MC Hammer

The best thing about the catch phrase “too legit to quit,” is that the man who created it is living proof. MC Hammer burst onto the music scene in 1988 with his major label debut, Let’s Get it Started, but it wasn’t until his 1990 follow up Please Hammer Don’t Hurt Em when people started to get the message that he was not just a fad, with his flamboyant wardrobe and memorable hooks.

Not only is his sophomore LP the best-selling rap album of all time, but several endorsement deals, a Saturday morning cartoon and an extraordinary amount of mainstream success allowed Hammer to break barriers for hip hop, demonstrating its market potential in pop culture.

Hammer’s reign seemingly came to an end when he filed for bankruptcy in 1996, but he reconfigured his master plan and is back in business. Extremely tech savvy and with four businesses of his own including, Dancejam.com and a dance studio, he lectures at the top colleges and universities in the United States, tours the world with his dynamic stage show and still finds time to return to his normal life as Stanley Burrell.

Now starring in A&E’s new reality series, Hammertime, the world watches as he balances several different roles as entertainer, entrepreneur and father, raising six children with his wife of 24 years, maintaining a productive home. Stay Tuned caught up with the family man to get the secrets to his success.

How did you ink a deal with A&E for a family show?

About a year and a half ago, they contacted me and asked if I was interested. I told them I might be if the terms and conditions meet a certain criteria so that was the genesis of the relationship.

Terms and conditions? You mean like not being followed with cameras 24/7?

[Laughs] No. We definitely weren’t filmed 24/7. We did it for about three months but not all day.

You’re pretty tech savvy, so were you hands on with the editing of the show?

I didn’t do too much of the editing. Anything that I did, I did over the phone [but] I was confident. I saw some initial roughs of what we were doing in post [production] and it was true to what was happening in the house so I just let them go.

You have five kids plus your nephew and they’re all different ages from toddler to young adult. How do you manage dealing with children of such a motley age range?

They all grew up together in the same house. Years change for everybody so with the 21-year-old, the closest sibling that she had was her little cousin—my nephew—who’s 18, so they’re not that far apart. Then, my other daughter will be 16 next month—so I have 18, 16, 14 and 11—they’re just a couple years behind each other, for the most part. The big jump is for the 3-year-old. He has the largest gap of anybody, but it’s pretty manageable just having them two or three years apart. It’s kind of like each person wants to hang out with the one that’s a little bit older.

About you being tech savvy, you’ve bounced back from bankruptcy with several businesses, most of them technology based. How did you get so knowledgeable?

I happened to be located in Silicon Valley. It’s where I lived for 20-plus years and it was probably 1995, when we were really talking heavy about what the internet would be and at that point, I wanted to find out when would we have video on the net, so I had to learn about three key components that were missing. By having an all-out search on how we can get it done, it made me become very savvy in technology. I used to go to a company called Silicon Graphics—and they used to let me go into their research development department. Apple also let me go over, and I met the young kid who was writing the code for QuickTime. He told me he was solving my problem about seeing video on the internet so that’s where it all started—being located in Silicon Valley, wanting to see video on the internet and being connected and getting an early understanding of the applications and the solutions.

I noticed that you incorporate Twitter in your show and you were using your flip cam for footage, so in nowaday’s climate, why is technology important in modern business as far as branding and how do you make it work for yourself?

I just lectured a course at Stanford [University], a few weeks ago, on branding and social media together, which is actually a series. I do an MIT panel, and three months ago I was at Harvard speaking on branding and social media, and I’ll do it again Aug 31, at Harvard. I talk about how social media platforms apply to modern media and to business in general. I have a very organic understanding of it so what we’re talking about doing is pretty simple. At this point, let’s say I have 800,000 people following me, then you take cable TV and you see how many people the average cable television program has. I think the average program has about 300,000 viewers, so from there you can gather where I’m going with that. It’s like you’re walking around with a broadcast network in your hand and at any moment you can broadcast 24 hours a day, not only for advertising but also on the other side from the talent perspective. Let’s say you’re an actor and you’re negotiating for a part in a movie and you have a million followers; you read the part and this other person reads it too. You both read it about even but guess who gets the job? The guy with a million followers cuts down on the marketing budget by millions of dollars because he’s talking about everything to his followers, I got a new film coming out blah blah blah, so the marketing promotion department says my God we cut down on the budget. The awareness level continues to grow about this film and we haven’t even started yet because actor x has all these followers and has been broadcasting our film, so if you understand that, then you can understand how powerful social media platforms are to business.

Hammer Fam

Your family is so progressive and your children stay out of trouble and out of the tabloids, so what’s the secret to your family’s success?

I think the real secret is that I always left MC Hammer outside and brought Stanley Burrell inside.

You’re very supportive of your daughters pursuing music careers and even help them record and perform, but did it initially bother you when you first found out that they were interested in entertainment careers?

Not at all. What I did do was, decide that I would not initially encourage it. I would let it happen organically. I’m not gonna be the type of father that said, “Hey what you need to do is go out there and be an entertainer, artist or a singer.” My daughter who is 21, made the opera at 18. She went out to the University of Texas as a student and auditioned for the Austin Symphony and they told her she was too young [but] she auditioned anyway and made it, so imagine her having the ability to sing on that level. At home, she had not even recorded an album and she’s already 18-years-old, so you know I wasn’t twisting her arm trying to force her into the music business. My other daughter who is 16—the one you saw my older daughter working with on the show—was shy. One of the byproducts of the show is that she’s not so shy anymore. She and her cousin did a YouTube video of Beyonce’s new record, “Ego.” One thing I took away from it is Sarah knows how to put the hammer into her dancing and I didn’t know she had quite got it like that. My son does. My 14-year-old son will challenge anybody. He’ll do it to you and he won’t spare your feelings.

They take after you. In the first episode you were rehearsing with dancers in a studio. Are you coming out with new material?

Yeah. I do dates all the time and the song you saw us rehearsing to was “I Got Gigs.” That’s a song that we’re shooting a video for, for an album I’m releasing this summer called “Dance Jam the Music.”

Wow, it’s great to see that you’re still in shape.

I’m three years from 50 and my 18, 19 and 20-year-old dancers are the only ones who can keep up with me now. It’s a blessing and I’m grateful. Hard work pays.

It’s great to see a positive Black family on TV. Your show, like The Cosby Show—even though that was fiction—shows that successful Black families actually exist. Even beyond race, any family could learn a lot from watching you.

Thank you. I say the other part though. I say we’re a combination from Good Times. I got some of James in me [laughs] but I hope that this show—keep in mind that I live 20 minutes from Stockton, Calif., the number one foreclosure market in America and where unemployment is over 10%—what I’m hoping is that through this show, since the whole world is aware that MC Hammer went through bankruptcy, that people going through hardships can see that through it all, you can still have a positive family and you can still cling to God and to hope, and still come out on the other side.

Hammertime airs Sunday nights at 10pm on A&E.

TAGS: Hammertime, Interviews, MC Hammer

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