ABSTRACT
The crucial hip-hop artists of this new millennium are aligned along the interior arc of that pendulum: introspective, local and idiosyncratic. The sometimes obscure, free-ranging lyrical disquisitions of The Roots' Black Thought are characteristic of this new movement, as are the evanescent, free-verse lyrical rambles of UK rapper, The Streets. The dominant hip-hop artists of the first few years of the twenty-first century are tense but restrained, their lyrical forays recontained within the persistent metaphorical landscape of guns and sexual innuendo, and they boast familiar rhymes and familiar subjects. Hip-hop has gone from being invisible to visible to ubiquitous, and in the rearguard of that ubiquity new forces of combination and resistance yet lurk, declaring that upon these fragments they will shore new ruins, new modalities, new possibilities. Evoking those movements, Paul D. Miller situates himself equally in the 'Afrological' and contemporary theory, a postmodern griot who doesn't have to 'change keys to play these'.
