E-Mail This Article to a Friend ‘Grey’ areas A mixed-up year for hip-hop BY FRANKLIN SOULTS

Hip-hop started this year with an ending. In November 2003, Jay-Z released The Black Album, a disc whose meta-meaningful title was intensified by the rap superstar’s announcement that it would be his last. Although the album featured some of hip-hop’s biggest producers, it felt rushed, as if it were scampering around a musical dead end. Jay-Z seemed to agree when he unexpectedly released an a cappella version for anyone to "remix the hell out of." In February, DJ Danger Mouse obliged with The Grey Album, a combination of Jay-Z’s Black Album raps with backing tracks squeezed from a sacred rock, the Beatles’ "White Album."

Concept doesn’t get any higher than that. So it’s no surprise that the concept outshone the music. Still, head-turning cuts like "What Can I Say" underscored the staleness of mainstream hip-hop, the unnecessary distance between black and white music, and the obsolescence of hard, fast lines between rap and rock. As if that weren’t enough, The Grey Album led to a cottage industry of similarly styled mash-ups, from The Slack Album, which took on Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted, to Jay-Zeezer: The Black and Blue Album, which did it to Weezer’s "Blue Album."

Of course, black-on-white mash-ups are nothing new, and the Jay-Z remix frenzy had as much to do with computers and copyright law as with the Black and "White" albums, or with blacks and whites. But it also confirmed how large hip-hop was living while also suggesting that the largeness has its limits. And sure enough, whereas the preceding year had mostly been about hip-hop’s successes (think 50 Cent and OutKast), 2004 turned out to be mostly about the limitations, as signaled by a series of commercial and artistic flops.

The Beastie Boys’ ballyhooed comeback came and went. Eminem started out with a "Mosh" against Bush but then acknowledged he was just a "Toy Soldier" with a bomb of an album (Encore, on Aftermath) strapped to his loins. As of this writing, even Nelly’s double releases Sweat and Suit (Universal) seem headed for the cleaners. In some ways, as my friend and fellow critic Jason Bracelin suggested, it might have been a good thing that big stars dimmed and bling-bling pretenders from Fabolous to Chingy got called on their cash advances. Then again, overdue regime change doesn’t always work out, as we learned on November 3. A month earlier, I had joined 15,000 Clevelanders to see the R. Kelly/Jay-Z "Best of Both Worlds Tour," which came to town one night after the sold-out Springsteen/R.E.M. "Vote for Change" show at a 20,000-seat arena just a few blocks away. In the wake of the way concrete politics made old rock new again at "Vote for Change," the hip-hop show’s hermetically sealed fantasy of bling, skin, and pity for dead superstars might as well have put "The Best of Both Worlds" on a different planet, and a dying one at that.

"Conscious," underground hip-hop wasn’t always much realer, even when it was much better. The most widely praised underground artist of the year was MF Doom, a thirtysomething rapper who shifted his disguises as prolifically as he dropped internal rhymes. His Madvillain disc, Madvillainy (Stones Throw), was a collaboration with producer Madlib that was like DJ Shadow crossed with the Firesign Theater and then slowly mixed in a blender until totally meaningless, a concoction of pure comic, cosmic, and sonic pleasure. Elsewhere, formerly political rappers Mos Def and Talib Kweli hedged their bets, the three white girls in Northern State lost cred, brilliant original Jean Grae spun in place, De La Soul reduced greatness to a grind, Brit rapper Dizzee Rascal expanded his original sound until it swallowed him whole, Brit rapper the Streets wrote a musical novella, and everywhere the political collapsed into the personal.

The one rapper who had the hooks, ideas, and sheer willpower to blow it back up again was Kanye West, whose frank and funny debut, The College Dropout (Roc-A-Fella), might be the greatest rap album since the Fugees’ The Score. Whereas 50 Cent just fulfilled an outlaw stereotype and OutKast split their anxieties in two, Kanye West fed the history of black music through a rap template and classic black/American survival story, finding strength in family and the church, release in sex and rebellion, and pain in his rising expectations. As it so happens, the Chicago rapper/producer was given his break by Jay-Z. The College Dropout garnered 10 Grammy nominations; the day after these were announced, Jay-Z was named president of Def Jam, the highest industry position ever held by a rapper. And last week, Jay-Z scored a #1 album with a mash-up disc with Linkin Park. To paraphrase: you get up to get down.