A Conversation with Steve Stoute

A few years ago, Steve Stoute, a former record executive turned advertising man, sensed that the Fortune 500 companies who wanted his help marketing their products didn’t quite “get it.” They were targeting young millennial consumers, looking to sell them everything from car insurance to hamburgers, but didn’t understand the millennial mindset. The old Donald Drapers were out of their league.

So Stoute—who runs Translation, LLC., a multicultural marketing agency and was named Advertising Age’s Executive of the Year last year—laid his mantra down in a book, The Tanning Of America: How the Culture of Hip-Hop Rewrote the Rules of the New Economy. In it, he argued that the reason brands were having trouble reaching young consumers was because hip-hop culture had permeated the very fabric of American society, tearing down racial barriers and uniting everyone under its influence. Black. White. Brown. Yellow. None of that shit mattered. Hip-hop, an ostensibly black movement, had ‘tanned’ the country, and now everyone was speaking the same language.

Whether you believe his philosophy to be true or not—and don’t doubt that there are some holes to be punched in his findings—Stoute is taking his hip-hop history lesson off the written page and onto the screen. A four-part documentary miniseries, The Tanning of America: One Nation Under Hip-Hop, which debuted last night on VH1. Directed by Billy Corben, of Cocaine Cowboys fame, it will explore how hip-hop culture became a global agent of change, and argue that its historic rise lead to the election of America’s first black president. I called Steve at his office last week and had him tell me all about it.

Noisey: Since you’re such a strategic marketer, was your plan always to take the book and turn it into a show?
Steve Stoute: The intent of the book was just to take something that was passing us by—the generation that caused the whole notion of black kids and white kids and young adults from all different races seeing the world through a very similar lens, and not necessarily being caught up and defined by ethnicity—I didn’t want that to just happen and then when we look back in time, it gets chopped up with how it took place. I felt hip-hop culture was the main component driving that reality. I wanted to document it, so that when it was all said and done, there was something that said it in one place. So the intent was never to turn it into a movie or anything. It was to make sure we were very specific and precise about what we did. The artists came out and wanted to speak on it, and that’s what turned it into the documentary, man. It was more driven from the people, the artists. It had nothing to do with being strategic.

Was there a personal sense of satisfaction that you got from having the book turned into a miniseries?
It’s a new feel for me. I don’t define myself as an author and filmmaker. I am a storyteller. And to know that a story can be told in book form and a book can be turned into a documentary, and people would have that much love for a philosophy you would have, it was a very new feeling for me. As a businessman and entrepreneur, I had never felt that one before. And it took a long time. That’s the other thing. Be careful what you wish for. Selling an idea for a book and then turning it into a documentary, that’s fine. But now you have to like literally… it’s three years! I just signed up for three years of doing your best to be precise, getting your thoughts out, recalling history. The first thing I started doing was like, I gotta call Fab Five Freddy. I gotta speak to Dr. Dre. I gotta speak to Rick Rubin. I gotta speak to [Reverend] Run.

Right.
I’m thinking of all the people who were part of driving this issue and sentiment forward, and getting their take on what was happening and what they had to go through when they were trying to be heard. What was the immediate action they were having with resistance? People saying [hip-hop is] a niche music, it’s niche movement or a niche culture. I needed to hear all that stuff. All those words—all they were up against—was what was going to make me get this done.

Were there any interviews or parts of shooting that were particularly difficult?
Because we didn’t shoot it on location, everybody had to come to a location that was pre-determined in New York and L.A., that was the part that made it hard. We didn’t go to Dr. Dre’s house. We didn’t go Rick Rubin’s house. Ron Howard’s house. Al Sharpon’s house. Eminem’s house. Mariah Carey’s house. Everybody had to come to this place. So it was coordinating schedules, and that was pretty crazy. Everybody who I wanted to be a part of it showed up.

That’s crazy.
Well the truth of the matter is—it ain’t me. The topic is honest and truthful and the people I spoke with represented those values. It was values that had not necessarily been packaged and told in a way that was honest and compelling. For Mariah Carey to speak about how she just wanted to sing and make great music, and it was the world’s inept understanding of how could someone be biracial and have a voice like that? And all of a sudden, her records that if she was black would have been on R&B radio, but because she was lighter-skinned with curly hair, it ended up getting on pop radio. She talks about that. She speaks about the system and how the system and media and shortsightedness of that allowed those things to happen quicker for her than it did for an artist who was darker skin.

Go on.
You seen this the other day with Macklemore. He calls Hot 97 after the Kendrick thing and says part of him winning Rap Album of the Year is because he’s white. He says that! The people who vote for the Grammys need to read [Tanning of America]. They obviously voted for him because they heard of him and they heard of one record, and they’re not necessarily with the real shit. It’s constantly this ongoing evolution of getting typically older people to understand that the world has shifted and changed, and that you can no longer define people’s cultural values through their ethnicity. Supporters of that notion are the people I was trying to speak to about it.

A couple of years ago you were critical of the Grammys. You wrote an open letter and said they were out of touch.
I didn’t make the shit up. It’s the same thing I did with this book. It’s a topic that everybody knows but nobody wants to discuss. And hopefully if you open that door and loudly have that conversation, it leads to others having that conversation, which ultimately leads to change.

But in your day to day now, are you still finding that the tanning is happening, or are we fully tan now?
No, we’re not fully tan. It’s still happening. It’s happening more and more with the younger generation; the interaction and the cultural sharing is happening at a higher pace. The access to culture sharing, the access to information. And tanning isn’t just black kids helping influence white kids or hispanic kids. It’s really the process of cultural sharing and the back and forth. Because of the dynamics of where we are digitally and where we are with social platforms that exist, you are seeing this cultural sharing at a higher transaction rate than ever before. You are seeing it in real time.

But when we’re culturally sharing so much with each other, don’t you run the risk of… Obviously the argument Macklemore was [The Heist] wasn’t even a rap album.
But it was a rap album. You know that. You and I could show our affection for the art form and say it’s not a rap album, right? Or we could show or understanding of the art form and say in today’s standards, it is a rap album.

I agree with you. In his defense, I saw him perform in front of 5 people. He’s from a Seattle underground rap scene. Now, he probably is courting a pop audience. But he is, in fact, rapping. He’s not singing, that’s for sure.
But Drake is singing.

And that’s the funny thing, right?
[The Heist] is a rap album. The art form has changed. I’m sure Kool G Rap and Big Daddy Kane would be pissed at us. And KRS-One would probably kill us. But we have to discard all of that, and be like, in today’s standards as the art form has moved and changed… I mean, it happened in rock n’ roll. In any art form, when it stands the test of time, the evolution of it is part of defining the success and everlasting effects of it.

Yeah, there are still people who think rock is supposed to sound like what it sounded like in 1960. You have that same argument with hip-hop. And you’re actually the first person I’ve heard say that about Drake.
It’s crazy no one talks about that. It’s unbelievable that no one talks about that.

I’m sure you’ve heard about his comments regarding Macklemore in Rolling Stone. He’s going in on Macklemore but you’re right. Drake is rapper who obviously comes from hip-hop culture, but he does sing a lot. He’s much further left and out of the mold, despite not being white—he’s half white—than most of the people in hip-hop.
The only person who should be pissed right now is Kendrick Lamar. I think Drake’s a great artist and he’s an unbelievable writer. He understands melody and great music and song structure. He’s really talented. But the whole arguing about what’s hip-hop and what’s not, he can’t do that any more than Macklemore can do it, if we’re talking about hip-hop in its purest form. That argument, coming from them, is like crazy to me.

It’s 2014. The music industry has changed. The interaction between artists and brands has changed. And yet you still hear the word “sellout.”
I don’t hear that word anymore. I’ve not heard that word in so long.

You hear it a lot from white music critics.
White music critics?

White music critics.
What is “white music critics?”

A white music critic is a music critic that typically would write about rock music but also write about some rap. Maybe he/she writes about indie rock, but also covers rap. It’s very easy these days to dip your toe in a lot of different waters. Ten years ago, there was a very defined group that covered hip-hop and urban music. They contributed to VIBE, XXL, The Source.
Umm hmm.

But like you said, there’s a lot of blending of cultures now. The black writer is maybe listening to indie rock, and the rock writer is listening to hip-hop. But the word sellout seems to come from the white side. Because of where they come from—because of privilege, of not necessarily having to do something for money—do they not understand why a hip-hop artist would do a deal with a brand? How is the line between selling out different depending on where you’re coming from?
I always thought that hip-hop artists were very unapologetic in the beginning. Michael Jackson never wore the glove; never sold the glove and jacket. Rock music and pop music at that time, not getting support from brands was like Fuck corporate America. That was edgy. But hip-hop was unapologetically using brands to say and make social statements about themselves. Run-DMC wearing the Adidas with no shoelaces, to Kangol and all these brands that were blatantly driving the brand of the artist, when those brands wanted to partner with those artists—give them some bullshit money just so they could keeping wearing it, or go one step further to endorsement deals, where we are today—the relationship with hip-hop and brands was always like that. No one gave a shit. If you do something that’s stupid or you make stupid records or you do something embarrassing, that’s always going to be noted as selling out or doing something for money. Partnering with brands and hip-hop music is certainly not selling out and never has been. In fact, what all the other art forms did was look at hip-hop and say, if these guys can get away with it and nobody has a problem with it, then what the fuck are we doing?

Paul Cantor is a writer living on Staten Island. He's on Twitter - @PaulCantor