The Tanning of America Read Free

(thanks to the aerobics craze), Adidas was facing extinction. In fact, together Nike and Reebok controlled half the North American athletic footwear market, while Adidas was down to 3 percent of U.S. sneaker sales. Given the landscape, the decision makers at Adidas apparently figured they had nothing to lose by attending the concert, and even opted to send Angelo Anastasio, their head of marketing, along with an entourage of company heavyweights, across the Atlantic to see what was going down.
    Up until the moment of truth when Run began to chant the first line of “My Adidas,” Russell and his people had to have been holding their breath. In other venues, the crowd reactions had been so ecstatic that there was no reason to expect this audience would be any different. But then again, this was Madison Square Garden, New York City, where concertgoers were unpredictable, even mercurial. So it was only when Run and DMC, backed by Jam Master Jay’s spinning turntables, roared into the first verse and the crowd immediately chimed in, full-throated—twenty thousand strong—that they knew the Adidas guys would be wowed. Nothing could have prepared them, however, for what happened next.
    As if driven by the fervor of the crowd, suddenly Run reached down and removed one of his shoes, rapping out its name in the singular—“My Adida!”—and held it high over his head, like a warrior holding up his blade for all to see. Egging the audience on, Run and the others dared them to respond. And they did. On cue, as hoped for, they all reached down to remove one of their sneakers and then held it in their hands above their heads, so that it looked like a pulsating sea of the black triplestriped Adidas emblem on white leather waving in unison over the heads of everyone at Madison Square Garden.
    In the ensuing years, accounts of the events that followed took on mythical proportions. Though the details I’d hear as my career evolved would vary—what was said and by whom, when it was proposed, how much was offered—the central fact of the matter is that when the Adidas executives witnessed twenty thousand young urban fans jubilantly holding their brand aloft, they immediately saw the incredible economic potential that this new, raw form of entertainment possessed. Besides the vision of Russell Simmons and company in anticipating this reaction, I have to acknowledge how far ahead of his time Angelo Anastasio was. An Italian in his thirties, Anastasio would have been foolish to think Run-DMC in any way resembled the all-American mainstream images that global companies yearned to associate with their brands. But by all accounts, the cultural revelation that night at the Garden was as akin to a religious conversion as anything the Adidas brass had ever experienced.
    According to Run (a.k.a. Reverend Run in later decades), the instant he walked offstage, one of the executives took him in hand and announced he was going to be given his own Adidas line. In a move that was completely unprecedented in the annals of marketing history, Adidas went on to negotiate an endorsement deal with Run-DMC to promote the company’s sneakers, the threesome’s own signature products, and an array of accessories. At upward of 1.5 million dollars, the deal made the rappers the first-ever nonathletes to become the international standard-bearers for what had theretofore been strictly marketed as an athletic shoe. The deal also transformed the fortunes of Adidas Group AG, bringing them back from the brink of marketplace irrelevance and infusing their brand with the unbridled energy and electromagnetic cool of urban youth, all of which translated into a quantum boost in revenue too.
    This translation—a convergence between two entities from totally dissimilar, distinct cultural galaxies—was a foreshadowing of greater magic still to come. Not only did it school hip-hop artists and their promoters as to the