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brands—Cristal meant one thing, but hip-hop gave its definition some new entries. The same goes for other brands: Timberland and Courvoisier, Versace and Maybach. We gave those brands a narrative, which is one of the reasons anyone buys anything: to own not just a product, but to become part of a story.
    Cristal, before hip-hop, had a nice story attached to it: It was a quality, premium, luxury brand known to connoisseurs. But hip-hop gave it a deeper meaning. Suddenly, Cristal didn’t just signify the good life, but the good life laced with hip-hop’s values: subversive, self-made, audacious, even a little dangerous. The word itself—Cristal—took on a new dimension. It wasn’t just a premium champagne anymore—it was a prop in an exciting story, a portal into a whole world. Just by drinking it, we infused their product with our story, an ingredient that they could never bottle on their own.
    Biggs first put me on to Cristal in the early days of Roc-A-Fella. We were drinking it in the video for “In My Lifetime” in 1994. We didn’t have a record deal yet, but back then we’d show up at clubs in Lexuses and buy bottles of Cristal, while most people in the clubs were buying Moët. It was symbolic of our whole game—it was the next shit. It told people that we were elevating our game, not by throwing on a bigger chain, but by showing more refined, and even slightly obscure, taste. We weren’t going to stick to whatever everyone else was drinking or what everyone expected us to drink. We were going to impose our sense of what was hot on the world around us.
     

 

When people all over started drinking Cristal at clubs—when Cristal became a household name among young consumers—it wasn’t because of anything Cristal had done. It was because of what we’d done. If Cristal had understood this dynamic, they never would’ve been so dismissive. The truth is, we didn’t need them to tolerate us with “curiosity and serenity.” In fact, we didn’t need them at all.
    IS THIS WHAT SUCCESS IS ALL ABOUT?

    There’s a knee-jerk fear in America that someone—especially someone young and black—is coming to take your shit, fuck up your brand, destroy the quality of your life, tarnish the things you love. But in hip-hop, despite all the brand shout-outs, the truth is, we don’t want your shit. We came out of the generation of black people who finally got the point: No one’s going to help us. So we went for self, for family, for block, for crew—which sounds selfish; it’s one of the criticisms hustlers and rappers both get, that we’re hypercapitalists, concerned only with the bottom line and enriching ourselves. But it’s just a rational response to the reality we faced. No one was going to help us. Not even our fathers stuck around. People who looked just like us were gunning for us. Weakness and dependence made you a mark, like a dope fiend. Success could only mean self-sufficiency, being a boss, not a dependent. The competition wasn’t about greed—or not just about greed. It was about survival.
    There are times when it gets exhausting, this focus on constant competition. There are times when it gets boring, especially these days when people use beef as a marketing plan. There’s something heroic about the winning boxer standing at the center of the ring alone with his opponent sprawled at his feet, roaring “What’s my name?” like Ali. But it’s tough never being able to let your guard down.
    When I described the landscape of hip-hop to Bono that night—a perpetual battlefield with new armies constantly joining in—he just shook his head. It’s brutal, but if you step back from it, it’s beautiful, too. What you’re looking at is a culture of people so in love with life that they can’t stop fighting for it—people who’ve seen death up close, literal death, but also the kind of dormancy and stagnation that kills your spirit. They’ve seen it all around them and they don’t want any