Free The Tanning of America by Steve Stoute

of the age-old bloody conflict between Catholics and Protestants. The son of a Catholic father, a taskmaster with a temper, and a Protestant mom who died when Bono was growing up, he experienced the Irish brand of lack and dysfunction in the streets and at home.
    As for me, my three siblings and I were lucky to be raised in a household in Queens Village with two parents—something that was becoming less and less the norm. Both immigrants from Trinidad, my parents had a relentless work ethic that drove them to each work full-time jobs with second and sometimes third jobs to make ends meet. Still, we lived paycheck to paycheck and knew what it meant to go without—from our own situation and from watching what was happening around us.
    So, yeah, my dinner companions and I recognized through code, without any biographical data necessarily being exchanged, that we’d all walked very different but rugged roads to get to the top of the Hôtel de Paris, where we could talk trash and smoke ridiculously expensive cigars. We could understand why it mattered to Roger Moore, because of where he had come from, to be able to sit there dressed like a prince all in white and say, “F**k Shatner, I lived above him!”
    We could understand, because of the spirit of the whole hip-hop cultural platform that had now circled the globe far beyond anything Star Trek could ever attempt through fact or fiction, that Roger Moore’s rap actually had nothing to do with William Shatner or the friendly rivalry of that relationship or the stuff he’d acquired that was superior to his rival’s. He was saying in his own way, Here I am, here we are, look at me, look at us, remember where we came from? Of course you want to have someone else whose status you can one-up. That’s how you win. And Roger Moore, with a totally unapologetic approach to life, spoke that language.
    Yeah, I remember thinking, the unapologetic approach, now that is the definition of cool!
    As I thought about it more, the realization helped me see how the unapologetic hip-hop mind-set—which had started to become much more vivid in the music and the culture in the mid-to late 1980s and early ’90s—had given tanning a turbocharge. First of all, the artists gaining the most popularity came from diverse backgrounds with distinct points of view. We had Salt-n-Pepa, female rappers from Queens unapologetically taking on the guys, talking street and sexy with infectious hits like “Push It” on their first album release, Hot, Cool and Vicious . We had the Beastie Boys, white suburban Jewish kids from Long Island, unapologetically bringing their punk-rock roots along in their reverse crossover to rap and then telling like-minded youth that you have to “fight for your right to party” on the album Licensed to Ill (interestingly enough, the bestselling rap album of the entire 1980s). We had another Long Island group, Public Enemy, who unapologetically pushed the genre to address political and racial issues (not without controversy) with anthem songs like “Fight the Power”—which Spike Lee used as a setpiece in his unapologetic Do the Right Thing .
    Lack of apology was nowhere more audible than in gangsta rap, a.k.a. reality rap, which was just warming up in the 1980s with West Coast rappers Ice-T and Ice Cube of NWA coming onto the scene. Nor was there anything apologetic about any of the new voices being heard in cities like Oakland, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami, Houston, and New Orleans, and in places least expected.
    The other thing to consider was that even with diverse points of view appealing to an increasingly diverse audience, the common story line was no less than a remix and reinterpretation of the American dream. It was the most gangsta—as in bold and daring—thing that a movement could have dared to do at the time. The eighties, let’s not forget, were disastrous for anyone