Word: hip-hop
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Even if guitar-band rock is a niche market now, supplanted by hip-hop as the reigning format of pop music, it still qualifies as the lingua franca of pop culture. Roughly a half-century after Elvis recorded Heartbreak Hotel, nearly everybody under 70 has some emotional attachment to electrified music with a beat. As a consequence, pop music is no longer mostly a way that one generation defines itself against its elders. The baby boomers' own parents grew up with Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney and Nat "King" Cole. Rock was such an unmistakable break with that creamy tradition that...
...generation the way it was for my father's. We came to our first concerts already divided into subcultures, armed with the different rock educations our parents gave us. Musical taste became our primary means of distinguishing ourselves from one another. In college most indie-rock kids respected hip-hop, and most hip-hop kids respected indie rock, but there was rarely any question as to who was hip-hop (baggy clothes) and who was indie (thrift-store clothes). The two groups tended to keep to themselves...
...after five years he was pink-slipped. "I fell in the cracks there," says Shaggy, now 32. "They saw me as a guy bringing them a couple of hits, not somebody building a career." It wasn't that he was slacking; his 1995 album, Boombastic--filled with thudding hip-hop style grooves--sold well and won the Grammy for Best Reggae Album. But when his follow-up, the saccharine Midnite Lover, flopped, Shaggy went label-less for nearly three years until MCA signed him after he scored with the hit single Luv Me Luv Me for the How Stella...
...Hotshot, Shaggy dispenses with the balladry and the hip-hop influences of his previous albums and instead keeps things upbeat, danceable and carefully attuned to the tastes of American pop ears. "My album might be disputed by purists as not reggae enough, but I wanted it to be eclectic and crossover," he explains. "To hell with categories." Maybe so, but Shaggy's triumph could help recapture some of the diversity pop lost after the reggae and ska waves of the 1990s faded. So when you hear Madonna and Britney Spears singing to a reggae beat a year from now, remember...
...trial is expected to go on for a few weeks. Both sides are under a gag order, but the case is nonetheless grabbing headlines nearly every day. With Puff Daddy and other rappers in the legal spotlight, the subject of hip-hop and violence is back on the nation's editorial pages. Puff Daddy, Eminem and DMX aren't great artists, but they have all, at some point, recorded material that I've enjoyed, including DMX's "Ruff Ryders Anthem," Eminem?s "Guilty Conscience," and Puff Daddy's production work with Mary J. Blige. They have also all recorded lyrics...