Thirty Three Jones | Desktop Site
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:
KRS-1 and Red Alert vs. Mc Shan and Magic (with Kid Capri as the announcer)
Grand Puba
Kris Kross
Pete Rock and CL Smooth
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:
Voltron I - King Zarkon Intro
Voltron II - Goodie Mob as the Blue Lion and Fat Joe as the Green Lion
Voltron III - Common as the Red Lion and Mack 10 as the Yellow Lion
Voltron IV - Afrika Bambaataa and Jazzy Jay as the Black Lion
Voltron V - Fat Joe, Goodie Mob, Bambaataa, Jazzy Jay, Mack 10 and Common Sense
These were just the ads that I could find online. Around the same time, there were ads with A Tribe Called Quest, Pharoahe Monch, Mos Def (with a beat produced by Dilla), Large Professor, Nas and AZ (who were sued by the Funky 4 + 1 for using one of their songs in the commercial), Rahzel and DJ Scratch and The Mountain Brothers. Sprite continued to enlist rappers in their advertising well after this campaign ended, even getting Beanie Sigel to do an ad.
1/5/2007 8:37:27 AM posted by Fresh