MC Hammer Maximizes and Optimizes the Commodity of Music

At the YPulse Mashup this past Tuesday, MC Hammer spoke on the “Totally Wired Hip Hop: Reaching Urban Youth” panel. He isn’t coasting on his “Can’t Touch This” creds anymore, though. The baggy-panted pioneer has actually been making the rounds at internet video companies for years, he says (”since there were three people at YouTube”). He started an online dance video site www.dancejam.com, to tap into the emerging trend. The site is all things dance and uses the “commodity” of music (from Weezer to Janet Jackson) to target demographics and create affiliate events.

Music is the ultimate touchpoint for youth, and @mchammer is becoming a savvy marketer of it. He understands that events, not music CD sales, will be the real moneymakers in the industry going forward. To get around the copyright problem, he follows the same model as RCRDLBL: recording original songs by artists and maintaining the rights. He stocks this music from various artists in his “FullBlast Playhouse.” so he doesn’t need to deal with licensing it through the labels.

Noting that hip hop is a mystery to many, Hammer received rounds of applause twice for his opinions on music and culture.

First time: we need to throw “keeping it real” out the window. “It’s only used to promote and market your own agenda,” he said. “Everyone thinks keeping it real is how they do it… You want to optimize and maximize whatever it is you are trying to deliver.” (Love the buzzwords, Hammer.) Citing the example of Ice-T saying that SouljaBoy “killed hip hop” (which prompted a YouTube rebuttal from Soulja), he called it “ridiculous.” “What kind of nonsense is that? What he really meant was, his [SouljaBoy's] style of hip hop doesn’t help his [Ice T's] style. You don’t like his music, you don’t have to buy it. We like what we like.” In other words, you can only keep it real to your own reality, which is whatever you make it.

Second time: we shouldn’t worry about the profanity in music, we should focus on WHY there is profanity. “The lyrics may shock you but it’s their reality.” “How do I rap about heaven when I’m living in hell?” He suggested that we should change the environments, not the lyrics. At the very least, perhaps we should focus less on exploiting “hip hop” culture, and more on employing the music to capture attention and create meaningful change.

Hammer has Twittered that the “goal is to move the Valley to the front of the tail in the new artist category with a business model that is focused on wk 25 vs week 1.” In the meantime, he got some new Nikes for his dance battles.