By Odeisel
Here we go again. High profile urban artist gets corporate endorsement opportunity. Enter watchdog group or vocal minority with designs on said high profile target. They bitch, they complain and said artist gets dropped. Recently, Pepsico pulled a Mountain Dew ad directed by Odd Future frontman Tyler the Creator after a firestorm of protest due to the commercial’s overtly racial overtones.
We have seen this scenario many times before as mass media and corporate culture attach themselves to something that is hot in the streets in order to garner the cool cachet. Their lack of understanding of certain codes and constants leave them vulnerable to watchdog groups and protesters who believe it’s their jobs to save the world from evil.
We saw this play out a few weeks ago when Rick Ross, fresh off saying he’d “die for these Reeboks” was unceremoniously removed from the Reebok money train for lyrics from a guest appearance on Rocko’s U.O.E.N.O where he rhymed about slipping the molly into a woman’s drink. It didn’t matter that molly isn’t a date rape drug, nor that the balance of Ross’ catalog includes rampant tales of gun play and drug dealing (which Reebok was presumably okay with). When people start marching outside of your corporate headquarters, urban culture becomes little more than fodder.
The Mountain Dew commercial was one in a series of four which feature a goat hopped up on the Dew giving the cops his hooves to kiss, assaulting a waitress who was a lil too slow for the Dew and ending up in a police line-up with the usual stereotypical crime suspects (read black males). If you watch the series without the prognostication, you would probably bust out laughing or stare incredulously with the WTF look. In all likelihood, you probably wouldn’t have visions of a hooded Trayvon Martin, or struggle with the plight of the Black man. You’d just laugh and keep it moving. Not to say that those undertones aren’t there, but that’s the whole point. If it wasn’t overt, you wouldn’t get the joke.
The strong, vocal minority has a peculiar way of forcing the issue with corporate America or the populace at large. There weren’t even 100 protesters outside of Reebok. Presumably they sell millions of sneakers. In a Nike-driven world, you could argue that nobody young gave a rat’s ass about Reebok until they started courting Hip-Hop artists. (Planet Ill has run many pieces on Reebok shoes and the most compelling ones either feature rappers or long forgotten members of the Reebok family like Shaq and Allen Iverson. No one cared about the Alicia Keys Reeboks and it would be tough to find any young athlete in any of the four major sports pushing more Reeboks than a rapper. Numbers should have told Reebok to pull a Nike when it came to dropping Tiger Woods and tell the protesters to kick rocks.
Black music and urban culture always find themselves on the outside looking in with these situations which is funny because so many of these rappers know the axiom you can’t turn a hoe into a housewife. Yet they continue to whore themselves out for the check and end up on the outside looking in when it’s time to move on and they are always bewildered. You are only as good as your loudest fans. If your support rages like a wildfire, then no matter how many people picket someone’s office, you’re good money. Can you imagine Jay-Z or Snoop getting bounced like that?
In the grand scheme of things this will not hurt Tyler. The commercial was internet only, no harm, no foul. But as a culture we have to do what we can to ensure that our cachet has more than transient value. It isn’t easy when you may not like a Rick Ross or a Tyler, but when their influence is diminished, our juice as a whole takes a hit. I’m sure there are more people from the hood drinking Mountain Dew than there are protesters. I’m sure there are more people buying sneakers because of Reeboks than there are people protesting. The difference is that they have the wherewithal to show up and show out when they want to be heard. What would happen if the hood stopped drinking Mountain Dew? Or stopped buying Reeboks? There is power in numbers. Too bad we’ll probably never know.
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