This episode contains music with explicit lyrics.

Coming out of the violence of the 90s, rap was firmly commercial.

It was becoming Americas and the world's pop music. But with that commercial

success, rap, or at least the rap topping the charts, had begun to largely shed its political

messaging in favor of music that was mostly about the trappings of success, sex, partying, and money.

Hip-hop was headed into the bling era,

after the cash money millionaires, a New Orleans supergroup

that included a young little Wayne who popularized the term

in the hit song, Bling, Bling by rapper B.G,

an anthem to Affluence.

There's also still not a player by Big Pun.

The music video starts with the crew taking a helicopter to the club and the lyrics pick up from there.

Hot tub, popin' bubble-lid, rubbing your spot love, I just mean to punish me, but it don't stop.

Watch the pun get wicked when I stop.

Even will be like, don't stop, get it, get it.

This kind of rap was cocky.

It was fun.

It was capitalist.

And it was where the industry was headed.

But the universe of hip-hop at the tail end of the 90s was still one in flux,

finding its voice in this post-pac post-big moment in 1998 a bridge year for the music a song like back that ass up by

juvenile with a dirty south beat perfect to shake you behind to or at least get it up off the wall

...