When LL Cool J filmed his 1997 commercial for the Gap, it was a milestone: never before had a rapper been called on to endorse as mainstream an apparel company. The commercial was minimal and cool: LL Cool J, rapping a cappella in front of a white background, quick camera cuts matching the speed of his verse.
“G-A-P gritty, ready to go,” he rapped, “For us, by us, on the low.”
See what he did there? In one of the slicker guerrilla marketing maneuvers in recent times, LL Cool J managed to promote the rising black-owned clothing line FUBU (the label stands for For Us, by Us) — in which he had a financial interest — by sneaking a reference to it into an ad for an exponentially larger brand. (He also wore a FUBU hat in the clip.)
A little something for them, a little something for us: that’s how Chris Lighty, LL Cool J’s manager, liked to do business.
Mr. Lighty, who died on Thursday in an apparent suicide, at 44, was one of the most powerful managers in hip-hop, an executive who distinguished himself by knocking down the often stiff wall that separated hip-hop culture from the mainstream, back when those worlds were far apart and still regarding each other warily.
The LL Cool J Gap commercial was just one of several high-profile corporate relationships he arranged for his rapper clients. This was before hip-hop’s great age of pop compromise. Back then hip-hop was still outsider culture, and still proving itself, both commercially and socioculturally.
Acquiring wealth was an obvious strategy against irrelevance or being overlooked. So the goal was to build rappers — and their brands — from the streets up, without ever sacrificing their connections to their background. Scale big and don’t dilute: those were the rules. That meant endorsement deals, vanity clothing lines and more, anything that could bear the weight of a rapper’s image, anything that could extend a reach.
So when Mr. Lighty partnered some of his clients with Sprite, the results were some of the most viscerally hip-hop ads of the day. Or even later, when he helped negotiate 50 Cent’s stake in Glaceau, the company that makes Vitaminwater, it was with an eye toward not just lending his client’s credibility but also letting the client do so on his own terms. Mr. Lighty didn’t change his artists; he encouraged them to infiltrate.
That was at least partly because of his background. A child of the Bronx, Mr. Lighty was attracted to New York artists, many with a toughness about them. He grew up at a time when hip-hop was growing quickly but was still seen as a sound and style that was best kept at arm’s length.
In his own career he saw hip-hop through all its stages of success. He began by carrying crates for the venerable Kool DJ Red Alert; eventually became a road manager for Boogie Down Productions and the Jungle Brothers; and then an artist manager, with a roster that at various points included 50 Cent, LL Cool J, De La Soul and Mobb Deep. He also formed a label, Violator Records, which signed New York artists like Fat Joe and the Beatnuts, back when New York rap was both a distinctive style and a potential breadwinner.
His company, Violator Management, had in its earliest years an aesthetic point of view. Mr. Lighty preferred streetwise artists to those who might have an easier time crossing over (LL Cool J excepted, of course).
In addition to Violator, he held executive positions at Def Jam and other labels and, before forming Violator, worked at Rush Artist Management under Russell Simmons and Lyor Cohen, two of the executives responsible for bringing hip-hop into the boardroom.
Early on, through Red Alert, Mr. Lighty became close with the Native Tongues, the naturalist New York hip-hop crew of the late ’80s and early ’90s. He even got to rap a verse on Black Sheep’s “Pass the 40.”
Over time, though, it was his name that would pop up in lyrics, whether being celebrated by his clients and peers, or sometimes taking shots from adversaries. In at least one case, the shots were real: in 2003 the Violator office was strafed with bullets. It was an awful part of the cost of doing business.
As hip-hop became a money game, the people responsible for the cash flow became as important as the artists themselves. In the mid-1990s only a few rappers could be considered true pop stars, but at the same time hip-hop was becoming a commercial juggernaut on its own, whether or not the mainstream played along.
But Mr. Lighty’s success ended up changing the landscape to the point where his rule book was decreasingly relevant. Hip-hop specific brands aren’t as potent as they once were, because hip-hop has long completed the path to assimilation — it stands apart far less than it ever has. By getting hip-hop in more homes, in more ways, Mr. Lighty helped sandpaper its rough edges, helped weaken the defenses and the preconceptions that had been keeping it outside. Hip-hop isn’t a subcultural curiosity or even an outsider success story: it is in the grammar of youth culture, of the whole country.
A result: now it’s taken for granted that rappers can be pop stars and brand ambassadors and fashion icons and global role models. Because of Mr. Lighty’s vision, there can be no more “for us, by us,” because now it’s “by us, for everyone.”
The Hunger Games
