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Urban Inc: The connection of Hip-Hop, the Projects, and Corporate Sponsorships in L.A.
Urban Inc.
Inside a Watts housing project, a Pepsi-sponsored recording studio burns hip-hop to disc, and another corporate logo to the face of urban culture.
By Drew Tewksbury
It’s no secret that Los Angeles is a city torn in two. Like any city, Los Angeles is awash with half-truths and half-remembered lies, geographically and ideologically bisected into separate but equally imagined parts: the good parts of town and the bad parts of town.
Wherever you are, there’s an adjacent neighborhood you’re not supposed to go into — a place drenched in the realms of the unknown. For many living north of the 10 freeway, the mythology of these forbidden places becomes a comfortable binary to the lives of the beachside and the high-rise. But it’s easy to forget that these places are real — that these “bad parts” house real, live people living under the smog of media terms like drive-bys, gangs, and the projects. These spaces — these unknown cities — filled with interwoven fact and fiction, become an urban forest delineated by fear.
For many Angelenos, this unknown city is Watts.
It was only a few months ago that Imperial Courts was simply another housing project stoking the hive of gang activity in Watts. With the historic gang treaty of 1992 broken, the PJ Crips of Imperial Courts reanimate as they ally with the infamous Bountyhunter Bloods of Nickerson Gardens against the Grape Street Crips of Jordan Downs.
It’s a lot of names, and a lot of colors, and it’s some bad shit of Shakespearian magnitude.
But on September 16th a story cracked the headlines of local news, reeling Watts in from the media periphery. And this time it wasn’t about violence. In fact, it was just the opposite; it was the other side of the media coin — a human-interest story. After much anticipation and even more bureaucracy, a recording studio has opened inside the red, white and blue cinder block walls of the Imperial Court. The realized dream of Jonathan Hart — a 20-year-old, genuine and ambitious resident — the studio will provide free access to the residents and act as an agent of musical education, job training and emotional release.
“I was born and raised in Imperial Courts, I’ve been there all my life. You can use hip-hop to show how you feel instead of taking it out on somebody, and that’s how I make music; everything that I’ve been through, I throw it in a song,” Jonathan explains.
He’s definitely on the right track.
With the deteriorating funding for arts and music in schools, there are few options for those who want to pursue a career in music or those who simply want to throw styles with their friends. So after months of meetings with city Housing Authority and heaps of bureaucracy, Hart set out to find help with his groundbreaking endeavor.
Hart’s approved proposal was picked up by Benjamin F. Chavis, former President of the NAACP and current president/CEO of Hip-Hop Summit Action Network. Chavis’s HSAN partner happens to be media mogul/hip-hop titan Russell Simmons. As the founder of Def Jam records (a venture that began with Rick Rubin in a dorm room 21 years ago) and current CEO of Rush Communications, Simmons was the right person to go to for all things hip-hop. Together, Chavis and Simmons devised a plan to raise the funds needed for the studio.
And like all good plans, this one involved Ludacris.
It was two years ago that Atlanta rapper Ludacris lost his endorsement deal with Pepsi-Cola following a frenzy of criticism by wary consumers, afraid of more violent and sexually charged lyrics. Simmons and Chavis defended Ludacris and threatened to have the hip-hop community boycott Pepsi. After a heated standoff, Pepsi decided to donate $1 million towards HSAN’s charities for kids, in this case bringing Jonathan Hart’s studio to life.
It’s another rags to riches story, a real live American Dream, and it’s all brought to you by Pepsi.
Oh yeah, and Russell Simmons.
But is hip-hop really the panacea to inner city social ills? Why are Pepsi and Simmons so interested in creating Generation DMX?
Pepsi’s m.o. may be uncertain, but it is certainly not the first big corporation to team up with prominent hip-hop (or basketball) figures for a charitable donation to inner city areas.
In 2002, Sprite began a campaign to refurbish old basketball courts in inner city areas with the help of the NBA (with whom they hold exclusive branding rights). In addition to the creation of these courts, the Sprite logo would be displayed prominently on the backboards. A similar idea was executed by Nike, who built courts iemblazoned with huge Nike swooshes.. On the one hand, these gestures of social responsibility are laudable in their intentions. Yet, it seems that the underlying motives are more fiscally motivated. Bigger than a billboard and with literal heavy foot traffic, both Nike and Sprite’s courts were unavoidable spaces of captive advertising, focused directly at a niche market that has often been alienated by media exclusion and a lack of buying power.
Now, Sprite and fast food chains like McDonald’s have discovered “urban” markets. Ask Destiny’s Child about McDonald’s apple-walnut salad, and if they’re “lovin’ it” as much as their McSponsored world tour. But Destiny’s Child aren’t the only ones eating at McDonald’s. Increasingly, fast food is becoming the food of American poverty. According to L.A. Health Action’s latest policy brief, nearly 60 percent of South L.A. residents are living in or near the poverty line. The vast majority of these people are Black and Latino, many of whom are also victims of soaring obesity and diabetes rates. “It’s unfortunate that the less well off you are in this country, the worse kind of service and food and things you need to live are given to you,” explains rapper Xzibit at the HSAN conference. “It’s about economics more than anything. More than race, it’s about economics.”
The world of corporate charitable donations and “urban” markets have become inextricably intertwined as more corporations focus their advertising to one of the fastest growing consumer groups. Marsha Calloway Campbell, president of the marketing firm Elite Consulting Enterprises, writes in Smart Biz online, “The African-American population is a fast-growing, relatively untapped wealth of marketing opportunities. [They] want to work with companies that give back to the community and have a community presence. They will be loyal if the company is perceived as having a vested interest in this market and their well-being, and if the company is perceived as one that cares and can be trusted.”
Simmons is no stranger to the “urban” markets or Campbell’s slightly reductive reasoning; he was one of the first to define and successfully create hip-hop as a lifestyle as well as a genre of music. In 1986, Simmons brought Run-DMC to Madison Square Garden where they were performing on their sold-out “Raising Hell” tour. The boys from Queens were urged by Russell to write a song about their favorite shoes called “My Adidas,” which not only told where their shoes had been, but also the exact ways in which they were worn. It eventually resulted in a top-five R&B record and turned into a tremendous endorsement deal when Simmons showed Adidas executives the impact of the rappers’ songs. During the group’s performance, Run asked everyone to raise an Adidas in the air. The crowd obeyed and, with one stinky salute, a sea of shell-toes emerged. The executives saw the power of urban aesthetics and the emergence of a distinct hip-hop culture. They signed Run- DMC for a $1.5 million contract and gave them their own brand of shoes featuring their own logo.
Take one lok at this get-rich-quick model, popularized by hip-hop-hero films like 8 Mile and the upcoming Get Rich or Die Trying, and you can see why the projects would want a recording studio. The reality of hip-hop often gets lost in the aesthetic and diluted by the rapper’s symbolic role — they are much more than artists or musicians. Xzibit explains, “I think that we are role models, that we’re just people that the kids look up to more than politicians, more than their teachers, and sometimes even more than their parents. I think that hip-hop has an impact because it’s so visual and so tangible for the inner city.”
Rappers become powerful business people in the realm of entertainment. Some make it on sheer talent and unique style (Kool Keith or Ol’ Dirty Bastard), but many others make it after being groomed as businessmen, label execs or producers (Sean “P. Puff Diddy Daddy” Combs and Master P).
Why is it that a great majority of hip-hop artists get big through the help of high-powered label execs who develop their images, buy their Bentleys, and bring them up from the underground, while these integral players remain invisible to inner city audiences? These are the people with briefcases, ties, and water cooler small talk — not the most exciting image. It would be a strange day to see kids at Nickerson Gardens wearing wingtips and bragging about how their portfolios are diversified like a motherfucker.
But this leaves a gaping hole in the minds of inner city youth, who live unaware of the importance of business savvy in their own success. Recognizing this need for financial education in urban areas, Simmons and Chavis once again took up the challenge, bringing their HSAN entourage to the Wiltern on Sept. 17th — the day after they opened the studios at Imperial Courts — where they held a conference for inner city kids called “Get Your Money Right.” The idea was to showcase black business owners and other financially successful black people in a panel discussion so that young urban kids could visualize a way out of the hood other than just rap. Then again, some members of the panel were rappers. Panel member, rapper, and Pimp My Ride host Xzibit warned of the complexities of change in the inner cities. “You can put on your shoes and walk out of the hood if you want to, it’s about staying out of the hood and empowering yourself and feeling comfortable that you can be somewhere, because if you get beat in the head and told that you are only a certain thing all your life, you kinda accept your position. And being subservient is not what’s up in 2005.”
Many of the audience members hailed from Watts and were most certainly Jonathan Hart’s peers. You could hear them give shout outs to Nickerson Gardens or just simply scream like it was a high-school lunchroom. Some held their heads in their hands only to perk up to see what Xzibit or the D.O.C. had to say. But one of the more insightful comments was made by a financial planner who was stationed at the end of the long table. Although his open-collared Oxford shirt wasn’t as cool as the D.O.C.’s indoor sunglasses, he said,”Looking at the people at this table, I feel like in my life I chose Plan B. But I just now realized that Plan B ain’t that bad.”
There was no response to the man’s comment, other than a guy wearing a Jesus baseball hat standing up and yelling “J-J-J-Jesus” in a G-unit approximation.
It’s definitely not hip to be square in Watts.
So, what’s the answer for Watts? Certainly there are better places to donate money than one music studio in one project. What about the King/Drew Magnet School, which has one of the highest graduation rates in the state? What about the decrepit social services? Conceivably, Pepsi is more concerned with generating future rappers-turned -spokespeople than quenching the thirst of a poverty-free generation.
In the end, it doesn’t matter onto whose tab this studio goes or where the money should have gone. For Jonathan Hart, the should-have’s and the could-haves are meaningless, it’s only in action that the spark for change can be lit. “I’ve been in the projects 20 years. I’m 20 years old, and I’m a positive person. Anything that I can do that’s positive for my community, I’m just trying to get it all together. Whatever I gotta do to get there I’m gonna do it, even if I have to ask for help to get there, I’m gonna do it.”
Perhaps it isn’t about providing new services to this already troubled neighborhood. Maybe it’s about planting a seed of dreams, as unattainable as they may be. Allowing people to have a space aside, where the pressures of the Bloods and the Crips, the marketing and soft drinks, and the politicians and the police are left outside.
To simply have a room of one’s own.
©2005 by Los Angeles Alternative LLC
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