The Tanning of America: How Hip-Hop Created a Culture that Rewrote the Rules of the New Economy

Stoute, founder of a brand-imaging firm, offers an entertaining, instructive mix of business memoir, music history, and marketing tutorial. He argues that hip-hop blurred "cultural and demographic lines so permanently that it laid the foundation" for the transformation he calls "tanning," a process that would "alter the landscape of America%E2%80%94racially, socially, politically, and especially economically." He surveys the early development of hip-hop and the arrival of LL Cool J, "the hip-hop celebrity who gave the marketing world an early tutorial about the value of aligning their brand with the genre." Stoute then moves more fully into the world of commerce, where "advertisers were looking to use the hip-hop Midas touch" but had little understanding of "the consumer they were trying to reach." Stoute's entrepreneurship and expertise in rebranding (e.g., Ray-Ban, Reebok, Modell's) makes absorbing reading. For the uninitiated, this is a sold primer on the business of music; for music historians, it's a solid study of how "how urban culture came to influence the mainstream economy." (Sept.)