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.H I P H O P M AT T E R SMaster P’s assault on the big chart came at the midway point ofthe year and signaled to Billboard that the state of American popular music was in the midst of a historic shift.Geoƒ Mayfield, a seniorwriter at Billboard, wrote: “A closer look at the numbers suggests that the genre has played a bigger role in the first half of this year than it did in the first six months of ’97.” Mayfield went on to report that inthe first half of 1997 eight rap albums had debuted in the big chart’stop ten.By comparison, seventeen rap titles debuted in the top ten in1998.While a majority of the rap albums that reached the top spotspent about one week in that position, the sustained presence of thegenre in the top ten throughout the year made a much more compre-hensive statement about the music’s popularity.Rap, along with filmsoundtracks, took home the honors in 1998 as the genre that col-lected the most weeks at number one.While rap occupied fifteenweeks in the top spot, motion picture soundtracks held on to the topspot for sixteen weeks.The soundtrack to the blockbuster movie Ti-tanic occupied the number one position for an incredible fifteen weeks.Nevertheless, once you accounted for the Titanic soundtrack, rap, in terms of chart-topping performance, was by far the mostdominant genre of the year.When DMX knocked Brooks from atop the Billboard 200 in Mayhis label, Def Jam, simply declared, “The streets have spoken.” Butmore than the streets had spoken.In reality, it was more like thestreets, the suburbs, and the entire world had spoken and what theyhad to say reverberated throughout the pop culture landscape.Still,despite all the noise rap music made in the first half of 1998, the hip-hop movement would have much more to say over the course of thenext six months.Hip hop’s widening sphere of influence reached far beyond the musicindustry.In September 1999 Advertising Age listed its “21 Brands To Watch In The 21st Century.” Listed alongside power brands like Mi-66 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]