Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
American Hip Hop music diffused fi rst to immigrants
living in major cities. In France, for example, some of
the fi rst Hip Hop artists were African, Arab, and
Spanish immigrants writing about the racism they
experienced in France.
The results of reterritorialization are seen in the
ways Hip Hop artists around the world use the texts and
music from their own local cultures, national cultures, and
libraries to sample (mix) in their music. Hip Hop artists
outside of the United States typically write and perform in
their own language or dialect with reference to Hip Hop
terms used by artists in the United States.
enormous pipe cut in half—also called a halfpipe) skate-
boarder, worked with Activision to create several versions
of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, with average annual sales of
$180 million. In 2001, sales relating to video games were
higher than the movie industry's box offi ce receipts. That
same year, baseball took a back seat to skateboarding,
with more children under the age of 18 skateboarding
than playing baseball.
Extreme sports greats, like Tony Hawk, gain cor-
porate sponsors, create their own brands, and sign
lucrative advertising deals. Hawk, who retired from
competitive skate boarding in 1999, reportedly still
earns more than $12 million a year through his skate-
boards and clothing lines, his video games, and his stints
as spokesperson for Heinz, Hershey, and Frito-Lay.
Hawk combined popular sports with popular music,
creating his Boom Boom Huck Jam tour that features
famous skateboarders, BMX bike riders, and motorcy-
cle stunt drivers, neatly choreographed and enhanced
by alternative live music. Tony Hawk, Inc., employs 30
people to oversee Hawk's branded products, which had
sales of over $200 million in 2009.
Advertisers who court the 12-34 age demographic,
fans looking for athletes who are outside of the excess of
major league sports, and fans who desire a sport that is
different from their parents' sport drove the expansion of
extreme sports into mainstream popular culture.
Marketers and business analysts refer to Hawk as the
godfather of extreme sports. He discovered Shaun White
as a 7-year-old in a skateboard park and helped White
become a professional skateboarder. Shaun White has
won more than a dozen medals in the X games for skate-
boarding and snowboarding and two gold medals in the
Winter Olympics for snowboarding (Fig. 4.19). The cash
prizes for winning a professional snowboarding competi-
tion are low, and Forbes reports it is rare for skateboard-
ers or snowboarders to bring in more than $100,000 a
year in prize money.
Shaun White has followed the path carved by Tony
Hawk. White's endorsement and product deals with
Burton, Red Bull, Oakley, Ubisoft and Target earn him
more than $9 million a year. White invented a snow-
boarding trick called the Double McTwist 1260 on a half-
pipe that Red Bull spent $500,000 to build in the back
country of Silverton, Colorado. White had to helicopter
into this top-secret location to practice and develop the
trick in preparation for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.
Forbes named White the top-grossing athlete of the
Vancouver Olympics.
Researchers Maureen Smith and Becky Beal have
studied how MTV's television show
Cribs
creates mascu-
line identities. They found that in the current economy,
“marketing lifestyles and desires is central to selling prod-
ucts, which has opened new and multiple masculinity
markets.” Marketers use sports to “sell trucks, beer, fast
Replacing Old Hearths with New: Beating Out
the Big Three in Popular Sports
Baseball, football, and basketball are historically the big
three sports in the United States. During the 1800s and
1900s, they all benefi ted from advances in transporta-
tion technology, communication technology, and insti-
tutionalization. First, the railroad interconnected cities
across the country, allowing baseball teams to compete
and baseball to diffuse. The telegraph enabled newspa-
pers to report baseball scores, which added to the sport's
following. In the late 1880s, electric lighting made bas-
ketball a nighttime spectator sport, played inside gym-
nasiums. The founding of the National Football League
in 1920 helped institutionalize (by creating institutions
to support it, formalize it, and regulate it) the sport of
football, with rules for the game remaining relatively
unchanged since then.
During much of the twentieth century, the big three
dominated sports popular culture. Figures including
Mark McGwire, Michael Jordan, and Brett Favre found
their ways onto Wheaties boxes and reached icon status.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, advertising
contracts and corporate sponsorship padded and eventu-
ally surpassed the salaries of the biggest sports heroes.
While the big three continued to draw millions of
fans and huge crowds to their venues, a growing number
of alternative sports captured the imagination of young
sports fans. Popular fi lms (including
Endless
Summer
) of
the 1960s immortalized the freedom of surfi ng. In the
1970s, sidewalk surfi ng, now known as skateboarding, dif-
fused from its hearth in Southern California. In the 1980s,
snowboarding found a following and initially met strong
resistance on ski slopes in the United States.
The debut of ESPN's X Games in 1995 and the pro-
liferation of video games involving extreme sports pro-
pelled previously alternative sports into popular culture.
Snowboarding debuted as a winter Olympic sport in
1998. Video games sparked interest in the sports for kids
who had never shown any interest in sports. Tony Hawk,
the famous vert (a skateboarding ramp that looks like an
