The
new photo book “Rap Tees: A Collection of Hip-Hop T-Shirts 1980-1999”
by DJ Ross One documents 500 shirts, from hip-hop’s dawn — the first
item is a Sugar Hill Gang shirt from 1980, a year after that group
released “Rapper’s Delight,”
widely considered the first commercial hip-hop single — to its
turn-of-the-millennium ubiquity. All the shirts are advertisements, but
they go about their job in vastly different ways: Some emphasize logos,
others favor slogans or let photos do the talking; a rare few let
artists have their way.
Commercialism
has long been one of hip-hop’s prime ambitions. Yet “Rap Tees”
(powerHouse) suggests that for many years hip-hop had in fact been
under-merchandised. It’s striking how many of the best shirts weren’t
official or for sale. Several were promotional items, given out to
tastemakers and fans. And many weren’t by the musicians at all, but
bootlegs made on the cheap and distributed broadly.
That
means that this book begins as a document of the hip-hop industry’s
efforts to branch out beyond music, and by the end shifts to the flea
markets, swap meets, sidewalk stalls and parking lots where street-level
entrepreneurs, recognizing that rabid fans were also underserved
customers, collected money that the rappers and their record labels were
leaving on the table.
DJ Ross One,
a tenacious and sharp-eyed collector, owns about half of the shirts in
the book, and he tracked down and photographed the rest. His list is
organized by artist and by region, in more or less chronological order.
Over
the two decades covered here, the nature of the hip-hop T-shirt
evolves. In hip-hop’s first true corporate era, from the mid-1980s
through the early 1990s, the artist logos were essential. About 20
shirts in the book depict the classic Run-DMC logo — bold white capital
letters, “Run” stacked atop “DMC,” sandwiched between two red lines.
Some are on elaborately designed sweatshirts made in partnership with
Adidas, the first example of the fashion world aggressively embracing
hip-hop.
The
book devotes extensive sections to the logos of the Beastie Boys, based
on the Harley-Davidson mark, and Public Enemy, perhaps hip-hop’s most
iconographically adept act. In addition to around two dozen Public Enemy
shirts, “Rap Tees” reproduces pages from Rapp Style, the group’s
mail-order catalog, which offered items like jackets, T-shirts, hats and
mugs. Rap music’s loudest and most radical polemicists were also its
most effective salesmen and branding experts.
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