"We've been told for years now that hip-hop has arrived, that it is now the dominant genre in the music business, in much the same way that every day for the last three months an article has appeared somewhere with the news that Howard Dean is on his way to becoming the front-runner in the race for the Democratic nomination. Hopefully the Billboard stat* and the Grammy nominations list** will act as Al Gore's endorsement did, and put to rest some of the novelty."

I'm not going to touch the Dean thing (I don't know near enough, though most of the response I did see, i.e. on ILE, was of the "Al Gore did what?" variety) but "novelty"? "NOVELTY"?! How long do you have to have your head in the sand to have not figured out that hip-hop was the dominant music in America (and elsewhere, though again I'm not quite sure to what degree and/or where exactly) for, oh, almost a decade now? I'll leave it at that, because as Mike Daddino puts it, "Ragging on terrible salon.com articles at this late stage of its living death is sorta like kicking puppies." MONDAY UPDATE: Wow--clearly I wrote all that before reading the thing in its entirety. Jeee-zus. This guy writes like a cross between Graydon Carter and Ed Felien. [Li'l reference for all y'all Minneapolis folks.]

*On October 4, each of Billboard's top ten pop singles were by black artists.
**Overwhelmingly dominated by hip-hop this year.