Russell Simmons is, as everyone says, the impresario of hip-hop, a self-taught, self-made 46-year-old entrepreneur who in the past two decades started two of the most successful enterprises of their kind: the hip-hop music label Def Jam and the clothing line Phat Farm. Simmons, more than anyone else, has helped bring an urban sensibility, with its bravado, its exaggerated desires, its urgent longing for the good life, to popular culture: It's the Nu American Dream. Phat Farm, a $263 million company, sells itself as "classic American flava with a twist" and its logo is an upside-down American flag. One of Simmons' new clothing lines, Run Athletics, is featured in Sears Roebuck & Co. and J.C. Penney Co. Another, Def Jam University, will be available in Sears next year; it alone could be worth $100 million before the end of the decade. Already, Phat Farm does its best business in a chain of stores called d.e.m.o., located almost entirely in suburban malls. The word phat ("highly attractive or gratifying") has been added to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. There is hardly a major consumer company around that isn't trying to cash in on hip-hop's singular popularity, if not its edgy authenticity. Hip-hop music, and its signature style, rap, emerged from mostly impoverished, largely African-American urban neighborhoods, grew into an entire way of life, and today dominates youth culture. It's not about race or place. It's an attitude, a state of mind. Marketing experts estimate that one-quarter of all discretionary spending in America today is influenced by hip-hop. Coke, Pepsi, Heineken, Courvoisier, McDonald's, Motorola, Gap, Cover Girl -- even milk: They all use hip-hop to sell themselves. "There has been a bona fide cultural shift," says Marian Salzman, chief strategic officer at advertising agency Euro RSCG Worldwide. "This is the new mainstream," says Erin Patton, president of the Mastermind Group, marketing consultants. And, in truth, there is no easy way to fully calculate its impact on our clothes, cars, movies, music, commercials, our very language. Full article here.