It wasn't all that long ago that I saw people walking around on the streets wearing those harem pants again (pants with the crotch hanging at knee level), but there's only one man who was originally responsible for making them famous; MC Hammer, later known simply as Hammer.
If you’ve been around to live through it, MC Hammer was an event. Wherever he went, he took a huge entourage with him. In his days as a rapper he was different to everyone, else at that time. He didn’t represent the gangster life or street life, but oozed energy, entertainment and positivity. And together with Vanilla Ice, he helped rap cross over to a pop audience. Of course, having to face a slightly pissed off hip hop scene.
His breakthrough single was “U Can’t Touch This”, using the bassline of Rick James’ “Superfreak”. Pretentious perhaps at the time, but it turned out true quickly. It was Hammer time.
However, his entourage literally cost him all his fortune and a few years into his success, the show stopped and he lost everything. Hammer is resilient though and made his money back when the Internet was rising and he saw the potential of it a little quicker than others. He became a speaker and Internet entrepreneur. As far as I know, he’s never returned to music.
He was a marketers dream though. In those years as a rapper, he had built a brand that everyone knew. And he has just sold out on it.
Around Christmas time, Hammer popped up in many American stores promoting hammerless hooks to hang your decorations with. The campaign came with one or two TV ads and a few promo pictures and it just gave a different meaning to his well-known phrases like “Stop! Hammer Time” and “U can’t touch this”.
I would’ve never known about this if music fans hadn’t posted up pictures of the campaign on Instagram. Of course, I would’ve been better off not having seen the commercials on YouTube. The first one seems to appeal to my humor, but with the second commercial it started to bug me. I was very grateful I wasn’t in the States being confronted with this, unwanted, all the time.
From a marketer’s perspective, this campaign is just so clever, but from an artistic and musical person, I feel that Hammer really is making fun of his musical legacy. He was really selling out here and it would make so much better sense to do this, if there’s a return to music following it. I wonder if there is.
