Where's the Eminem of the Green Party?

Ricardo Baca
Denver Post
Dec. 6, 2003 12:00 AM


This year's Grammy nominations could have been subtitled "When Harry Met Hip-Hop."

The guess here is that 2003 will always be remembered as the year when the masses met hip-hop. And the nominations only drove home that notion.

Hip-hop is long past its tipping point, of course, but that didn't stop Joe American from asking "who's Eminem?" 13 months ago when the release of 8 Mile had the rapper astride every medium possible. It also didn't stop an awe-struck music industry from stopping to take notice when, in October, the top-10 singles list on Billboard's charts was filled top to bottom with Black hip-hop artists.

Hip-hop is everywhere, but that didn't stop moviegoers from looking at Tupac Shakur with fresh eyes when the documentary Tupac: Resurrection hit theaters last month.

And it didn't stop the recent Onion humor Web site headline - "OutKast Universally Accepted," bannered over a picture of Andre 3000 - from ringing with a biting resonance.

But you've been learning, haven't you? You may not know the Roots or Blackalicious, but you've heard of that Jay-Z guy.

This is a good thing. Of the top 13 Grammy-nominated acts this year, only three - Ricky Skaggs, Evanescence and the late Warren Zevon - aren't rooted in hip-hop and R&B.

Hip-hop, both the music and the lifestyle, have slowly taken over the world in which you live. Television, magazines, radio and video games have all jumped aboard. The older public and the music industry are among the last to recognize the genre's immense output and goliath success, but that's changing, too.

While it appears that hip-hop owns this year's Grammys outright, rock and roll wasn't completely edged out in the major categories.

One of the five artists nominated for record of the year (Coldplay) and two of those nominated for top album (White Stripes and Evanescence) aren't hip-hop. Eminem and his two co-writers on the 8 Mile theme Lose Yourself are the only hip-hop-heads to crack the song-of-the-year honor, which goes to the writers of a track.

Still, you can't ignore the numbers, and when all of your top-nominated artists - Beyoncé, OutKast, Pharrell Williams and Jay-Z - are hip-hoppers, you have to take notice.

Each of those artists landed six nominations Thursday. When last year's nominations were announced in January (the process was moved up a month this year), we saw eight artists heading the pack with five nominations each. Two were hip-hoppers, and two were R&B types. The others had names like Springsteen and Avril, Norah and Sheryl

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