Hill country

The rap on the Grammys

by Alex Pappademas

Lauryn Hill (center)

Last week, when Time magazine crowned Lauryn Hill "First Lady of the Hip-Hop Nation," a cover-photo caption identified her as "Lauryn Hill . . . killing us softly with her songs, to the tune of 10 Grammy nominations." No female artist has ever racked up that many Grammy nods in a single year, which is an impressive achievement any way you slice it.

Actually, given hip-hop's uneasy history with the Grammys, maybe it's more like a triumph. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, or NARAS, didn't issue a Best Rap Song Grammy until 1989. The first award went to DJ Jazzy Jeff and his partner, a fresh-faced Fresh Prince, who won for the pre-SoundScan crossover smash "Parents Just Don't Understand," beating out L.L. Cool J, Kool Moe Dee, Salt n' Pepa, and JJ Fad. But when NARAS announced that the rap award wouldn't be presented during that year's telecast, ostensibly because of time constraints, the duo boycotted the show.

The artist formerly known as the Fresh Prince is up for another Grammy this year. Along with a clutch of platinum-certified rappers, including Hill, Will Smith appears on 1999 Grammy Rap Nominees (Elektra/Grammy Recordings), a snappily titled collection of (you guessed it) most of this year's rap Grammy contenders. A companion piece to Elektra's more mainstream 1999 Grammy Nominees collection (featuring the Dixie Chicks, Eric Clapton, Shania, and Celine), the Grammy rap disc is the first of its kind, commemorating a year when rap album sales rose by 32 percent, knocking country out of the box and cracking the 80-million-sold mark for the first time.

Since Master P probably appeared on 79 million of those 80 million records, the fact that he's up for nothing this year is a little weird. So is the distribution of Lauryn Hill's nominations. She's up for a bunch of pop and R&B awards and only one rap prize. That's NARAS for you -- even though hip-hop's become a force to be reckoned with, both creatively and commercially, it's still subject to Grammy Logic, the inexplicable laws of a music-awards show for parents who just don't understand.

And the nominees are:

Best Rap Solo Performance. I love the capering-caterpillar bass line on Lauryn's "The Lost Ones," the Latin brass on Wyclef Jean's "Gone till November" still gives me goosebumps, and the way the kid's voice cracks in Jay-Z's "Hard Knock Life (The Ghetto Anthem)" is starting to get to me too. But this prize belongs to Will Smith and "Gettin' Jiggy wit It," the car-radio single that made red lights fun again. Inexplicable omission: Big Punisher's "Still Not a Player." Was I the only one who spent summer '98 imagining Pun ("I ain't a player, I just crush a lot") finding true love with pop princess Jennifer Paige ("It's just a crush, a little crush?").

Best Rap Duo or Group. The Beastie Boys' robot roll call "Intergalactic" was a rock-radio staple, so the firm of Horshack, Epstein, and Barbarino are the team to beat here, barring a "Ghetto Supastar"/Pras Michel groundswell. Jermaine Dupri's "Money Ain't a Thing" features a deftly smug Jay-Z verse ("I been spendin' hundreds since they had small faces"), but it still sounds the way a rented limo smells. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen of Steely Dan didn't take kindly to the wholesale sampling of their "Black Cow" by Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz for "Deja Vu (Uptown Baby)," and they successfully sued for full writing credit -- as a Steely Dan song, it's better than "Green Earrings" and nowhere near as dope as "Do It Again." Reason to root for Outkast's foreboding backwoods cyber-funk jam "Rosa Parks": Outkast's Dre dresses like a guy who cruises sporting-goods outlets with Dr. Teeth from the Muppet Show band, and I can't wait for his take on "creative black tie."

Best Rap Album. This category snubs good-to-the-last-drop full-lengths like Lauryn Hill's Miseducation Of . . . (Ruffhouse/Columbia) and Outkast's Aquemini (LaFace/Arista) in favor of Mase's huggable Harlem World (Bad Boy/Arista), Jermaine Dupri's Life in 1472 (So So Def/Columbia), and A Tribe Called Quest's The Love Movement (Jive), a farewell album that turned into a long, long, long goodbye. I'd like to see Big Punisher's underrated Capital Punishment (Loud) come from behind, but Jay-Z's In My Lifetime Vol. 2 (Roc-A-Fella) will probably clean up, on the strength of "Hard Knock Life" and the irresistible he-said/she-said electroboogie of "Can I Get A . . . "

In a category full of weak albums, 1999 Grammy Rap Nominees picks cuts that put the albums in the best possible light -- Dupri's "Sweetheart" turns Mariah Carey into a Latin-freestyle queen from the Shannon/Exposé mold, exhaling a sultry, scary love dedication over heavy-breathing drum programs. And Quest's "Find a Way" is an air-conditioned summer samba rescued from Love Movement, an album so conceptually spacy it was the hip-hop equivalent of medicine head.