The ceremony for the 60th Annual Grammy Awards is Sunday, but already music's biggest TV night has made history.
For the first time, hip-hop artists dominate in the academy's top categories, including record, album and song of the year.
But that sound you're hearing isn't champagne corks popping in celebration. It's exasperated sighs that the Recording Academy only just discovered what the rest of the entertainment industry noticed back in the flip-phone era: Hip-hop, once an outlier, is now the status quo.
From Broadway's Hamilton to Hollywood's Straight Outta Compton to television's Atlanta, hip-hop's broad influence of American pop culture has defied countless predictions that a nervous white mainstream would never fully embrace a trend born out of the urban, black experience.
Consider hip-hop's television takeover. Today, rappers are not only backing films about the black experience, but they are creating, producing and starring in top-rated cable and network series and breaking out of music categories at film and television awards shows.
Atlanta creator and star Donald Glover -- who under his stage name, Childish Gambino, is up for five Grammys -- made history when he won a directing Emmy in September for his breakthrough FX comedy, a cable ratings success, about the everyday trials and tribulations of an aspiring hip-hop entrepreneur. No other black director had ever won an Emmy in the comedy category, and Glover was the first director since Alan Alda in 1977 to win for a comedy in which he also starred.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, who shattered records and expectations when his hip-hop musical Hamilton swept the 2016 Tonys, is now executive producing a forthcoming Showtime series, The Kingkiller Chronicle, based on characters from the fantasy books by Patrick Rothfuss.
And hitting Showtime this month was the already critically acclaimed The Chi from Master of None's Lena Waithe, the first black woman to win an Emmy for comedy writing, and hip-hop star Common, the first rapper to win an Emmy, Oscar, Grammy and Golden Globe. (Before Oprah and Meryl Streep, he gave what had been the Golden Globes' most inspirational speech -- "I am" -- delivered with the poetic rhythm of a rap when he and John Legend accepted the 2015 original song award for "Glory" in Ava DuVernay's civil rights drama "Selma.")
"I was surprised by it all," Common said about the accolades.
It was one of many in a string of "crossover surprises": Fox's hip-hop themed drama Empire became a surprise success with white audiences; soccer moms across America were surprised they couldn't stop humming Pharrell Williams' Happy in favor of something -- anything -- else; and a biopic about once-feared gangsta rap pioneers N.W.A, Straight Outta Compton, became a surprise hit at the box office.
The surprise, however, is that anyone was surprised.
"Hip-hop is the soundtrack of at least one, probably two generations now," says Common (aka Lonny Rashid Lynn Jr.), who is an executive producer on the Waithe-run series about everyday life on the South Side of Chicago.
Hip-hop is now part of our cultural DNA. Tupac Shakur, Lauryn Hill and Eminem are to a generation what the Beatles and Stones were to boomers -- the artists of their youth.
And in some cases, the actors of today were the rappers of their parents' generation.
Ice-T, the once-controversial Cop Killer rapper whose breakthrough film role was in 1991's New Jack City, has played a sex crimes detective on NBC's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit since 2000. "If you're 17 now, that means I started when you were two," he said in the past. "So you don't have a reference point for me as a rapper. Your mother does, your father does ... ."
Rap, after all, was the genre that gave us TV and film personalities like Queen Latifah, Will Smith, LL Cool J, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Redman, Method Man and Tupac -- and we're not even into the 2000s yet. Their popularity would eventually give rise to more and more shows about or starring hip-hop figures.
Lee Daniels' Empire was the clearest example of hip-hop as a crossover bridge to break color barriers when it premiered on Fox in 2015 and obliterated conventional wisdom that a "black" drama was for black audiences. After all, why would an entire generation raised on Dr. Dre's The Chronic consider a show about a hip-hop family dynasty as anything but meant for them?
Ice Cube (aka O'Shea Jackson) alone launched an entire genre of black comedies for the post-Run DMC generation in the Friday and Barbershop series. The stone-cold gangsta reinvented himself as everyone's dad in the Are We There Yet? films.
Ice Cube and Dr. Dre co-produced their own story in "Straight Outta Compton." "NCIS: Los Angeles" star and five-time Grammy host LL Cool J now co-produces his own game show, Lip Sync Battle.
Queen Latifah (aka Dana Owens) and Will Smith also created their own production companies after experiencing success on their respective hit series, Living Single and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Netflix recently teamed up with Smith for its biggest gamble to date, Bright, a streaming version of a Hollywood blockbuster. Though critically panned, the production was streamed an astonishing 11 million times over three days when it was released last month and has been greenlit for a sequel.
Demand is high for the cachet, the perspective and, of course, the money that a rap celebrity and elder statesman like Jay-Z brings to a production. Selma and Wrinkle in Time director Ava DuVernay recently worked with Mr. Bey for his Family Feud music video, a short released on his streaming service, Tidal.
Reality TV has served as a major stepping stone for hip-hop stars transitioning from music to TV -- and beyond.
Let's face it, when Martha & Snoop's Potluck Dinner Party is renewed for a second season (which kicked off last year), a barrier has not only been broken, it's been entirely erased. "I don't know who's going to be more fried by the end of this show," joked the perfect hostess with the "Gin & Juice" rapper in the first season.
VH1's reality show Love & Hip-Hop gave us Cardi B. Surreal Life and Strange Love made Public Enemy's Flavor Flav a household name 20 years after he was last a household name. Run's House and, yes, even The Vanilla Ice Project, a home improvement show, were canaries in a coal mine for the acceptance of the brash likes of Nicki Minaj on Middle America's go-to show, American Idol.
Rappers who are used to saying it all -- unedited, with abandon and on the fly -- make for the best and most unpredictable reality stars. As for scripted television and film, the tradition of storytelling at the base of rap as far back as Kurtis Blow and the Sugarhill Gang is what makes hip-hop so attractive to narrative-hungry mediums.
Says Common, "rappers are storytellers, and that is a timeless tradition no matter who is watching or listening." And clearly, this year, the Grammys finally are.
Style on 01/23/2018