Culture: "Whassup!" Bud Commercial Gets Props
HOT 104.com News Desk

Wasington, D.C. -- They still jocking our steez, yo.

In the blink of a Budweiser commercial, the common Hip-Hop street greeting ”Whassup” has become a classic male bonding moment, a verbal high-five and a growing national phenomenon. Like "Where's the beef--" or "I love you, man!" it has leapt from the lips of TV characters into the national consciousness, male division.

There are knockoffs and tributes aplenty. The Washington Capitals carry a parody of it on the JumboTron at MCI Center (imagine Eastern European hockey players doing it); "Saturday Night Live" last weekend featured Tom Brokaw, Ted Koppel and Bernard Shaw characters exchanging the greeting; the hot e-mail of the moment uses the soundtrack of the original Bud ad but syncs it, ingeniously, with cartoons of Superman, Batman and Robin, Wonder Woman and Aquaman.

Anheuser-Busch Inc., Bud's parent company, launched the whassup phenomenon in late December with a series of commercials starring four young African Americans. The friends break up their otherwise ordinary routines by greeting each other with elaborately comic turns on the phrase, a variation of the salutation "What's up--"

In 1997, director Charles Stone III recruited three of his pals from Philadelphia to star in a short film. The two-minute piece, called "True," captured the whole whassup bit. When Bud's ad agency, DDB of Chicago, saw Stone's video resume, they asked him to reshoot his short as a 60-second Bud commercial.

"The agency guys had to be sold on the characters," recalls Stone, 33. "They originally wanted a multicultural cast." Stone auditioned about 80 actors, but none, he says, captured the same spirit. So Stone persuaded the suits to go with his friends.

That's Stone himself (he's the bearded fellow) who utters the laconic "watching the game, drinking a Bud" line, along with afroed Paul Williams, Scott ("Dukie") Brooks and Fred Thomas (the guy in the jersey who kick-starts all the whassuping).

"That's really how we talk to each other," says Stone, who shot music videos before the Bud ads. "We used to call each other on the phone 15 years ago, during our college years, and that was our greeting. People say it seems real to them. It is real."

On another level, "whassup" follows the long line of black slang that has migrated from the street to the mainstream. The lexicon has been enriched by countless similar words and phrases, from "cool" and "diss" to "you go, girl" and "24/7." The phrase itself springs from its own tradition of black ceremonial greetings. It's the head nod, the grip, the brotherman hug with a tightfisted pound for heightened punctuation.

"There is something quite ritualized about it and very specific to black people, this whole issue of 'what's up,' the way that that says informality, unity, we are a people," says Elijah Anderson, a University of Pennsylvania sociology professor and the author of "Code of the Street," a book on urban culture.

Pay attention Madison Avenue.