Word: hards
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Every schoolchild knows how "dangerous" zero can be. Just try dividing a number by zero and all hell breaks loose; indeed, zero was once scorned as the devil's work. It is such a familiar number today that it may be hard to believe there was a time--hundreds of years, actually--when our species counted and spoke but had no concept of zero. Seife and Kaplan both trace the history of naught, from its inception in Babylon around 300 B.C. through Athens, India and Europe later in the Middle Ages. It took Western mathematicians so long to accept zero...
...Fluke? In 1990 a New York-based makeup artist, Bobbi Brown, scraped together $10,000 to start her own minimalist line, which Lauder also snapped up. In 1995 a 22-year-old premed student, Dineh Mohajer, mixed nail polish to match a pair of light blue sandals, kicking off Hard Candy and a craze for pastel lacquers. The upstarts keep coming--makeup-artist lines such as Laura Mercier and Stila; New Agey innovators such as Philosophy and Tony & Tina--almost faster than stores can stock them. Together they capture a relatively small share of the market, but their quirky products...
These companies are surviving, and thriving, on word of mouth. Since they can't afford huge advertising spreads in Vogue or prime real estate at big department stores, they vie for the attention of magazine editors, Hollywood stars and other buzzmakers. Drew Barrymore probably did more for Hard Candy's Glitter Eye by wearing it to the 1998 Oscars than Elizabeth Hurley has ever done for Estee Lauder...
Musical and lyrical honesty has always been a core hip-hop value--then again, so has exaggeration. On one hand, rappers want to keep their music true to life. On the other, boasting and roasting are also part of the tradition. Lately, exaggeration has ruled. It's often hard to find real experience in the cartoonish raps of many gangsta rappers. Q-Tip, on his new album, Amplified (Arista), brings back the honesty--but doesn't cut back on the fun. This is a party album about picking up chicks (Vivrant Thing), cruising the streets (Let's Ride) and dancing...
...Impressionists and Cezanne to Cubism, and from there through ever greater reaches of stylization, psychic turmoil and abstraction--has been under pressure for years to admit developments that can't be legitimized under that model. The creamy maidens of Victorian genre painting, "outsider art" by the mentally ill, hard-to-categorize painters like Jacob Lawrence and Florine Stettheimer--all of them have been tried out on museum walls. It was only a matter of time before attention turned back to Rockwell, a man who could paint cute but intricate scenes like The Runaway, where a cop and a waiter...