Ever since 1986, when Kurtis Blow became the first rapper to appear in a mainstream television commercial by shilling soda for Sprite, the company has repeatedly turned to hip hop for its advertising campaigns. At the height of its original "Obey Your Thirst" campaign, around '95, Sprite was getting everyone from KRS-1 to A Tribe Called Quest to endorse their soft drink.
I remember at the time being somewhat dismayed by the commercials. It was definitely cool to see MC Shan and KRS-1 squash their beef after all those years, but was a soda commercial the appropriate venue for such a milestone in hip hop? I was also surprised to see an artist like Grand Puba, a rapper who had aligned himself with the 5 Percenters, giving in to the lure of a few advertising dollars. And while the idea of Sprite using hip hop was less troubling than, say, The Gap, I knew that nothing good could come from the continued appropriation of the music by an international conglomerate.
These days, turn on the t.v. and you'll see turntable scratching in fast food commercials, Maybach commercials camouflaged as Jay-Z videos, coke rappers doing photo ops with Ronald McDonald and conscious rappers dancing around in Gap sweaters. Back then, though, the Sprite ads were the first time that I remember the commercialization of hip hop being so blatant (not to say that there weren't examples of it before then, just that it was the first time I was conscious of it).
I figured with the rise of sites like YouTube and Google Video it would be pretty easy to track down all of the old Sprite videos, but I was mistaken. There were a ton of rappers that appeared during the mid 90's in Sprite's "Obey Your Thirst" campaign, but apparently only a handful of the ads survived into the new millennium. These were the ones that I could find:
A year or two later, Sprite continued the "Obey Your Thirst" campaign, this time throwing in Voltron along with various rappers in the hopes of cashing in on both the hip hop and Japanimation crowd:
I get what you guys are saying, and to some degree I agree with it. There are certainly worse companies than Sprite for a rapper to get involved with -- the marketing behind Sprite at least has some sense of the history of the music. But at the end of the day, Sprite isn't doing this out of any real appreciation of hip hop -- they'd just as soon put ICP or D4L or some other bullshit group in their ads if they thought that would work better with the hip hop demographic.
That being said, I can't really hate on a group like Tribe for going after Sprite's money. I remember Q-Tip did an interview around the time of the Sprite commercials saying that, after paying back the record label for the promos and video shoots, they only made about $30,000 off of Low End Theory. If you're getting jerked by your label like that, I guess you have to get money from wherever you can find it.
I keep coming back to those St Ides commercials with Cube, King T, EPMD, and I even think Rakim had one. Not only are they pimping alcohol, but a "traditional" liquor that is easily available in the inner city. Hard to figure where those fit in.
St Ides trivia: When the Alkaholiks were offered an endorsement deal for st ides, they had it written into their contract that they would get a case of 40s a week. They ended up having St Ides stop the shipments a few months into it because they were worried about how much of the malt liquor they were drinking.
1/5/2007 8:29:19 PM posted by fresh
.....Record company people are shady!
1/6/2007 1:38:01 PM posted by fresh
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