Hey Young World,
Today is Hip Hop's official 50th birthday (which has been celebrated all year under the banner #HipHop50), marking the now mythical day on which DJ Kool Herc first used two turntables to loop the very dance-friendly drum breaks of the funk songs he played, thereby inventing the breakbeat, during a back-to-school jam his sister organized in the basement of their apartment building 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, New York City.
Whenever someone asks me where the name 1520 comes from, I always recount said story, and explain that Millennials, which were our exclusive focus when we started 1520, are also known as the Hip Hop generation. Usually, that's enough to make people understand. That is not the whole story, however. Not even close. In truth, Hip Hop fundamentally shaped who I am as a person and, through that, the way we do business at 1520. So for Hip Hop’s 50th birthday, let me take you all the way back.
One of my most vivid early-ish childhood (I must have been around 6) memories is me sitting in the backseat of the family car while we were driving on one of the freeways that run through Amsterdam. I remember liking the song that was playing on the radio. For years I was sure that it was Men In Black by Will Smith, but I have since found out that that song hadn’t been released yet. I’m therefore now pretty sure that it was a DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince song (maybe this one?), but that might be revisionist history on my part. I remember looking out the front window and there being this huge billboard advertising the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Something about the whole situation – Amsterdam, the busy freeway, the billboard, the music – struck me. It was the first time that I felt, deep down, that the world was a huge place, and it was profound and exciting. Interestingly, I also have a vivid memory of me once again sitting in the backseat of the family car while we were driving on one of Amsterdam’s freeways, this time as a teenager overcome by emotions, listening to Long Time by The Roots for the first time. It’s a song I still go back to when it is time to reminisce and it might be my favorite song of all time. But I digress.
A few years after that initial memory, after we had moved to the Swiss Alps, when I was still a little kid that did not actively listen to music, my favorite TV show was the Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air. I loved everything about it. It made me laugh, but it also spoke to me, it taught me. To this day, I’m not sure what made an 8-year-old me connect with the characters on the show, but I did. When James Avery died in 2013, I posted “R.I.P. Uncle Phil. Thanks for raising us.” on Facebook. I meant it.
The first album I ever bought was LL Cool J’s G.O.A.T. I was 11 years old. My mom picked me up from school and on our way home we stopped to buy groceries for the hotel that my parents ran. I don’t remember how, but I had earned some money the day before, and I had put it into my head that I wanted to buy a CD, so I crossed the street and went into the CD store (shout out to CD stores, I still love you). I had no idea about music. The little mountain village in which we lived had limited TV reception, so I had no access to MTV. I just walked around the store and looked at album covers. G.O.A.T.’s album cover – on which LL Cool J, dressed in a blue Nicky Velour FUBU sweat suit and very-2001-jewellery, looks away from the camera with a serious look on his face - grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I bought the CD and started listening to it as soon as I came home. At this point, my English was extremely rudimentary, so I only understood a few words here and there, but I was mesmerized nevertheless. To this day, hearing the opener gives me goosebumps. When my Dutch brother- in-law (my sister is quite a lot older than me) saw what I had bought, he gave me a bunch of his old CDs - Illmatic, Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and Hell On Earth (I know that sounds fake, but I swear that’s what happened). I have spent every year since then being obsessed with Hip Hop music (meaning rap and R&B) and culture. It became, and in many ways still is, everything to me. As a perpetual immigrant and “new kid”, it made me feel at home. As a young adult, it emboldened me to choose my own path, trust my gut and chase my dreams. It decidedly influenced the way think about the world. It also brought a lot of people into my life that meant and mean the world to me.
The LL Cool J album I bought that day.
To this day I can’t be sure that I really did hear a DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince song on the radio that day. That did not stop me from coppin’ this (now extremely worn out) shirt in their honor in 2003.
European Hip Hop music and culture, although inextricably linked to its American sister, has its own unique characteristics. American rap music crossed the Atlantic Ocean very early and in the first few years actually found more commercial success in the Old World than in the United States. Naturally, Europeans started emulating it. Hip Hop music and culture in Europe soon mostly became an outlet for the following groups: alternative (often white) kids that didn’t really feel at home in conventional alternative subcultures, kids from poorer urban areas, immigrants (often second or even third generation), and other minorities, including Black kids. In short, Hip Hop, especially culturally, became a common home for people that, for various reasons, did not fit into or were not accepted by larger mainstream society. This is still often the case today, though Hip Hop, especially rap music, has since of course become a juggernaut that has reached and influenced all kinds of people. All this is to say that Hip Hop brings people together, and it has indeed been one of the main reasons that I met and formed relationships with people that became very important to me. It had and has a big influence on my understanding of relationships - platonic, familial and romantic. Worst comes to worst, my people come first.
About a year after buying my first rap album, we went back to the Netherlands. A few weeks into my first school-year in the Netherlands, I walked into the classroom and saw that the spot next to the guy I had latched on to – let’s call him Steve - was taken. In hindsight, I’m happy about it, but at the time it gave me a stomachache. I was a slightly awkward 13-year-old. The fact that I had just arrived in a country I had not lived in for more than eight years, which outed itself in obvious ways that some of my classmates weren’t shy to highlight and make fun of constantly, did not help. As you can imagine, I did not feel very confident in my abilities to make friends in this new place. To avoid having to even try, I moved to a cluster of empty tables, sat down, trying to not focus on the whispering that probably wasn’t actually taking place behind my back. Before I could even comfortably engage in my paranoia however, someone sat down next to me: Frans. I knew the kid, he was a very quiet guy that mostly wore shirts with cartoons (mostly South Park, which was a plus) or names of metal bands on them. He was so quiet that I don’t think we ever even talked before that day, which honestly wasn’t a bad thing, because I had talked to the other guys, and except for Steve, they didn’t seem great. Steve, by the way, was a good guy and I’ll forever appreciate him for being kind to me during those first few weeks when I had nobody else, but we weren’t exactly compatible. I believe Frans was in a similar situation within his social circle. Anyway, Frans sat down next to me and over the course of that morning, we got to know each other a little. I don’t remember much, except for some music talk. My Hip Hop obsession was starting to really take off. My English had gotten significantly better (partly because I was good at it, partly because English is everywhere in the Netherlands), I spent a lot of time in Amsterdam (which at that point even had a Fat Beats), and I finally had access to proper Internet, all of which made it easy to really go deep. I was dismayed when Frans told me that he doesn’t like rap and R&B and that “R. Kelly belongs with I Believe I Can Fly and I Believe I Can Fly belongs in the 90s”. Also, he remembers that we had a conversation about Kiss (the band), which makes sense, because I’ve always found them pretty cool. They were also an Easter egg in a Tony Hawk game, which made them legendary.
The Internet, by the way, was great. It did not take long for me to discover the world of message boards. Before I knew what was happening, I was hooked. I frequented a lot of Hip Hop forums, both German and American (or English) and, especially early on, I met some people that became important to me, some of which have stayed with me to this day. Some of them I have never met in person, but that never made it feel any less real to me. Because all we did was talk via text, often for hours every night, I have talked more in total with some of these people than I have talked to anyone else in my life. Online friendships are different, but they are no less intense. For many people my age, especially those that grew up on the internet, online is irl. I met one of my oldest friends, Angelique from Texas on a message board. We’re still tight. Her fiancé, which also frequented that board and moved to live with her all the way from Pennsylvania, is really cool too. What are the odds? Around the same time, I also met a girl from Vienna. Her name is Jenni and we met on a Black Eyed Peas message board, a group which wasn’t even one of my favorites (though I was never too cool for Where Is The Love?, and I definitely once stole the knitted-sweater-over-a-XXL-white-tee look from Will.I.Am). Funnily enough, she initially added me on MSN - the communication tool of European teenagers of the first half of the 00s – because I called her pretty. For a while, we were really close. She was there for me when I still had problems adapting to a new school and country and it meant a lot to me (and still does). These days message boards have largely become a thing of the past (though I still frequent one, and still meet cool people that way - you know who you are), especially among people under the age of 20. Poor kids.
One thing Frans and I did agree on from the beginning was punk. I started getting into punk music – mostly pop punk, but also some less commercial variants – shortly after I got into rap music, when I still lived in Switzerland. A friend of mine had a very pretty older sister that always adapted her musical taste and clothing style to match whoever her current boyfriend was, and at the time she was dating a punk (she still loved Dilemma by Nelly though, so of course we did too). Through her, my friend and I were introduced to Green Day’s Dookie, which grabbed me 10 seconds into the opener Burnout. I have been a fan of punk music ever since then. Although I have, over the course of my life, identified with some artists of the genre, I never felt nearly as close to the culture as I did to Hip Hop. The attitudes are similar, but they're not the same. Also, punk has always been too monocultural for me. It therefore only makes sense that in hindsight I identified most with the punk artists that themselves seemed to be in touch with Hip Hop (I see you Madden Brothers), and that I always had a weak spot for the Beastie Boys.
Anyway, Frans’ negative attitude towards Hip Hop did not last. I like to believe that I then and there offered to loan him the Wu-Tang CD that would eventually bring him around, but I can’t be sure. I do know it did not take long before he was on board and joined me in my Hip Hop rabbit hole. We went deep. He once told me that he realized that he needed to turn things around when he was standing in a CD store wondering whether or not to buy a Cannibal Corpse album. Whatever the case was, I was very happy about it and I think it changed both of our lives for the better. There were two of us now, and together we came out of our shells.
Over the next four years (which felt a lot longer as a teen than it does now) we went through a lot together, and Hip Hop was always right there with us. We - an immigrant and a Dutch kid that did not feel at ease in mainstream culture, as well as other kids that fit the description laid out above (you know who you are) - found a home in it.
Frans and I in Amsterdam, 2008, channeling RUN DMC.
A small selection of the many issues of Juice and The Source I collected. I kept them all.
Although all of our individual stories were different, and our stories were again different from the ones our favorite artists were telling, there was enough overlap there for us to feel understood by them and for us to empathize with, if not always fully understand, them in return. Hip Hop culture - and by extent Black culture and collective immigrant culture - was the source of the majority of the music we listened to, of the stuff we read (shout out to The Source, we held you down even in the bad years) and the movies, comedy specials and TV shows we watched. It was our everything and it fundamentally shaped our values and our outlook on the world. It made us susceptible to the many flaws of the country (in my case countries) we live in, such as systematic racism. This in turn only increased my principal mistrust of authority, something that’s a gift and a curse to this day (my love for South Park and punk did not help either). When we were down, Hip Hop lifted us up. When we felt unrooted, it grounded us. To this day, conversations between Frans and me often start with music, but we end up talking about life and love, pain and politics. That’s Hip Hop.
For a while there we really enjoyed sprinkling in loud Young Jeezy adlibs during class. In between lessons, we’d spend our time in school roaming around the halls, quoting rap lyrics, Chris Rock specials and, of course, Cartman. Outside of school, we did more of the same. We mostly spent our afternoons and weekends (when I wasn’t working the family restaurant in Amsterdam) in Alkmaar, the Dutch city Frans was from. We walked for hours, without really doing anything. We went to the same stores every day, which were mostly stores that sold CDs and DVDs. We went to McDonald’s in the morning and Aspendos, a small Turkish restaurant, in the afternoon. In the summer, we hung around this empty playground/basketball court and listened to new rap releases on my Discman. You read that right. iPods were a thing already, but I trashed mine, so for years I fell back on a Discman. I specifically remember listening to Negativitijdperk, the at that point new album by Dutch rapper Negativ. It was big for me because it was the first time a Dutch rap album truly spoke to me (though Ali B's song Ik Ben Je Zat for sure was a banger). Through that, it made me feel more at home in the Netherlands. At its best, that is the power of local rap music. To this day, Dutch rap music remains my main touchstone with the local culture. Negativitijdperk flopped, but I still believe that Negativ is the best Dutch rapper to ever touch a mic. He’s now a fairly successful TV personality, and I still feel proud every time I see his face somewhere.
Although I had difficulties adapting and had to deal with some discrimination, I nevertheless was relatively happy that we had moved to the Netherlands, which, at the time, felt somewhat less restrictive than Switzerland (though things became grimmer politically within a few years in the Netherlands, but that’s another story). This was especially true if you compared the two regions I lived in: a rural area in the Alps (which has its own perks) and various towns and cities clustered around Amsterdam. All of this is not to say that I wasn’t homesick or that I did not feel out of place, because I definitely was and did. I still miss the mountains, the snow, the lakes, and last but not least, the food. To cope, I sought out pop culture that reminded me of home. The access to Swiss media was limited in the Netherlands (this was long before the internet's pivot to video). Luckily, kids in the German speaking part of Switzerland grow up with Swiss, German and Austrian media, so I fell back on German media, which was readily available in the Netherlands. I, for example, regularly walked to the local magazine store and bought the Bravo. The Bravo is a long lived but horrendous German teen magazine. I did not care though; it was something that was in my language that I could buy in a place full of kids that did not speak it. I bought and read it every week for about two years, until I was introduced to German rap magazines during a prolonged, health-related stay in Germany. While in Germany, I also saw a Kool Savas x Azad concert on MTV and picked up a Samy Deluxe's album Verdammtnochma. German rap, and later Swiss rap, too became a way to stay in touch with “home”.
In one of those Bravos in the fall of 2004, there was a little article about 00s mainstream rap phenomenon Ja Rule. He had released his new album, R.U.L.E. I was aware of him of course. He was a guest on LL Cool J’s G.O.A.T after all. His song Always On Time was unavoidable and his at the time current single Wonderful was killing it on the local music television station TMF (R.I.P.). I did not own any of his music though. I have no idea what the little article said about the album, but I do know that the next day I bought the album together with Snoop’s R&G (Rhythm & Gangsta: The Masterpiece) in the Free Record Shop (again, R.I.P.) at Amsterdam’s central train station. R&G was cool, Drop It Like It’s Hot is undeniable, but R.U.L.E. really fucking grabbed me. Despite what other people say, ever since hearing that album for the first time, I have never backed away from my stance that Ja Rule is a great rapper. While he might be best known for his massive pop songs, Ja also made other kinds of song, one of them being Where I’m From featuring Lloyd, a Tupac-ish ballad on which Ja’s voice cracks and breaks several times over the course of the song. Its pain pressed onto a CD, and I’ll never forget hearing it for the first time. As corny as it sounds, hearing it was one of those moments that I can pinpoint that shaped my progressive politics. Also, one time my sister and brother-in-law caught my at the time 6 year old nephew rap along to the very explicit song New York off of R.U.L.E. that was blasting in my unattended room. He’s all grown up now, and there’s nobody I talk about Hip Hop with more than him, so all’s well that ends well and all that.
A few weeks - or months - after buying R.U.L.E. I was surfing the web, bored as shit. All the message boards I frequented were dead that day, so I looked around the room for stuff to do and my Ja Rule CD caught my eye. I went to the German version of Google – because fuck Dutch message boards – and looked for a Ja Rule message board. The results led me to Murder Inc. Online, a fan forum that had a German and an English version. I picked the German version on a whim and made an account. It was a relatively small but active community, which is what I always enjoyed the most. There were some Turkish-German kids that had formed a very MySpace-era amateur rap collective that they called Turkish Dream, inspired by Turkish-German rapper Eko Fresh’s label German Dream. There was an Italian-German guy that referred to himself as a music business insider because he worked in the CD department of a local big box electronic retailer. He did come through with slightly early copies of Rev. Run’s 2005 solo album Distortion, so there was that. There was this German guy that was obsessed with semi-obscure Southern and West Coast rap - his favorite rapper was Yukmouth - and always received packages of CDs from some American relative or friend. There was this creepy but harmless guy that called himself Shorty and occasionally sent the female message board members flowers and mix-CDs with Chingy songs on them. There was an Afro-Swiss girl that at one point posted a picture of a lesser-known R&B singer claiming it was her. Then there was Maike (yes, that Maike, 1520's Maike, my fiancé) aka Baby_Chuck, from the Rurhgebiet (often referred to as the Ruhrpott), the largest urban area in Germany, just across the Dutch border. The Rurhgebiet is an area with a lot of poverty, urban decay and unemployment, but also a lot of creative urban renewal, a lot of diversity and oddly optimistic young people with big mouths and bigger dreams. Sound familiar?
Maike and I hit it off right away and it didn’t not take long before we exchanged our MSN addresses. Before long, we talked every day, often for hours, sharing stories, helping each other through crisis. She soon became my best friend. In early 2007, a few years into our friendship, I went on a one-day school trip to the opera in Essen, the unofficial capital of the Ruhrgebiet. Maike decided to come and join us, so we could finally meet. We had some time before the show (do opera people call it a show?) started, so we went to the Burger King in the city center, a short walk away from the opera. It did not take long for Maike to take my hand. My friends, to their credit, kept a safe distance from us - even Stans, an ex barely-girlfriend of mine, which earlier that day went up to Maike to introduce herself as “Marius’ ex”, before I could even say hello myself. After Burger King, we went to a CD store (because of course we did), and I bought two German rap CDs: Insallah by Ruhrpott rapper Manuellsen, which would become my de facto soundtrack to the Ruhrgebiet, and Optik Takeover, a label sampler. Back at the opera, the lights went out, and we started holding hands again. After the show, I got on the bus, listened to the CDs I had bought, and contemplated what had just happened. The next few afternoons, I spend A LOT of time on the phone with Maike. To let her know it’s real, I told her I would visit her the very next weekend. So I did. She visited me too. During one visit I remember Maike, Frans and I went to a huge CD store (what else?) in Amsterdam. I think I picked up albums by UGK and Living Legends. In the summer of that year, a few months after we got together, I moved to Germany, to finish high school and live with Maike. The rest, as they say, is history.
Maike and I in Paris, 2007. I was wearing a Public Enemy shirt and the same New Era cap that Common once wore in a music video. Just in case if you were wondering if I was really about that life.
An image from a recent campaign photoshoot we coordinated. One of the posters you can see in the background is a Samy Deluxe poster that used to hang in my teenage bedroom. Always reppin’.
All this is to say that for most of my life, and to this day, Hip Hop has been there for me. It helped me connect with people from around the world, and still does. It helped me make sense of my frequently changing environments and the world at large, and still does. It helped me dream big and make something out of nothing, and still does. It helped me find the love of my life. That's why I represent Hip Hop any chance I get, for example through the name of my business. That's why I still love H.E.R. Always will. Happy 50th Birthday, my friend.
One Love,
Marius | 1500
P.S. If you came here to learn about the effect Hip Hop had on marketing in general, I am sorry to have disapointed you. However, I can point you towards a fascinating book that explains it all: The Tanning Of America: How Hip-Hop Created A Culture That Rewrote The Rules Of The New Economy by Steve Stoute. If you’re interested in learning more about the history of Hip Hop in general, I recommend the brilliant Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang. If you never realy listened to Hip Hop, we have a Spotify playlist for you (and an R&B playlist too).