Word: hip-hop
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...ANGELO VOODOO Slick as chicken grease. Hotter than summer asphalt. D'Angelo summoned old ghosts--Jimi and Marvin--and woke up a new artistic spirit in R. and B. Voodoo (Virgin) is a menage a trois of soul, hip-hop and jazz, all tangled up like lovers caught in the act. Even as D'Angelo pays homage to music's past, he proves the future is in good hands...
...Olympics; free-agent baseball player Alex Rodriguez became the poster boy for greed when he reportedly demanded private jets and personal flacks in negotiations with the New York Mets; pro-basketball star Allen Iverson was called on the carpet by the NBA commissioner for misogynist imagery in his new hip-hop release; and football player Rae Carruth faced a real rap: he's on trial for ordering the murder of his girlfriend. For all the murk, some splendid performances managed to shine through...
...good year for music? I think so, actually. There were some amazing hip-hop albums released-Outkast's Stankonia and Jurassic 5's Quality Control come immediately to mind, while Eminem is undoubtedly talented as hell. In the soul/R&B section, D'Angelo's second album was competent, but the stunner was Jill Scott. Dance music did well by compilations, and even managed a few good albums (Groove Armada's Vertigo, David Holmes' Bow Down to the Exit Sign) in what is generally a singles-driven culture. As for pop-well, some records were set by various assortments of platinum...
...members of Wu-Tang are street-corner scientists, experimenting, theorizing, pushing the limits of what's possible in hip-hop. The phrase experimental music usually suggests that the work in question is somehow hard to enjoy and impossible to understand. Wu-Tang's lyrics and intentions can be perversely oblique, but their music manages to be experimental and populist at the same time. Wu-Tang's songs have the loose but intricate feel of late-night jazz jams--they're artfully crafted but emotionally...
...band's 1993 debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) was rough and rambling, combining ragged street beats with lyrical imagery and audio samples drawn from Hong Kong martial-arts flicks. At a time when West Coast gangsta rap was dominating the hip-hop scene, the arrival of Wu-Tang of Staten Island, N.Y., announced that the East Coast was not to be ignored. The group's last major album, the ambitious 1997 double album Wu-Tang Forever, was a challenging, complex work of urban sprawl, spilling over with rude wordplay, goofy ideas, bad attitude and mumbled philosophy...