Steve Stoute found startling evidence of the global influence of hip-hop in the mountaintop town of Èze in southern France. On the square of a village that boasts thousands of years of history, he saw a jewelry store named Bling. "Lil Wayne invented the word 'bling'," says Stoute, who has been an innovator in bringing hip-hop culture and commerce together, and is the author of The Tanning of America: How Hip-Hop Created a Culture That Rewrote the Rules of the New Economy. "When I saw that, I was happy, I was shocked. It said to me, 'This [influence] is real.' " 

Stoute has built a career on understanding and monetizing the global spread of hip-hop culture. He heads the ad agency Translation, which specializes in helping large companies understand and take advantage of hot trends and cultural shifts to better market their products. "The change [in branding] for luxury goods is very simple," he says. "The generation of hip-hop music has done a lot to influence mainstream culture by really driving it home. It became part of the aspirational dimension of America."

He vividly describes a scene from a 1986 concert involving LL Cool J, Run-DMC and Whodini at New York City's Madison Square Garden, the first big rap event at the landmark arena. Impresario Russell Simmons had invited executives for the German sport-shoe company Adidas.

When Rev. Run began performing his hit "My Adidas," he took off his three-striped shoe and held it above his head. Thousands in the crowd did the same. As Stoute tells it, the Adidas executive realized a vast market existed for their products that they had not tapped.

What Stoute, Simmons and other pioneers of the rap industry stumbled on was the appeal of the music -- and culture -- across racial lines, even if it was rooted in a shared materialism. "The hip-hop generation is not very apologetic about having aspirations," concedes Stoute. "When you hear these artists talk about brand -- Gucci, Mercedes, Cristal -- they're painting a picture of a lifestyle."

The credibility of hip-hop artists, the visibility of certain brands in music videos and seeing favorite artists use or interact with certain products, says Stoute, "created a lifestyle around [the products] that became contagious." Stoute, who is the child of immigrants from Trinidad, grew up in a black neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens, N.Y., and he understands the connection between working-class aspirations and the rags-to-riches narratives of so many rappers.

In The Tanning of America, Stoute describes dining in Monaco's Hotel de Paris with Jimmy Iovine of Interscope, Jay-Z, Bono and actor Roger Moore, all of whom climbed to the top from modest circumstances, and reflecting with them on how far they had all come.