Air Jordans

"This was one of the great American moments in Madison Avenue advertising," says Robert Thompson, founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. "The idea that people don't get good at something because of practice and the right genes, but rather with the right attitude and the right shoes -- it was brilliant."

Nike also pioneered guerrilla marketing on Air Jordans' behalf. The company relied on its "urban promotion teams" -- "young black guys who would go into ghettoes to see what was happening and to put our shoes on the hot guys," in the words of Brendan Foster, a former Nike marketing V.P. and Olympic runner, who laid out the strategy in a 1990 article in Campaign magazine. "Six months later, the shoes would be hot in L.A."

And this is where the Air Jordans story takes a turn toward tragedy. The ads, the innovative marketing and the high prices all contributed to a major problem: sneaker-related violence. Throughout the late '80s and early '90s, a spate of robberies and a few murders were tied to Nike's high-priced sneakers. Kids who couldn't afford the $125 price tag simply started stealing the shoes they wanted. Gangs reportedly started using sneakers to recruit youngsters, and even accepted nifty new pairs as payment.

Was Nike ultimately responsible for the violence? Thompson suggests that Nike marketing was simply part of a larger trend. "This ability for American commerce and culture to transform celebrity into a product, a commodity -- even something as mundane as a shoe -- is perhaps a thing that Americans do better than anyone else," he says. "Air Jordans are just one of the supreme examples."

But critics contend that in Nike's case, the trend toward branding went too far. Thomas Frank, in "The Conquest of Cool," criticized Nike for co-opting and commercializing the counterculture: "the words of William S. Burroughs and songs by the Beatles, Iggy Pop and Gil Scott-Heron ('the revolution will not be televised')."

Meanwhile, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, despite Nike's stable of African-American spokesmen, condemned Nike for taking advantage of the black community; for promoting what he called an "ethos of mindless materialism" that most low-income blacks couldn't afford. And it wasn't just the buyers who needed to beware. The three-figure prices were especially egregious, Jackson and other critics argued, because the company paid the workers who actually made the shoes -- typically in Indonesia -- less than $3 an hour.

Ultimately, consumers -- "black and white and brown," Jackson said in a 1998 "Frontline" interview -- needed to wake up. They should judge companies and their products not according to style, cost and appearance but rather "by their investment policy," he said. "That's the real challenge for us today."

I agree with Jackson's point; in an ideal world, consumers would always consider the extended effects of their purchases, whether on workers or the environment. I also agree, though to a lesser extent, with Frank. Sometimes the Nike ad campaigns anger me at a visceral level. John Lennon doesn't deserve to have his "instant karma" tied to a product. If he were alive and in charge of his own rights, I'm sure Nike would have had to look elsewhere. (They could probably have bought a song from Donovan.)

The real point, though, is not whether Nike's use of such songs somehow taints the originals (I would argue that it doesn't), or even whether Nike crossed a line from marketing to manipulation. To truly judge greatness, one must only consider impact. Karl Marx's ideals have largely been found impractical, but he's still a towering figure of 20th-century history. Sigmund Freud's theories have been punctured and pricked with doubt, but anyone who argues that he should be dropped from the canon of Western civilization needs therapy.

So it is with Air Jordans. The sneakers, in all their black, red, white and blue brilliance, are a masterpiece. They've given the world a new vision of their feet, a reason to exercise, a new form of cultural expression. A fresh pair of A.J.s won't necessarily make the world a better place, but I for one am willing to let this larger issue go. Even though I'm less willing than I once was to pay the outrageous prices, I'll never regret owning those original Air Jordans. Because, as I told my friends when I hooked up with them at the mall later on that fateful day, Air Jordans are just too wicked cool to pass up.

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