Word: hip-hop
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...mold of a platinum-selling rapper. His 2004 debut album, The College Dropout, went nearly triple platinum, topped all the major critics' polls, earned 10 Grammy nominations and made rap accessible to audiences that hadn't paid attention in years. "That record restored my faith in hip-hop," says Jamie Foxx, who lent comic vocals to West's No. 1 hit Slow Jamz...
That the "urban demographic" needs "superficialness" could be read as two euphemisms away from racism. But Dash, an African American who thinks exclusively in shades of green, is merely letting the world in on what's accepted as social fact by much of the record industry. Hip-hop was born in the '70s as party music and evolved in the '80s into that rarest of pleasures--socially relevant party music. But in the mid-'90s, the genre came to be dominated by people like Snoop Dogg (sample track: Murder Was the Case), the Notorious B.I.G. (Ten Crack Commandments...
...that was complicated by--and you had to know it was coming--race. Statistics consistently show that 70% of hip-hop is consumed by young white audiences, but a century of anecdotal evidence is similarly irrefutable: white kids think it's cool to be black, which means the other 30% sets the trends and runs the show. With the market mired in thuggery, African-American consumers' could choose to: a) propagate a nasty stereotype of themselves for white kids to pin their libidinous fantasies on; b) not care; c) start patronizing the danger-free, supernice, superboring rappers at the liberal...
...stopped listening to hip-hop 10 years ago," says Darryl McDaniels, the D.M.C. in Run-D.M.C. McDaniels points out that Run-D.M.C. rhymed about everything from materialism (My Adidas) and higher education ("I'm D.M.C. in the place to be/ I go to St. John's University") to Santa Claus (Christmas in Hollis). "We weren't choirboys, but we had multiple points of view. This past decade it seems like hip-hop has mostly been about parties and guns and women. That's fine if you're in a club, but from 9 a.m. till I went...
West is sometimes credited with revolutionizing hip-hop, but this doesn't quite fit. Revolutions require moral certainty, and West's default position is doubt. What he's up to is more like a reformation. "I'm pretty calculating," he says, standing before the baroque altar of Prague's Church of St. Simon and Juda. "I take stuff that I know appeals to people's bad sides and match it up with stuff that appeals to their good sides." As an example, he cites a snippet of Diamonds from Sierra Leone about his rise to fame: "'Life movin' too fast...