When did cash take over well and truly in hip hop? When artists finally stood up and took shit seriously because there was more money to make outside of selling records. It started before Wu-Tang rapped on it, and it's been hustled alongside every rap record since. Hip hop is big business, man.

 

One of the very first endorsement deals connected into the slow-wheeling juggernaut of rap music was through Adidas sneakers. Ex-Seven Immortals gang member and entrepreneur Russell Simmons asked the shoe company to sponsor a concert tour for his brother Joey Simmons' rap group Run DMC. When their single 'My Adidas' came out – a track which told the message of coming out of the ghetto and being successful without resorting to crime – hip hop was rocking the Adidas Shell-top, with no laces. Still hesitant to back the Queens' NY rap group, Russell flew in marketing execs out from Germany to attend a Run DMC concert at New York's prestigious Madison Square Gardens. When Run instructed everybody in the house to raise their sneakers – easy to remove with the laces out – thousands of shoes were held high. Russell and his Rush Management had a million-dollar plus shoe contract backing the Run DMC Raising Hell tour of 1988. Stomping into the nineties, culture trend really swung hugely in favour of hip hop's industry and as it became a dominant marketing tool, a synthesis of fashion and business had begun to dominate hip hop music.

 

Russell and his Def Jam label couldn't get a hold of Run DMC's record contract at the time of the legendary three-piece's signing, but the genius of his Rush Communications had him snatch earnings for his clients from under the label by managing the group and making more moves and more money behind the recording industry with lucrative endorsements, and corporate brand marketing. Rush had drawn up the blueprint for how hip hop is handled across a board room table to the point where everyday from fashion to beer sales and limitless consumer boundaries if you consider the distances impresarios such as Snoop Dogg and P Diddy have taken their game, the business behind hip hop pockets far greater earnings for rappers than selling their stone cold rhymes on wax. And if cash rules everything around me, the lines of business versus art gets dangerously close to a complete smudge for a cultural movement stretching over 35 years now.

 

When did it get so F.U.B.A.R.? When 50 Cent sold water to Coca Cola? When Vodka and Tequila began double-teaming hip hop, re-branding bottles? When Champagne makers had to watch what they say in fear of losing such global iconic rappers as Jay-Z from blurbing their brands through lyrics and popping their corks on videos? Big business has been catching the vapours from hip hop since Russell bum-rushed the show, and for the most part they've held hands and laughed all the way to the stock exchange. The reality of rap has ventured from the streets to representing a global business model – jackin' C.R.E.A.M. For beats.

 

And in 2011, an internet age where the ease of fame can blow out like a candle, artists are becoming ever more aware of the necessity to maintain the status of culture amidst the mad dash for dollars. So while “cream, get the money” becomes ethos and raining singles is the practise, hip hop treads on the equilibrium of the art and is in danger of losing focus and digging into a cultural uprooting of four elements that once lit up Cedar Park.

"With my first act in '79, people said hip-hop was dead," Russell Simmons once remarked. “Now look, 20 years later, the culture is so strong we're doing underwear."