This episode contains music with explicit lyrics.

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

It was becoming America's and the world's pot music.

But with that commercial success, rap, or at least a rap top in the charts, had begun

to largely shed its political message and favor of music that was mostly about the trappings

of success, sex, parting, and money.

Hip hop was headed into the bling era.

After the cash money millionaires, a New Orleans supergroup that included a young low-wing

who popularized the term in hit song, Bling Bling, by rapper BG, and 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.

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-pock 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 your behind to or at least get it up off the wall.

Back That Ass Up occupied the same charts as a song like Brown Skin Lady by Black Star,

with its more G-rated salute to Black women, said to a slower, smoother rhythm.

But perhaps no single album or artist in that pivotal moment in hip hop spoke to the contradictions

of what the music was on the verge of, a struggle between consciousness and capitalism,

...