and Mary J. Blige, just to name a few.
EXCLUSIVE: Steve Stoute Takes Run DMC’s My Adidas & Gets A New Tan Generation
Tanning is a handbook into the mindset of a new generation. It examines our culture and how powerful it’s been since hip-hop and the mainstream collided. The effect of this influenced an entire generation to unify through a similar mindset.
STORY: What Is The “Tanning Effect”?!
Steve’s book is nostalgic, digging into the importance of hip-hop’s beginning and how it largely effected the idea of tanning. It’s also extremely enlightening in discussing how important this idea is. If you haven’t gotten your hands on this book yet, you need to do so, but, in the mean time, we’ve picked out some of our favorite excerpts from this book that are undoubtedly enlightening.
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Chapter 1: Walk This Way
[On Run DMC getting their own line of Adidas]
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.
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Chapter 2: Hard Knock Life
“It was only natural that brands were destined to become the beneficiaries of aspiration when the common message was one of going from poverty to success. Brands, after all, were being used by hip-hop to chart growth and proclaim the possibilities. I can play a thousand rap songs from every era that all say the same thing—I went from this to that…”
“…Being brand-conscious is nothing new for African-Americans—who I contend are the absolute best consumers in the world. How so? Because as a buying force, African-American consumers over-index in commodities and brands that aren’t even marketed to them.” … “If really smart corporate executives had wanted to save money on all that market research about what the next new new thing was going to be, they would only have had to turn to the hip-hop community—who were doing the research anyway, selecting trends that looked promising…”
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Chapter 5: Marketing CDs with Shoelaces
Technology had always been the friend of the music business, prompting innovation in the studio and new ways to market existing catalogs as well as new product. But when the technology came along that would make file sharing possible—and in fact digitized music to fit a compact digital file, so it was a natural target—nobody reacted with an alarm or stopped to consider how this could be the demise of and industry. Executives who ought to have used their own resources and found ways to control the kinds of things that Napster and later iTunes were doing, unfortunately, were complacent.
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Chapter 8: Selling Mind-sets, Not Products
When Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas performed the song, “My Humps,” that praised the power of her derriere and her breasts (“lovely lady lumps”) to draw luxury-brand gifts and attention galore, the code implied that it was a shared value, no color line dividing it.
This aspect of tanning, I believe, has been a healthy change allowing women from diverse cultures to come to a place where they can meet and match and have common aesthetics.
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Chapter 10: Tan Is The New Cool
One of the coolest things I see about this tan generation and the scene they’re cultivating now is that there is no uniformity and that’s a style unto itself. The unapologetic attitude of today draws from that permission to lead and to be different. That’s in the DNA.
As for the language being spoken in this culture by young America today, I think that Mike Bentley had it right when he talked about the evolution of urban culture into a digital culture.
