Adult-contemporary rap

Some decades ago, rock'n'roll was born. It was the more or less natural result of the rise of consumer mass media and the emergence of a large demographic of teenagers with pocket money. As such, it was about teenage rebellion, about greasing one's hair and wearing leather jackets, about high-school crushes and provocative hip-swaying dancing. The oldies saw it as a threat to decency and protested it, which made the teenagers all the more eager to identify with it.

Some decades later, those teenagers became middle-aged, many with well-paying white-collar jobs and more grown-up tastes to spend their discretionary income on. Now a lot of them didn't graduate to classical music or even jazz, but maintained an interest in the rock genre; on the other hand, they weren't rebellious teenagers any more, but rather the voices of age and wisdom contrasting with hormonal brats of their own. So the recording industry invented adult-oriented rock; stuff like Michael Bolton and Bryan Adams, with all the staid conservatism of a genre that knows it's part of the status quo, not its overthrowing. (And then the Rolling Stones issued their own platinum credit card, but that's another story.)

In the past few decades, hip-hop has been one of the fastest growing musical genres; born in the inner cities of America and influenced by Jamaican sound systems and an ethic of improvisation, it has reached out into suburbia and the charts. And to an extent, it has been adopted into the mainstream; witness rappers like Will Smith, gangsta rap made with rebellious white kids in mind, and even hip-hop elements in manufactured boy/girl bands. However, that is still marketed at Generation Y.

The kids who grew up listening to Snoop Dogg and Ice Cube will, in their own time, grow up and become comfortable fourtysomethings with kids, mortgages and air-conditioned SUVs. As such, someone will have to formulate adult-contemporary rap so they have something to put on the car stereo when commuting to work, taking the kids to the equivalent of soccer practice, or just kvetching about how they can't understand the noise their kids are listening to.