Pirate Radio Culture, England, Street Fashion Culture, USA, 2002

The Pirate Radio scene in London, England is still booming. If you live there you don't need me to tell you. Apparently, the numbers have more than increased from 10 years ago. More than 80 illegal stations now operate (unofficially) from the capital. Thats 25 more then 10 years ago - playing the latest Techno, Trance, Jungle, Garage (Usa and UK). This is happening even though BBC Radio One(England has now got up and running a 24 Hour Digital Dance music station...)

Some Pirate radio stations state that they can earn more then £3,000(* English Pounds) a week on advertising alone! As dance and street culture here is viewed as being one of the most important in the world. Pirates are seen in some cases as breaking or making a pop single!!

Yet despite constant raids by the Radiocommunications Agency(London, England), the government body that polices the airwaves, the pirates appear to be winning the battle.

According to the organisation via its most recent figures state that its offices have made over 1,494 raids against illegal radio stations in the year of 2000, around 1,300 of these in London. If caught, pirate broadcasters face up to two years in jail and unlimited fines.

Yet despite all of this, the DTI have only secured 40 convitions. Coupled to this when the broadcasters are bought to book, they face usually a light fine.

Many of these Pirate radio stations charge a quite low fee to entice small to large business on the airwaves. The usually charge being between £50.00 to £125.00p (English pounds).

Remarkably, last summer the Metropolitan Police(London) planned to advertise Operation Trident, its anti-gun campaign, on north London pirates - until Scotland Yard lawyers pointed out that this was illegal under the 1949 Wireless Telegraphy Act.

Some stations have become hugely influential in defining the nation's musical tastes. Radio Caroline in the 1960s paved the way for Radio 1. Now the London urban pirates are turning Garage and Dance music into commercial hits. From the year of 2001 a number-one singles from DJ Pied Piper, Daniel Bedingfield and So Solid Crew were boosted by early pirate airplay. Record labels are specialising in sourcing talent from the London FM pirates these days.

For most pirates, advertising profits compensate for the cost of transmitters regularly seized by the DTI. These costs range from £350, including a "microlink" that allows a studio to be some distance from the tower block where the transmitter is sited. But money is not the only force driving the pirate boom. Some owners refuse adverts, lest they compromise their stations' calls for political agitation or "black empowerment". However, not all are happy with this rommance that everyone has of Pirate Radio stations here in England.

"It's absolute bilge about pirates being needed by the community," said Paul Brown, chief executive of the Commercial Radio Companies' Association, the commercial stations' trade body. "These crooks broadcast at enormous power and obliterate legal radio stations."

Some are now so concerned at the growing competition from pirates that they fear for their own survival. Thames Radio, broadcasting legally from Kingston upon Thames, claims that pirate interference to its 107.8FM frequency is limiting its transmission area, and losing listeners and advertising revenue.

"We're the victims," said Mark Walker, the programme controller. "I rise and fall on my audience figures, and these stations come along and stop us reaching our listeners. We have to pay licence fees, wages, performingrights fees, taxes - while these guys just squat our frequency. If this carries on, people here are going to lose their jobs."

Barry Maxwell, director of the Radiocommunications Agency, agrees that the courts could be tougher.

"It would be nice to see some higher fines. There's a fairly villainous element behind (some of the) bigger stations." But the agency faces a dilemma: "You can spend a very small time taking away lots of their transmitters. Or you can spend a lot of time looking for a studio or going for a prosecution. It's a question of balancing resources."

Another pointer to take into consideration for silencing Pirate Radio stations is that they can cause radio interference. Usually these complaints relate to no more than disruption to television reception. However on occasion, the agency is called out onto take the matter more seriously.

A team from the Evening Standard newspaper earlier this year went on patrol with the agency's north-west London enforcement team, the agency received an emergency l"safety of life" call. Flight crews coming in to Heathrow had found one of their communications channels blocked by "Arabic music", which drowned out instructions from air-traffic control. Investigators traced the signal to a poorly constructed transmitter above Wembley Central station.

"We found the transmitter within an hour and called police for backup," one of the enforcement officers told us. "Unfortunately the police were busy dealing with two dead bodies, so we had to wait four hours for their assistance." Two days later, when the Standard returned to Wembley Central, a replacement transmitter was already in place.

London's underground pirates by David Rowan, (Evening Standard, 3rd, January, 2002) - www.thisislondon.co.uk

The determination of these pirates on not getting caught is amazing.They have been stories and sightings of Pirates stations using methods as:

1. Putting up grids on tower-block roofs so people can't gain access - mostly to prevent other stations stealing equipment.
2. Others have kept dogs on the roofs on tower blocks.
3. Others brick up the rig (transmitter).
4. One station has used CS spray inside a concrete enclosure so it's not tampered with.
5. Lewisham Council, London says it found one tower-block rooftop booby-trapped by pirates "putting a 240V electrical supply on the locks".

London's underground pirates by David Rowan, (Evening Standard, 3rd, January, 2002) - www.thisislondon.co.uk

Many of Englands more ambitious Pirate radio set-ups are looking to built on a feature that has long been the norm in the United States of America marketing scene. Where "urban" marketing agencies lock happily into advertisers' knowledge that certain key groups - gay men, clubbers and black and Asian kids - have a disproportionate effect on the mainstream consumer.

In the US, the African-American audience tends to lead the white consumer around by the nose.

In her book called "No Logo", by Naomi Klein. She highlights the use of so-called "Brands" by sports brands such as Nike and Adidas and soft drink companies such as Coke and Pepsi, who hand cash to the "coolest kids in the school" to wander round the playground discoursing on the benefits of one drink or shoe over another.

Excerpts from - "No logo - Taking aim at the Brand Bullies" by Naomi Klein.

(The book examines the negative effects that '90s marketing has had on culture, work and the consumer voice; copyright ©1999 by Naomi Klein Reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Press, LLC)

Please read below...

"As we have seen, in the eighties you had to be relatively rich to get noticed by marketers. In the nineties, you have only to be cool. As designer Christian Lacroix remarked in Vogue, "it's terrible to say, very often the most exciting outfits are from the poorest people."

Over the past decade, young black men in American inner cities have been the market most aggressively mined by the brandmasters as a source of borrowed "meaning" and identity. This was the key to the success of Nike and Tommy Hilfiger, both of which were catapulted to brand superstardom in no small part by poor kids who incorporated Nike and Hilfiger into hiphop style at the very moment when rap was being thrust into the expanding youth-culture limelight by MTV and Vibe (the first mass-market hip-hop magazine, founded in 1992). "The hip-hop nation," write Lopiano-Misdom and De Luca in Street Trends, is "the first to embrace a designer or a major label, they make that label 'big concept' fashion. Or, in their words, they 'blow it up.'"

Designers like Stussy, Hilfiger, Polo, DKNY and Nike have refused to crack down on the pirating of their logos for T-shirts and baseball hats in the inner cities and several of them have clearly backed away from serious attempts to curb rampant shoplifting. By now the big brands know that profits from logowear do not just flow from the purchase of the garment but also from people seeing your logo on "the right people," as Pepe Jeans' Phil Spur judiciously puts it. The truth is that the "got to be cool" rhetoric of the global brands is, more often than not, an indirect way of saying "got to be black." Just as the history of cool in America is really (as many have argued) a history of African-American culture - from jazz and blues to rock and roll to rap - for many of the superbrands, cool hunting simply means blackculture hunting. Which is why the cool hunters' first stop was the basketball courts of America's poorest neighborhoods.

The latest chapter in mainstream America's gold rush to poverty began in 1986, when rappers Run-DMC breathed new life into Adidas products with their hit single "My Adidas," a homage to their favorite brand. Already, the wildly popular rap trio had hordes of fans copying their signature style of gold medallions, black-and-white Adidas tracksuits and low-cut Adidas sneakers, worn without laces. "We've been wearing them all our lives," Darryl McDaniels (a k a DMC) said of his Adidas shoes at the time. That was fine for a time, but after a while it occurred to Russell Simmons, the president of Run-DMC's label Def Jam Records, that the boys should be getting paid for the promotion they were giving to Adidas. He approached the German shoe company about kicking in some money for the act's 1987 Together Forever tour. Adidas executives were skeptical about being associated with rap music, which at that time was alternately dismissed as a passing fad or vilified as an incitement to riot. To help change their minds, Simmons took a couple of Adidas bigwigs to a Run-DMC show. Christopher Vaughn describes the event in Black Enterprise: "At a crucial moment, while the rap group was performing the song ["My Adidas"], one of the members yelled out, 'Okay, everybody in the house, rock your Adidas!' - and three thousand pairs of sneakers shot in the air. The Adidas executives couldn't reach for their checkbooks fast enough." By the time of the annual Atlanta sports-shoe Super Show that year, Adidas had unveiled its new line of Run-DMC shoes: the Super Star and the Ultra Star-"designed to be worn without laces."

Since "My Adidas," nothing in inner-city branding has been left up to chance. Major record labels like BMG now hire "street crews" of urban black youth to talk up hip-hop albums in their communities and to go out on guerrilla-style postering and sticker missions. The L.A.-based Steven Rifkind Company bills itself as a marketing firm "specializing in building word-of-mouth in urban areas and inner cities." Rifkind is CEO of the rap label Loud Records, and companies like Nike pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars to find out how to make their brands cool with trend-setting black youth.

So focused is Nike on borrowing style, attitude and imagery from black urban youth that the company has its own word for the practice: bro-ing. That's when Nike marketers and designers bring their prototypes to inner-city neighborhoods in New York, Philadelphia or Chicago and say, "Hey, bro, check out the shoes ' to gauge the reaction to new styles and to build up a buzz. In an interview with journalist Josh Feit, Nike designer Aaron Cooper described his bro-ing conversion in Harlem: "We go to the playground, and we dump the shoes out. It's unbelievable. The kids go nuts. That's when you realize the importance of Nike. Having kids tell you Nike is the number one thing in their life - number two is their girifriend." Nike has even succeeded in branding the basketball courts where it goes bro-ing through its philanthropic wing, P.L.A.Y (Participate in the Lives of Youth). P.L.A.Y sponsors inner-city sports programs in exchange for high swoosh visibility, including giant swooshes at the center of resurfaced urban basketball courts. In tonier parts of the city, that kind of thing would be called an ad and the space would come at a price, but on this side of the tracks, Nike pays nothing, and files the cost under charity.

Tommy Hilfiger, even more than Nike or Adidas, has fumed the harnessing of ghetto cool into a mass-marketing science. Hilfiger forged a formula that has since been imitated by Polo, Nautica, Munsingwear (thanks to Puff Daddy's fondness for the penguin logo) and several other clothing companies looking for a short cut to making it at the suburban mall with innercity attitude.

Like a depoliticized, hyper-patriotic Benetton, Hilfiger ads are a tangle of Cape Cod multiculturalism: scrubbed black faces lounging with their windswept white brothers and sisters in that great country club in the sky, and always against the backdrop of a billowing American flag. "By respecting one another we can reach all cultures and communities," the company says. "We promote...the concept of living the American dream." But the hard facts of Tommy's interracial financial success have less to do with finding common ground between cultures than with the power and mythology embedded in America's deep racial segregation.

Tommy Hilfiger started off squarely as white-preppy wear in the tradition of Ralph Lauren and Lacoste. But the designer soon realized that his clothes also had a peculiar cachet in the inner cities, where the hip-hop philosophy of "living large" saw poor and working-class kids acquiring status in the ghetto by adopting the gear and accoutrements of prohibitively costly leisure activities, such as skiing, golfing, even boating. Perhaps to better position his brand within this urban fantasy, Hilfiger began to associate his clothes more consciously with these sports, shooting ads at yacht clubs, beaches and other nautical locales. At the same time, the clothes themselves were redesigned to appeal more directly to the hip-hop aesthetic. Cultural theorist Paul Smith describes the shift as "bolder colors, bigger and baggier styles, more hoods and cords, and more prominence for logos and the Hilfiger name." He also plied rap artists like Snoop Dogg with free clothes and, walking the tightrope between the yacht and the ghetto, launched a line of Tommy Hilfiger beepers.

Once Tommy was firmly established as a ghetto thing, the real selling could begin - not just to the comparatively small market of poor inner-city youth but to the much larger market of middle-class white and Asian kids who mimic black style in everything from lingo to sports to music. Company sales reached $847 million in 1998--up from a paltry $53 million in 1991 when Hilfiger was still, as Smith puts it, "Young Republican clothing." Like so much of cool hunting, Hilfiger's marketing journey feeds off the alienation at the heart of America's race relations: selling white youth on their fetishization of black style, and black youth on their fetishization of white wealth.

After almost a decade of the branding frenzy, cool hunting has become an internal contradiction: the hunters must rarefy youth "microcultures" by claiming that only full-time hunters have the know-how to unearth them-- or else why hire cool hunters at all? Sputnik warns its clients that if the cool trend is "visible in your neighborhood or crowding your nearest mall, the learning is over. It's too late....You need to get down with the streets, to be in the trenches every day." And yet this is demonstrably false; so-called street fashions--many of them planted by brandmasters like Nike and Hilfiger from day one - reach the ballooning industry of glossy youth-culture magazines and video stations without a heartbeat's delay. And if there is one thing virtually every young person now knows, it's that street style and youth culture are infinitely marketable commodities.

Besides, even if there was a lost indigenous tribe of cool a few years back, rest assured that it no longer exists. It turns out that the prevailing legalized forms of youth stalking are only the tip of the iceberg: the Sputnik vision for the future of hip marketing is for companies to hire armies of Sputnik spawns--young "street promoters," "Net promoters" and "street distributors" who will hype brands one-on-one on the street, in the clubs and on-line. "Use the magic of peer-to-peer distribution - it worked in the freestyle sport cultures, mainly because the promoters were their friends....Street promoting will survive as the only true means of personally 'spreading the word.'" So all arrows point to more jobs for the ballooning industry of "street snitches," certified representatives of their demographic who will happily become walking infomercials for Nike, Reebok and Levi's.

By fall 1998 it had already started to happen with the Korean car manufacturer Daewoo hiring two thousand college students on two hundred campuses to talk up the cars to their friends.

Similarly, Anheuser-Busch keeps troops of U.S. college frat boys and "Bud Girls" on its payroll to promote Budweiser beer at campus parties and bars. The vision is both horrifying and hilarious: a world of glorified diary trespassers and professional eavesdroppers, part of a spy-vs.-spy corporate-fueled youth culture stalking itself, whose members will videotape one another's haircuts and chat about their corporate keepers' cool new products in their grassroots newsgroups."

And you thought it was just about the music? Music and Fashion usually go in hand as this has proved over the decades. Usually it is the music the susequently changes fashions.

If you have any comments any comments what so ever on any of the things mention within this report please get back to me. If you disagree entirely with this report. Please get back to me, I would love to hear your views!!

Report was done by Carl Brown Ipswich, England

All rights of the text and the images belong to Carl Brown, David Rowan and Naomi Klein.
If you which to use any of this interview. Please contact us. All Copyright laws apply.