In 1995, a lucky stop sign in Pleasant City, a neighborhood in West Palm Beach, found itself draped in a drool-repellent Skyywalker Records varsity jacket. Estimated hang time: seconds. I imagine some kid on a bike squeaking off in a flash of satin green, with a dancing bass cloud stitched to his back. Maybe someone snatched the jacket from a car while running the intersection at Spruce Avenue.
Can you appeal a citation for failure to stop at a rare promotional Miami Bass artifact?
More important: Did the jacket have the correct misspelling? A copyright flout in the guise of typo, the double y’s fiber-date the item as "pre-George Lucas lawsuit."
DJ Ross One (Ross Schartzman) missed that stop sign by only 20 years. The Skyywalker jacket was one that got away, and not for cheap. His book Rap Tees is a museum of vintage rap T-shirts and jackets, ranging from the limited promotional (the Tommy Boy Carhartt barn coat that we mooned over in ads in The Source) to '90s street vendor bootlegs (Biggie’s face on every corner), to those ogled at concert merch tables, copped from Goodwills, brokered through overseas swaps. Or just borrowed from the Bronx closet of '90s producer Showbiz. (Not that fetish would render the music immaterial or anything.) The "Renegades of Funk" shirt was discovered in a box of tutus in North Versailles, Pa., by a man with a pet ferret. Taken from the cover of a Soulsonic Force 12-inch illustrated in 1983 by Marvel’s Bob Camp (who later worked with Ren and Stimpy), the shirt has Bambaataa in his King and I pants, punching through bricks—in a girl's small no less, against all Double Dutch odds.
Rap Tees is a history of hip-hop design and branding as much as it is a catalog of want, in service of inclusion. This is a club where No Limit tanks are literally worn on the sleeve while the Grand Royal elephant sits on a couch, blazed out of his mind, trying to remember why he’s there. The secret password: "Grand Puba ‘Reel to Reel’ promotional fishing vest. Not everybody was invited. There’s the Beastie Boys’ homophobic shirt, circa Licensed to Ill. (Run-DMC’s minimal orange bars, now worn by kids who think Run-DMC is gramp rap, was, according to designer Cey Adams, inspired by the Relax T-shirts from Frankie Goes to Hollywood, some pro-queer subtext not lost on the leatherette of old school fashion.) Sadly, the Public Enemy crosshairs logo and Latifah’s "Who u callin’ a bitch???" have not gone out of style, as if literally turning their back on the problem to deal with it head on.
According to Ross One, his book is the "realization of that ideal, unattainable collection of rap T-shirts." For some, the realization arrived late to the armpit. I might still have my 3rd Bass (page 215) shirt had I not actually, you know, worn it. (Perhaps the dilemma posed by sweat stains could be resolved within the arm folds of the b-boy stance.) The 3rd Bass logo, borrowed from film leader, would be shaved into the back of MC Serch’s head, a bit of precision detailing performed by the same clippers which—let’s speculate—could be heard buzzing in a skit on KMD’s first album Mr. Hood. Along with a Def Jam jacket, 3rd Bass’s Pete Nice once used the KMD shirt (page 217) in an unsuccessful attempt to bribe a tow truck driver who’d already impounded KRS-One.
Some shirts place you there and not on eBay. It’s heartening to know that Egyptian Lover is still in possession of his "pink ringer" from the '87 Raptron Tour at Little Rock. My Strictly Business shirt put me at the Charlotte Coliseum on a night when EPMD themselves couldn’t make it. The commerce must go on. Opening for Public Enemy and Guy (!) that night was Sir Mix-a-lot. The satin Nasty Mix jacket worn by his dancer Maharaji was duly coveted, if not howling at the seams.
Emboldened by rap’s storytelling and boasting, rap T-shirts have grown into their own oversized legends. During one of my first interviews (Urb, 1994), DJ Shadow recalled a moment at a show in Long Beach when Run lobbed one of his Adidas shell toes into the crowd. The story, as the shoe flies, has already fulfilled its obligation to myth, having been told many times from as many tour stops. But the loop remaining in my head is "some guy in a Mantronix shirt" intercepting Run’s shoe in mid-air. The Mantronix logo, in THX routing number font, echoes in triplicate at half speed, in a memory bootlegged from someone else’s memory. Stretch becomes document. The shirt, sometimes referred to as "Mantronix The ShirtShirtShirt," is the story, toasted from my orange Mantronix promotional koozie.
Other shirts have left the event and arena behind. Worn by a friend during our first conversation, the LL shirt (circa B.A.D.) will always be attached to our mutual admiration for Leatherface’s (RIP) last twilight dance, waving his Poulan at the sun.
My pink sleeveless Full Force T-shirt probably wondered how it ended up at a family reunion in Tryon, North Carolina in 1986.
And did the Japanese guy at the Wu-Tang show at the 1993 New Music Seminar remember my Diamond D T-shirt, floating in front of him, while in the background King Sun was being hauled off by (much) security after brawling with the UMC’s entire Staten Island crew as Coolio rolled a blunt in the corner?
The weed-wear '90s should’ve capitalized on the Boast logo of the '80s. (Oddly, one could get sent home from school for wearing Japanese tennis gear with a maple leaf stitched to their heart, but a Doobie Brothers T-shirt was okay.) The Funkdoobiest shirt asks "Which Doobie Do U Be?", sampling a cautionary bootlegging episode of What’s Happening!!, when Los Angeles poplocker Fred "Re-Run" Berry met future ballistic missile defense advisor Jeff "Skunk" Baxter of the Doobie Brothers.
A shirt from the later, more enlightened Beastie Boys has the stoner van from Fast Times at Ridgemont High parked on its front, worn by a friend who got the glasses kicked off her face as collateral mosh during the Ill Communication tour. The back of the shirt waves "Aloha Mr. Hand", from the back of the classroom. (Know your history teacher!) It was also in Fast Times that Sean Penn’s Spiccoli presented the ultimate question: Where did you get that jacket?
I got mine, a Skyywalker with vinyl sleeves the color of cookie dough, from a friend who had lost out on a Fat Boys roller derby jacket and figured he needed to "up his bidding game". The superfluous pit gain was taken in so it could appear in Rap Tees, looking far more polished on the page than on my back. (Is it any more okay to wear a varsity bass jacket at age 46 than it is for an expensive Scandinavian clothing line to name a jacket after a classic electro 12-inch?) A magnifying glass will take you to a tiny booster flame, bursting from the rear of a spaceship sewn to the cuff. The dancing cloud is in red high waters and Peanuts shoes.
I’d be remiss to not acknowledge the green Skyywalker that ended up in the hands of Makoto Nagumato, proprietor of Weekend Records in Japan. I don’t know if Mark the 45 King remembers that night in 2003 when Makoto took a knee in front of his turn tables, as if to genuflect, waiting for someone (me) to surprise cape him like James Brown’s valet, while the 45 King’s records flew across the bar. (Not kidding.) The jacket now hangs in Makoto’s store. I traded it for a copy of Booty Shakin’ Breakout (Even less kidding).
The Skyywalker jacket worn by that stop sign in Pleasant City, however, remains unaccounted for. It was last spotted in the rearview mirror of Ray "Raylo" Lowe, co-creator of "Peanut Butter Jelly Time", a song released on purple and peanut-colored vinyl and created from a dance born in Liberty City’s Scott Projects. According to Raylo, his girlfriend left the house wearing the jacket after an argument. She still had it on when he drove past her walking down the sidewalk later that afternoon. He checked the mirror to make sure, stopped at the sign, looked both ways. Never saw that jacket again.