Word: hip-hop
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...Hip-hop's language - not simply its slang, which is as likely to be heard in Yale dorm rooms as on inner-city street corners, but its idiom, which involves combining the spoken (or screamed) word with a pastiche of musical elements drawn from previous songs and styles reassembled in new and unique combinations - is not only the preeminent musical genre of a generation, it's also a complex, ever-evolving organism that has spawned countless dialects that are constantly in conversation with one another...
...HIP-HOP CULTURE may be difficult to define, but it is pervasive nonetheless. It began simply as a combination of four art forms - deejaying, rapping, break dancing and graffiti tagging - but it quickly evolved into a cultural revolution in which young African-Americans literally remade their America. In the spirit of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, they didn't simply demand to be admitted as an equal in Whitey's world; they created their own popular culture grounded in the lived reality and aspirations of black life in America. Far from demanding to join the club, the hip-hop...
...fortunes of the likes of Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger and Timberland over the past decade are testimony to the power of hip-hop as American taste-maker. Initially, the effect is achieved by unsolicited appropriation - Ralph Lauren's ads were full of white preppies, but that didn't stop the hip-hop generation from buying his wares. Lauren's ad agency acknowledged that much by inserting Tyson Beckwith into the preppy mix, launching the career of the first black male supermodel. Hip-hop's power to direct tastes in everything from malt liquor to SUVs is today assiduously courted...
...surprisingly given that this is America after all - in the sphere of its economy that the hip-hop nation is most evolved. Where hip-hop artists once built a following through word of mouth at block parties and tiny clubs in New York's outer boroughs, today they're part of a multibillion-dollar industry that invents new careers week after week and launches them in million-dollar videos. In terms of sales, hip-hop, together with the R&B genre that it counts as a cousin, is the largest and the fastest-growing musical format. When the Fugees swept...
...CONTROVERSIES WITHIN HIP-HOP - the "civil war" between the coasts; the issues of corporate control and censorship; issues of gender and the struggle of women rappers to challenge the negative stereotypes of black women reinforced by some of their male colleagues - are alluded to in passing, but receive scant attention in "Hip-Hop Nation." Still other questions, such as the obvious tension between artists who still see themselves as community activists and those who simply head for the Hamptons are scarcely raised. But as the organizers emphasize, the show is an introduction rather than the last word, and the deeper...