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.H I P H O P M AT T E R SBeyonce Knowles’s career as a solo artist was set for takeoƒ, Jay-Z did a feature rap on her breakout single, “Crazy in Love.” Midway in the rhyme he slipped in a bit of history about how ever since his plat-inum hits, rap has changed the business of pop.Only a few peoplelikely realized that Jay-Z was speaking about 1998, the year rap made its greatest surge.But after the “great year in hip hop” the rap game, too, would never be the same.Even as rap music was breaking through the barriers maintained bythe music mainstream one final barrier remained: the black musicestablishment.Since the late 1950s rhythm and blues had been theheart and soul of black popular music.Over the course of that pe-riod, radio programmers, industry executives, successive generations of artists, the music press, and a legion of fans became part of an elab-orate machine.The R&B dynasty produced professional comfort and a small fortune for some, an evolving stable of stars for others, and considerable pleasure for generations of music lovers.But the world of R&B extended well beyond music.As Nelson George, author ofThe Death of Rhythm and Blues, writes: “R&B—and music in general—have been an integral part of a black community forged bycommon political, economic, and geographic conditions.” The ar-rival of hip hop not only threatened R&B music and the world it created, it also questioned for the first time in roughly four decades who and what kinds of sensibilities would define the most important cul-tural industry in black America: popular music.From the very beginning key sectors of the black music establish-ment shunned hip hop and the music it produced.The reaction inthe late 1980s and early 1990s of urban contemporary radio is a clear example.It was not uncommon in the late 1980s to hear “no rap”promos on radio formats that appealed to black audiences.From theperspective of the executives who ran urban contemporary radio,R&B was still preferred in the early 1990s.The resistance to rap was78
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