Last week, in his latest bid to be the most visible retired
individual this side of Michael Jordan, Jay-Z declared that he will
be boycotting Cristal, the expensive champagne brand he has
previously championed in his music and lifestyle, because of
comments made by Cristal director Frederic Rouzard in a recent
interview in The Economist.
In the interview, Rouzard was asked whether he viewed his
brand’s recent association with the hip-hop world and the
“bling” lifestyle as “unwanted attention”
and whether it would hurt the champagne’s image. Rouzard
responded by saying, “We can’t forbid people from
buying it. I’m sure Don Perignon or Krug would love to have
their business.”
As a result of these comments, which Jay-Z called
“racist,” the rapper has decided to boycott the
champagne brand and cozy up with its competitors instead. Of
course, while this is an amusing story and all, it didn’t
really make me think much about hip-hop, Cristal or Jay-Z himself.
Instead, it got me thinking about boycotts.
Cristal has become one of the biggest status symbols in the
“bling” lifestyle, to use the parlance of our times.
You see the stuff all over rap videos. When the NBA All-Star Game
came to Los Angeles in 2004, you couldn’t find a bottle of
Cristal in any liquor store in the greater Los Angeles area. And
now here we are, potentially seeing the demise of a subcultural
symbol.
So this got me wondering: What would happen if other musical
genres and subcultures were to boycott things integral to their
lifestyle?
For instance, what would happen if DJs decided to boycott vinyl
records because they saw “Shaun of the Dead” and
realized that these seemingly harmless discs of aural pleasure
could be lodged in someone’s forehead if tossed hard enough?
What would that do to house and dance music? Suddenly you’d
have guys like Jay, a 38-year-old man I used to work with, working
as top-flight DJs. Jay used to spin CDs at parties, trying to use
his CD mixing skills to get “bangin’ honeys” to
come back to his house with him as a “lil’ something on
the side” in addition to his wife of nine months. Ugh. Thank
God for vinyl requiring the skill that the Jays of the world
lack.
Or what would happen if lo-fi artists decided to boycott
four-track recorders and record their songs with high-end equipment
in an effort to sound more polished and professional? Basically all
the music that I like would suddenly be refined to such a degree
that it would lose any personality that attracted me to it in the
first place. The entire “Westing (by Musket and
Sextant)” album that Pavement released 14 years ago is
essentially one huge mess of poorly recorded songs that is awesome
simply because it sounds so tossed off and careless. Take this
quality away and basically everything that Lou Barlow and Stephen
Malkmus ever recorded loses its soul.
Worst of all, and something that would have changed the course
of my life irrevocably: What if in the early 1980s, Thurston Moore
and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth decided, “Hey man, you know
what? We’re sick of buying these crappy $50 Japanese Fender
knock-offs. We’re saving up and buying uber-expensive guitars
and taking good care of them!”
If this had happened, Moore and Ranaldo would not have been as
inclined to experiment on their disposable, poor-quality
instruments. Then Sonic Youth would have just been some overly
pretentious art-punk band. I mean, yeah, they are an overly
pretentious art-punk band, but they’d be far less interesting
without their adventurous, experimental aesthetic. Probably
something like a poor man’s Liars. Actually, make that a
homeless man’s Liars. Indie rock (and by extension,
mainstream rock) would have looked far different had Sonic Youth
stopped messing around with flimsy instruments.
With all that said, I really don’t expect Jay-Z’s
boycott of Cristal to continue. After all, we all remember the time
that Snoop Dogg decided that he could no longer get high because he
was a “businessman.” That lasted for oh, I don’t
know, two months. I remember watching “MTV Cribs” and
seeing an episode with Snoop while this was going on. At one point,
he showed off his massive refrigerator and started talking about
all the food he kept in it, like chicken wings, french fries,
popsicles, Kool-Aid, etc. As he named all these foods, he started
to trail off, and the look in his eyes said one thing: “Man,
as soon as these MTV cats leave, I’ma light up and rip apart
that fridge.” For the record, it was not clear if Snoop was
off the grass wagon at this point, but it wasn’t hard to make
an educated guess.
Eventually, Jay-Z and Cristal will make up, probably when Jay-Z
realizes Krug and Don Perignon aren’t nearly as cool or when
Cristal notices that now no one is willing to pay an exorbitant
price for a champagne that isn’t championed by the rap world
anymore.
But Hova, take my advice: Think long and hard before you discard
something so vital to your lifestyle and image.
If only to keep the Jays of the world at bay.
Humphrey will never boycott Expressmart for as long as he
lives. E-mail him at mhumphrey@media.ucla.edu.