The California Raisins Were Way More Influential Than They Had Any Right to Be
If you’re between the ages of approximately 35 and 65, you probably remember the California Raisins, a claymation group of sun-dried grapes that ruled the airwaves and the commercial break with soulful covers of classic R&B hits. If you’re not, that sentence sounded like a stroke-induced fever dream. That’s by design — the whole thing started when an ad exec trying to come up with an idea for a commercial for Sun-Maid said, “We have tried everything but dancing raisins singing ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine.’”
He had no idea how successful his stupid joke was going to be. Between 1986 and 1994, those damn raisins were inescapable, branching out from TV commercials to primetime specials (which garnered Emmy nominations), a short-lived Saturday morning TV show, a boatload of merchandise, collabs with other brands, not one but two video games and four studio albums, which brings us to a white guy from Canada named Bryan Turner.
Turner was a passionate hip-hop fan who came to Los Angeles in the ‘80s to turn the rap world on its head and mostly failed — at first. He found himself putting together compilations for Capitol Records before breaking away to form his own label, Priority Records, which also primarily produced compilations. Hey, you do what you know.
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Priority got its big break with the California Raisins, producing four compilations of golden oldies in 1987 and 1988. Against all logic, they were wildly successful, to the point that Priority had enough money to do what Turner really wanted to do, starting with signing a little group called N.W.A. and becoming one of the most important forces of hip-hop in the ‘80s and ‘90s. When Ice-T proved too controversial for Warner Bros., he was picked up by Priority. They collaborated with Jay-Z’s own label to release his first album. Essentially, the California Raisins created gangsta rap.
Meanwhile, by 1994, those shriveled crooners had dried a little too close to the sun. They were in such high demand that the grape farming industry all but revolted, vowing to quit paying the exorbitant fees extracted from them from the California Raisin Advisory Board to support the band’s lifestyle. The board was dissolved, and the Raisins were no more, though there’s been talk of a reboot.
Let’s hope the same is true for early ‘90s West Coast hip-hop.
