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In Hip-Hop, Making Name-Dropping Pay
Tony Rome, left, Kyla Triplett, Lamar Lee-Kane Sr. and Porta Jackson meet at Maven Strategies, a hip-hop marketing firm in Lanham.
(By Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post)
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Larry Khan, senior vice president of R&B promotion and marketing for Jive Records, said this process for making music is "pretty much accepted."
"I guess in days gone by it would have looked like the artist was selling out, but now it has become a part of American culture. It doesn't hurt your street cred," he said.
Hip-hop artists, who often rhyme about their lives, fantasies and aspirations, have been touting their favorite brands in songs for years and subconsciously enticing their fans to buy them.
Hip-hop originally functioned as a sort of "black CNN," as rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy dubbed the music in the late 1980s. And the transition to mainstream pop culture, and thus branding, began innocently -- and unpaid. In 1986, popular Brooklyn rap group Run-DMC released "My Adidas" -- an ode to the sneaker company and their personal style. The song topped the charts and boosted the company's sales. Later, Adidas offered the rappers a paid sponsorship deal, and the relationship between the business and the art was formed.
In the past decade, the link between rappers and brands has evolved along with the music's promotion of bling and living the luxurious life. According to Agenda, brands were mentioned almost 1,000 times in the top 20 singles last year on the Billboard charts. The top brands were: Cadillac (70 mentions), Hennessy (69), Mercedes-Benz (63), Rolls Royce (62), and Gucci (49).
In the popular song "Overnight Celebrity" Grammy-nominated rapper Twista mentioned nine brands, including these:
I can get you on CDs and DVDs
Take you to BeBe and BCBG, . . .
Y'all take a look at her, she got such an astonishing body
I can see you in some Gucci or Roberto Cavalli
Rome said 90 percent of those radio plugs were free product placements and would cost the companies upwards of a billion dollars if they were paid advertisements.
"Hip-hop is really the only music genre that embraces brands in their songs and because they are doing it, I think the hip-hop artists should be paid for it," Rome said.
At least one of those artists was not only paid but says so in his song.
A version of Maven client Petey Pablo's song "Freek-a-Leek," which was one of the most played last year, included this line:
Now I got to give a shout out to Seagram's Gin/Cause I'm drinkin' it and they payin' me for it.
