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don’t even think my second album was out—and my first album hadn’t exactly set the world on fire in terms of sales—and the executives at Iceberg looked at us like we were speaking a foreign language. They offered us free clothes, but we wanted millions and the use of their private jet; we walked out of their offices realizing we had to do it ourselves.
    In the beginning it was laughable, since we had no idea what we were doing. We had sewing machines up in our office, but not professional ones that can do twelve kinds of stitches; we had the big black ones that old ladies use. We had people sewing shirts that took three weeks each. We actually thought we were going to make the clothes ourselves in our own little sewing shop. Eventually, we got some advice from Russell and did the necessary research, got some partners, and launched Rocawear properly. Once we committed to the fashion industry, we were committed to doing it right. We didn’t want a vanity label. We wanted the top slot. I’m lucky that Iceberg didn’t give us the bullshit we asked for in the first place, an endorsement contract that would’ve run out a long time ago, because we might not have ever started a company that’s poised to bring in a billion dollars a year in revenue.
    I’M A HUSTLER HOMIE, YOU’RE A CUSTOMER CRONY

    The spirit of the Iceberg response was replayed years later with another company. From the first time I rapped the line
you like Dom, maybe this Cristal will change your life
on my first album, hip-hop has raised the profile of Cristal. No one denies that. But we were unpaid endorsers of the brand—which we thought was okay, because it was a two-way street. We used their brand as a signifier of luxury and they got free advertising and credibility every time we mentioned it. We were trading cache. But they didn’t see it that way.
    A journalist at
The Economist
asked Frederic Rouzaud, the managing director of the company that makes Cristal: “Do you think your brand is hurt by its association with the ‘bling lifestyle’?” This was Rouzaud’s reply: “That’s a good question, but what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it.” He also said that he looked on the association between Cristal and hip-hop with “curiosity and serenity.”
The Economist
printed the quote under the heading UNWELCOME ATTENTION.
    That was like a slap in the face. You can argue all you want about Rouzaud’s statements and try to justify them or whatever, but the tone is clear. When asked about an influential segment of his market, his response was, essentially, well, we can’t stop them from drinking it. That was it for me. I released a statement saying that I would never drink Cristal or promote it in any way or serve it at my clubs ever again. I felt like this was the bullshit I’d been dealing with forever, this kind of offhanded, patronizing disrespect for the culture of hip-hop.
    Why not just say thank you and keep it moving? You would think the person who runs the company would be most interested in selling his product, not in criticizing—or accepting criticisms—of the people buying it.
    The whole situation is probably most interesting for what it says about competition, and the way power can shift without people’s being aware of it. It’s like in chess, when you’ve already set up your endgame and your opponent doesn’t even realize it. What a lot of people—including, obviously,
The Economist,
Cristal, and Iceberg—think is that rappers define themselves by dropping the names of luxury brands. They can’t believe that it might actually work the other way around.
    Everything that hip-hop touches is transformed by the encounter, especially things like language and brands, which leave themselves open to constant redefinition. With language, rappers have raided the dictionary and written in new entries to every definition—words with one or two meanings now have twelve. The same thing happens with