Follow the Leader by Eric B. & Rakim,1988 UNI Records Inc.
I was 18, and despite eight years of parochial school I sometimes skimmed past hard questions. I’d first seen it in downtown Portland on the Galleria’s third floor, in a waist-high glass case—the kind with the long, skinny display trays you rotated like a Ferris-wheel, with a push button. It looked like wealth. Any sense it could have been lifted was squelched by dazzlement. He—I’ll call him Marco—was charismatic, short, with olive skin and pretty eyes, and knew how to hustle. He could have gotten the money from his dad, I guessed, whose line of work remained unclear. There’s a time and place for unquestioning acceptance, but I’m not sure this was it. It was a solid gold, one-inch Mercedes emblem pendant. I didn’t have a car, and Marco drove a beat-up Nova, but the Mercedes pendant was the freshest thing I’d seen. If you went to The Spectrum or The Warehouse back then you might have seen me wearing it. When Rick and his girl showed up one night wearing matching gold crosses, it made a strong impression. For the time being, though, I had this symbol around my neck, a type of opulence according to some, and it made me feel different. Like it implied success and status or something. The yet-unknown phenomenon the rapper B.G. would coin had entered my psyche and overridden my conscience: the allure of bling.
The waning of Death Row’s prominence in the 90s marked a divergence for me and hip hop. Status brands seemed to begin taking up residence, infringing on the culture and style of the four-element-to-gangsta genre that had ruled my teenage years. In retrospect, the intrusiveness I had sensed back then was a precursor to surveillance capitalism. Like product placement in films, the message seemed headed toward, ‘You follow hip hop? You’re gonna see Gucci and Cristal everywhere in the music you love.’ I’d come to a type of terms with the bitches and hoes talk, but this consumerist push felt antidemocratic. Buying that record became a vote for indefinite encroachment of the superficial. But back then, the only real awareness I had was that I couldn’t relate to the music or the culture like before. I know now it was about the commodification of an important and influential entity in my life. A sacred place. A place where, up till then, real stories were more the rule than the exception.
Styles in hip hop’s golden age had been derived from creativity and accessibility—Lee jeans, Pumas, maybe a custom belt buckle. People pieced together what they could access to make their own look and tell the world who they are. As a reserved person, fashion has been a way to express myself without words. I’d looked to hip hop for inspiration, but the music and culture’s creative edge became obscured by corporate influence. Artists began hiring stylists to pull their image together for them. Brand ambassadors were born. Aesthetics mined the golden-age ideology I held fast to—the brand-flaunting rapper clashed with ingenuity and spontaneity. Storytelling through the styles and the music—the real narratives, the ones that mattered—seemed on their way out. I sensed that I had two choices: adjust or leave.
The corporate control, processing and refinement of hip hop, though I couldn’t put words to it, is what I couldn’t submit to. It hit close to home, like going from the public school system to parochial school, where a strict dress code told outwardly the story of stifling narrow-mindedness. It didn’t matter if F**k Tha Police was outside my purview—I could relate. In the 90s, I sensed that the street was being pulled out from under hip hop. The street, where people found their voice, their style, their personal power. The street, where there was freedom from confinement and control. The street, where I could even encounter myself. I was deaf to the new classic narratives, which—had I been able to assimilate—would have kept me close to the genre. I couldn’t detect the emerging schism: a more mass-produced mainstream and an independent, more creative, resistant, resilient underground1. Looking back, it was a little like the loss I’d felt when my sisters, five and six years older than me, left for college. Certain sectors in hip hop were maturing, growing in intellect and awareness, and I just wasn’t ready, my sense of agency to fight the power yet untapped.
In 1999, Rob Gonzales reveals, in true narrative style, a turn-of-the-millennium holdover era I’d been oblivious to. The track, from his jazz-influenced LP, On Second Thought, describes many of the simpler, golden-age values I was missing. Listen:
1999 by Rob Gonzales x DJ Proof, cuts by Tone Spliff, 2023 Rob Gonzales
… the intrusiveness I had sensed back then was a precursor to surveillance capitalism. … ‘You follow hip hop? You’re gonna see Gucci and Cristal everywhere in the music you love’.
But the onset of hip hop’s gilded age, and my subjective experience, didn’t occur in a vacuum. In her book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Naomi Klein explains how in the late 80s corporate marketing tactics had shifted after an economic crash from things that went down here in the U.S. and other parts of the world. Multinationals redirected their sights from baby-boomers to the more lucrative youth sector, pushing not just brands and logos, but lifestyles.2
All of that coincided with hip hop’s rise. With the exception of a small minority of conscious innovators, money-hungry corporations and record executives descended upon hip hop—indefinitely3. By the gilded age, the 1980s commodification of hip hop had evolved into a type of trade show—call it a rhyme scheme: multinationals sold lifestyles to mainstream hip hop, used as a proxy to sell lifestyles to us.
I sensed that the street was being pulled out from under hip hop.
Despite my disillusionment with hip hop, material mindedness set in as I fell under the spell of phenomena like reality-TV-precursor Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and I became part of the problem. I threw away money on fake Fendi accessories from Canal Street during my first ever visit to New York City; tasked relatives with picking up a bootlegged Louis Vuitton bag at the Ventimiglia market; and felt the fleeting ego rush of rolling up to a show in a flashy Lexus owned by someone I was housesitting for. I couldn’t afford the real things myself—it was an adult game of pretend. I didn’t see that I was telling the same shallow stories about myself as those in hip hop that had turned me off. I had bought the consumerist-driven story that I needed to not only conform but continually up the ante to feel acceptance, from within and without.
D-Roc of the Ying Yang Twins provided this 2000s-era context in a 2023 interview: “Everybody trying to outdo the next person. That’s what hip hop fashion is. Clothes, shoes, jewelry, gold, chains—when a rapper get his first check, he goes shopping and say I want that…I want that… You go and buy everything you never could buy.”4
Aesthetics mined the golden-age ideology I held fast to—the brand-flaunting rapper clashed with ingenuity and spontaneity.
I typed ‘street rappers now’ into the search bar and stared at the grid of unfamiliar names and faces on the screen. I picked one at random because the name sounded cool: Lil Baby, chosen for irony, I thought. His YouTube channel had 9 million subscribers, and the first video that came up, Crazy, from a month ago, had almost 5 million views. It’s set in Paris, done with professional camerawork, and shows Lil Baby and his entourage and cute kids in different settings, like a posh restaurant, clothes shopping in a high-end boutique, and gazing at a stack of hundreds. I read a couple of the four thousand comments as I tried listening with an open mind. They praised Lil Baby for rapping about real stuff and said his music is a journey and a whole vibe that keeps them coming back. I turned off the video after several bars of heavily auto-tuned vocals as the empty feeling bubbled up from the past. The images and the music just felt out of sync.
Though I couldn’t pinpoint it in the 90s, it seems like bling and materialism became a glittery diversion to upstage conscious messaging and real storytelling—fact or fiction—and generate high profits for a wealthy few. Like a spinoff of the American Dream.
I love fashion, and I can be as hedonistic as anyone when it comes to hip hop. But I’ve also come to love the depth in underground conceptual and narrative lyricism. It sets the bar a little higher, I guess. William Bostick’s sharp sociopolitical commentary in Designer Dummies captures some of my disenchantment. Listen to how the track’s tone, tempo, and background vocals underscore the sardonic message:
Designer Dummies by William Bostick, 2023 Bostick Business Corp
“I had to learn hip hop was a state of mind, and not the way I rhymed, or the way I dressed.” - Rob Gonzales, 1999
I recently heard a reading of Frederick Douglass’s powerful 1852 speech, What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July5, in which he eloquently rebuked the discordance between the institution of enslavement, the church, and the ideals the nation was founded on. He suggested that the church was little more than ‘empty ceremony’ for its complicity. Empty ceremony would have also described the national fanfare amidst the disgraceful reality. I listened quietly as clergy, activists, musicians, like Chuck D, actors, and journalists spoke the words with varied intonation, and I was struck by how much of his message still rings true today. Days later, Rakim’s words in Follow the Leader suddenly hit me as I recognized how hip hop, too, can be elegant, persuasive oratory. I hated that Lil Baby’s mainstream could waste its own platform in favor of vapid VIP culture. Top-down control pushed flash as an end goal, versus holding up points of view from the reality on the ground as the agents for social, political, and economic change. An empty ceremony of flash and fanfare. I thought about commodification. The word looks a little like co-modification. Hip hop didn’t need modification from the outside. It didn’t need moderation. It needed the autonomy to evolve on its own terms. It needed to tell its own true stories far and wide. “For it is not light that is needed, but fire,” Frederick Douglass had said. I hit play on Follow the Leader again. Eric B. and Rakim understood Frederick Douglass’s appeal.
The material age of hip hop didn’t just devalue inventiveness, dimension, and agency, though. This stuff can be divisive and deadly. Slik Jack tells it straight up in the chilling, enigmatic story of Who Killed Virgil. Its originality opposes the mass-produced sound pervasive in so-called street rap now. Check out the singular delivery:
Who Killed Virgil by Slik Jack (prod. Sqreeb), 2023 Ugly Pitch Records
“Cain and Abel situations off the Bible page, brother backstab his own brother in the primal craze.” - Ill Bill, Jordan 3s
But even in the golden age, people were reportedly mugged for their Lee Jeans patches. I wanted to find out what made hip hop uniquely prone to these style wars. Dapper Dan—custom tailor, first to hustlers and then rappers like L.L. Cool J, Eric B., Rakim and countless others—grew up poor in Harlem and learned to hustle from a young age. I spent time looking through photos of his beautiful work and current atelier and loved the nostalgic images. It’s clear from the interviews I found that he’s a great person—smart, insightful, open; grounded despite his success. He’s said that when he was just starting out, middle class Blacks didn’t accept him, and people he had admired, like James Baldwin, had moved up and out while he stayed behind. He built his clothing studio out of necessity, and climbed a Black staircase, he says, having no industry connections,6 outfitting gangsters in rat-pack inspired glitz on the downlow. A major breakthrough came when a client in his shop pulled hundred-dollar bills from a Louis Vuitton pouch. Dap says he’d noticed symbols around him his entire life—in religion, government, the pyramid on a dollar bill—and when he saw the attention the other customers gave to that pouch that day, he decided he was going to dress his clients from head to toe in those symbols of affluence but Africanize them. And logo-mania was born in earnest. His outfits, using designer-logo fabric he printed, fetched thousands of dollars each as he continued outfitting rap royalty until his shop was raided and shut down in the early 90s. At the height of its first incarnation, the business he started out of aspiration had evolved into fashioning clothes to change people’s attitudes about themselves, Dap has said, to make them feel different…themselves.78 He makes it a point to ride public transport now and then, to stay fully connected to his Harlem where he still lives and works. Where the story began.
Certain sectors in hip hop were maturing, growing in intellect and awareness, and I just wasn’t ready, my sense of personal agency to fight the power yet untapped.
Dap’s breakthrough, DC
“I don’t support who don’t give back to the hood” - William Bostick, Designer Dummies
Driving home late one night, midway through writing this essay, Bob James’s Nautilus came on the radio, and some links came to mind between Dapper Dan sampling Gucci symbols in his clothing designs and Eric B. and Rakim sampling beats for Follow the Leader. The rap LP later came full circle when it was reworked as an instrumental jazz album, and, after about as many years, Dap’s designs had followed a similar trajectory as they were reinvented by none other than Gucci. Significant instinct and attention to detail went into these three artists’ work. Much like the symbols all around him had informed Dap’s designs, Eric B. and Rakim had had the jazz chops and acuity to recognize 03:369 in Nautilus as the fitting component for Follow the Leader. So just how different is sampling logo textiles and clothing designs from sampling beats, the fabric of music?
Learning about Dapper Dan’s underground-bred influence on branding in hip hop culture, I got how people would see his work and want more and more of a good thing. He created def styles that the fashion houses he was bootlegging from would later emulate. Spurred by the corporate machine, mainstream hip hop took those looks and ran with them. What was once fresh and creative mutated into a culture of want. I thought of how the corporate-driven exce$$, contrived VIP culture, the propagation of multinational brand ambassadorship—superseding realism as the agent for meaningful change—watered down the art, style, and the full force of hip hop music. It dampened the fire. I’m not trying to put Lil Baby or his fans in a corner or be the antidemocratic voice that made me split from hip hop. But artists like Dapper Dan, Eric B., and Rakim exemplified original and inventive styles and storytelling that catapulted hip hop to a worldwide phenomenon—the craft of work like theirs promotes imagination and a sense of possibility.
“You sell it, but I don’t cop it” - Franchise Liaison x Josh Lamont feat. Shabaam Sahdeeq, Burnt Jansport Strings
Street style and hip hop are inextricably linked. I still have the Mercedes pendant and wear it out from time to time. I like the look of gold chains and could think of worse investments. I just can’t relate to songs and artists that make it the focus for its own sake. I thought back to Rakim's words in Follow the Leader and the deeper connotations of chains. Tracks like Franchise Liaison and Josh Lamont’s Burnt JanSport Strings use fashion as narrative references to illustrate in-depth stories and rituals with an economy of words. People would steal the strings off each other’s backpacks and use a lighter to fuse the knot so no one could lift them.10 They signified a type of status; the more strings the better.11 That’s a rich piece of street lore and it makes me want to know more. Listen to how the beat, mesmerizing loop, whisper track, and attention-grabbing breaks work in support of the lyricism:
Burnt JanSport Strings by Franchise Liaison x Josh Lamont feat. Shabaam Sahdeeq, 2023 Black M.I.E.R.S. LLC
Likewise, rather than brand placement for prestige, Ill Bill suggests on the LP BILLY® that “the plot of any Saturday kung fu matinee” could illustrate things he’s seen and experienced in his Jordan 3s. Here—flowing over a straight fire beat by Stu Bangas—the iconic kicks are featured in narrative context, with rhyme and reason, as the rapper encapsulates the golden-age merging of street style and hip hop. The shoes are a storytelling device. It’s Ill Bill’s origin story, not Phil Knight’s. Even mentioned repeatedly, the product doesn’t eclipse the track’s narrative, the album, or the artist. Released on his own label, he trademarked himself in the album title. This type of subjective storytelling combined with a cathartic tone sustains my interest and captures my imagination. Listen for the sound effects, like sonic images:
Jordan 3s from BILLY® by Ill Bill, 2023 Uncle Howie Records
“… unless there is an organic link between the subjective impressions of the author and his objective representation of reality, he will not achieve even superficial credibility, let alone authenticity and inner truth.” - Andrey Tarkovsky
Russian filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky wasn’t a documentarian, with a couple exceptions. He worked in fiction, but he let parts of his life experience inform parts of his films. Each track in my essay has the organic link he refers to above, from his book Sculpting in Time12, which has a lot to offer artists of every discipline. The subjective impression-objective representation is that nameless thing I was missing in the gilded age.
With the help of hip hop conservationists, my eyes are being opened to artists who all along insisted on that organic link, and fire, not just light. Hip hop waited for me, right where my true nature lies: creation-driven, unaffected by fleeting trends. Underground’s autonomy and unencumbered freedom of expression, with no corporate strings, makes me want to give back whatever I can. I listen to artist interviews and dialogues with rapt attention because I want to know what motivates them to produce the music they do. I want to know where they came from and all the Jordan 3s and JanSport strings that made up their life experiences. While the Mercedes pendant had at first made me feel like someone else, it’s a part of who I am and where I’ve come from—my JanSport strings.
The shoes are a storytelling device. It’s Ill Bill’s origin story, not Phil Knight’s. The brand doesn’t eclipse the track’s narrative, the album, or the artist.
Hip hop can generate unexpected perspective. I wish lots of money for the real heads if that’s what they aspire to—who doesn’t love seeing Conway rapping from the banks of Venice. What I value is seeing something real in the artist’s work. With or without gold chains. Logos or no logos. I want to trust my ears and eyes like with Follow the Leader. There’s no doubt that something tangible in Rakim’s life informed that track and the video. I thought back to D-Roc’s redemptive notion of aspiration and having the things one didn’t have access to in the past. I thought about the sense of wanting that bling culture helped create and foster. But what if what we longed for were not material things at all, but our own creative voices telling true stories about our lives and the world around us? Like Dapper Dan’s audacious alchemy of the symbols he’d been surrounded by his entire life.
A very special thanks to all the storytellers in this issue.
Music source, tracks 2-6 and UNDERSCORE: @hiphopstacks
This month’s UNDERSCORE
Rasheed Chappell tells how Regan-era politics resulted in marginalized communities being used as Mascots:
Mascots by Rasheed Chappell, prod. The Arcitype, 2023 Perfect Time Music Group
“How Capitalism Underdeveloped Hip Hop: A People’s History of Political Rap (Part 1 of 2).” Hampton Institute, www.hamptonthink.org/read/how-capitalism-underdeveloped-hip-hop-a-peoples-history-of-political-rap-part-1-of-2.
Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: Picador, 2009.
“How Capitalism Underdeveloped Hip Hop: A People’s History of Political Rap (Part 1 of 2).” Hampton Institute, www.hamptonthink.org/read/how-capitalism-underdeveloped-hip-hop-a-peoples-history-of-political-rap-part-1-of-2.
“Hip Hop at 50: The Evolution of Hip Hop Fashion | Prime.” n.d. Www.youtube.com. Accessed September 4, 2023.
“Exclusive! Activists, Celebs Read Frederick Douglass’ Epic 4th of July Speech.” YouTube, July 4, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/live/7zyk4ECxlks?si=aBSIYKXJh9dDY0a6.
Yomi Adegoke. 2021. “‘I Came up a Black Staircase’: How Dapper Dan Went from Fashion Industry Pariah to Gucci God.” The Guardian. The Guardian. January 14, 2021.
Sanzgiri, Leena, and Jay Williams. “Dapper Dan on Hip-Hop and Fashion, Harlem History and Constant Reinvention.” NPR, July 5, 2022.
Cornish, Audie. “Dapper Dan, Telling Stories in Leather, Fur and Logos.” NPR, July 8, 2019.
James, Bob. 1974. “Bob James - Nautilus (Audio).” Www.youtube.com. June 4, 1974.
“Skyzoo, ‘Jansport Strings (One Time for Chi-Ali)’ (Prod. by 9th Wonder).” MIND INVERSION, August 8, 2012.
“JANSPORT – Legend of the Infamous Brooklyn Book-Bag.” Who Flushed The Toilet?, July 16, 2009.
Andrey Tarkovsky. 1986. Andrey Tarkovsky : Sculpting in Time : Reflections on the Cinema. London: Bodley Head.