Bring on the bling -- rappers give Cristal and Hennessy street cred / Rappers give the bubbly, Hennessy Cognac street cred

Link: Bring on the bling -- rappers give Cristal and Hennessy street cred / Rappers give the bubbly, Hennessy Cognac street cred.

Why do rappers choose Cristal above other premium Champagnes? For starters, the name is easy to say, with a crisp ring to it. In Jay-Z's song, "Excuse Me, Miss," he says: "You can't even drink Crist-OWL ... you gotta drink Crist-ALL." (Imagine the rapper as Pygmalion, trying to give his scantily clad protege elocution lessons on pronouncing the French diphthongs in Veuve Clicquot and Dom Perignon.) More important may be Cristal's bling- bling packaging -- the clear bottle and gold foil are easy to spot across a bar.

Bring on the bling -- rappers give Cristal and Hennessy street cred
Rappers give the bubbly, Hennessy Cognac street cred

Natalie MacLean, Special to The Chronicle

Thursday, December 16, 2004

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At the 40/40 Club in New York's lower Manhattan, rap music pulses between the laughter and clinking glasses. Sleek 20- and 30-somethings recline on leather sofas with velvet pillows, chatting or watching a game on the giant flat-panel screen. Under the screen, atop the bar, is a long row of backlit bottles, including, naturally, Cristal Champagne and Remy Martin Cognac.

Champagne and Cognac may seem more Harvard Club than hip-hop bar, but lately, these centuries-old tipples of the establishment have had a shot of "Sudden Hipness Syndrome," becoming status symbols for the young and urban. Has the 'hood moved to Park Avenue?

Rapper Biggie Smalls (a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G.), who was gunned down in 1997, is believed to have been the first performer to mention Cristal. He started off elegizing Moet & Chandon Champagne, then switched to "Cristal forever" on the song "Brooklyn's Finest" on Jay-Z's album "Reasonable Doubt." References to Cristal started popping up in the lyrics of Lil' Kim, Snoop Dogg, P. Diddy, Jay-Z and 50 Cent. The latter has apparently launched what sounds like an inner-city sampling campaign with his hit song "Rotten Apple," in which he's "teachin' the hoodrats what Cristal taste like."

Jay-Z, who opened 40/40 last year, proposes trading his Cristal for extreme intimacy with a young woman in the video, "I Just Wanna Love You" -- the camera zooms in on a designer refrigerator full of the bubbly. In another video, "Big Pimpin'," he brandishes his drink on a yacht -- just the kind of "livin' large atmospherics" that brand managers love. (In fact, so many rap videos feature Cristal that Dr. Evil, the archrival of Austin Powers, both played by Mike Myers, did a hilarious parody of them in the movie "Austin Powers in Goldmember.")

Critics charge that whatever the image benefits -- rappers have given Cristal street credibility (and sales) that advertising could never buy -- it's still a dubious honor to be associated with music that glorifies misogyny, violence and crime.

Jay-Z got the juice

The California importer of Cristal, Maisons Marques & Domaines, says it gets some 40 requests a year to include the bubbly in videos and movies. The company stocked Jay-Z's fridge for his video. In fact, Jay-Z seems to have become a pitchman for Cristal, the Paul Masson of our time. But not all stars have enough cachet to get permission -- a request to feature the Champagne in a film with Sandra Bullock and Liam Neeson was turned down because the script called for them to drink it in a field of manure.

Why do rappers choose Cristal above other premium Champagnes? For starters, the name is easy to say, with a crisp ring to it. In Jay-Z's song, "Excuse Me, Miss," he says: "You can't even drink Crist-OWL ... you gotta drink Crist-ALL." (Imagine the rapper as Pygmalion, trying to give his scantily clad protege elocution lessons on pronouncing the French diphthongs in Veuve Clicquot and Dom Perignon.) More important may be Cristal's bling- bling packaging -- the clear bottle and gold foil are easy to spot across a bar.

Cristal is made by Champagne producer Louis Roederer from the best grapes from 500 acres of vineyards in northern France, and is aged in oak for five years. Even in a good year, only 65,000 six-bottle cases are made; in bad years, it's not produced at all. That happened three times during the 1990s.

That scarcity is a source of consternation for hip-hop stars who like to take Cristal along when they travel. P. Diddy spent $80,000 on four methuselahs (the equivalent of eight 750-ml bottles) of Cristal while chillin' in St. Tropez, according to the British newspaper the Observer, and for his 29th birthday at New York's Cipriani restaurant, he set up six free-flowing Champagne bars -- the tab was $500,000. Jay-Z even takes Cristal onstage.

Such antics have an impact. New York-based Scarborough Research found that people who have attended a hip-hop concert are 77 percent more likely than the general public to buy Champagne. And a recent study by New Media Strategies, a research company in Washington, D.C., showed that 60 percent of consumers who consider themselves hip-hop fans are likely to buy products mentioned by rappers.

In his book, "Young, Black, Rich and Famous: The Rise of the NBA, the Hip- Hop Invasion and the Transformation of American Culture," author Todd Boyd writes that hip-hop culture is all about disenfranchised people, such as young blacks and Latinos from the inner cities, who like to celebrate in very visible ways when they succeed, to show others how well they have done (known as "flossing" or "shining"). As a result, hip-hop lyrics tend to chronicle life as lived on the Shopping Channel.

Hip-hop icons and trends have also become part of mainstream American culture, from low-hung jeans to certain brands of footwear. Some 70 percent of rap music is sold to white consumers, who buy more of it than they do country music, and only slightly less than rock in America.

Inserting your favorite brands into your rap songs is called a "shout out, " and in the last five years the practice has become both more prevalent and specific. According to American Brandstand, a Web site (www.agendainc.com/brand.html) that tracks brand names on the Billboard top singles chart, of the 111 songs that made the Billboard Top 20 in 2003, 43 mentioned a product; 84 different brands were named.

Why advertise other folks' brands, though, when you can flog your own stuff? Several rappers have launched their own lines of clothing, footwear and even liquor -- Jay-Z has created Roc-A-Fella whiskey and purchased U.S. distribution rights for the Scottish brand Armadale vodka.

Givin' props to Cognac

While Cristal remains in the top 20 American Brandstand references this year, it trails Hennessy Cognac. Artists as disparate as Destiny's Child and LL Cool J mention the brand in their songs; for them, the amber cordial represents platinum living.

Hennessy is known as "Henn Dog," "Henn-roc" and "Henn," as in Lil John & the East Side Boyz' tuneful advice: "Now give me my dough back and go get ya friend. (She's) standing there while I'm drinking my Henn." Eminem celebrates "Henny" on his song "Just Lose It."

This is fortunate and timely for Cognac producers. In 1998, sales were at an all-time low, mainly because Asia, a top export market, was in economic crisis. As well, brown spirits had fallen out of favor; they'd been replaced by clear spirits such as vodka.

Some 20,000 people in the southwestern region of France, near the small town of Cognac, depend on the digestif for their living. When producers cut back on their grape orders in 1998 because of reduced demand, growers blockaded the town for four days.

Then along came Busta Rhymes and P. Diddy, who revitalized the potable with their 2001 song "Pass the Courvoisier." The song comes off as a commercial for the Cognac:

"Give me the Henny. You can give me the Cris. You can pass me the Remy, but pass the Courvoisier. You could give me the dough. You can give me 'dro, but pass the Courvoisier. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just pass the Courvoisier."

In 2002, Courvoisier sales jumped 30 percent, the largest increase the 300-year-old brand had experienced since Napoleon III named it the "official supplier to the Imperial Court."

Claire Coates, a spokeswoman for the Cognac National Interprofessional Bureau, says the hip-hop influence helped American sales reach more than 40 million bottles last year, worth $1 billion. Young blacks accounted for 75 percent of those sales. And although worldwide Cognac sales, at $1.5 billion a year, are still only a tenth of vodka's sales, they're growing at a robust 10 percent.

"Le bling-bling? Sacre bleu!"

However, when Courvoisier management summoned some 900 grapegrowers from Cognac to watch the Rhymes music video in order to gain an appreciation of the American market, they were shocked at both the lyrics and the images -- a world away from their bucolic life and traditions.

For most of its life, Cognac was considered a connoisseur's digestif, served neat or on ice, much like single-malt whisky. But today, 60 percent of all Cognac consumed is part of a mixed drink. The late rapper Tupac Shakur trumpeted his favorite drink, "Thug Passion" -- Alize (a passion fruit and Cognac liqueur) mixed with Hennessy. Other popular Cognac-based liqueurs are Camus 4U, a blend of Cognac and fruit juice, and Hpnotiq, a blue-colored blend of Cognac, vodka and fruit juice. To traditionalists, that's blasphemy; for marketers, it's a dream come true.

Today, liquor marketers walk a thin line in trying to appeal to both the younger generation and to those they call "calmly affluent" blacks. The classic Cognac liqueur, B&B (Benedictine and brandy, owned by Bacardi), calls its new campaign "anti-bling-bling" and targets drinkers with ads in upscale publications such as Black Enterprise, GQ and Savoy.

So what's next in the lineup of makeover? Sherry could certainly use help for its image as the nip of grannies and aging Oxford dons. Maybe Madeira, too, could be used for more than just cooking. But apparently, the spirit of the times is gin. The "mother's ruin" of the 18th century is just starting to pop up in lyrics.

But at the 40/40 club, most are still down with Cognac, garnished with major mojo.

Natalie MacLean has her own free e-letter, Nat Decants, at her Web site at nataliemaclean.com. E-mail her at wine@sfchronicle.com.

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