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propriation of new musical technologies, hip hop is noisy, oral, and rhythmic, providing a soundtrack for life in a high-tech world of rapid transformation and turbulent change. Hip hop is also highly visual, creating its distinctive art form of graffiti and urban art, as well as fashion (B Boy, wild style, and ghetto street couture) that provides extremely strong visual imagery, which also serves as models of fashion and badges of cultural identity and belonging. Together, these forms provide a vivid hip hop spectacle, providing style, identity, Politics, and a way of life for individuals throughout the world. Rap is thus the voice and sound of hip hop culture while dance and bodily movement enact its rhythms and moves; graffiti inscribes spatial identity and presence and fashion provides subcultural style; music videos present a compendia of hip hop's sounds and images; and digitized multimedia furnish a sign of its migration into new cultural terrains and the next millennium. Encompassing style, fashion, and attitude, hip hop culture thus becomes a way of living, a genuine subculture and way of life, appropriate for the postmodern adventure. Indeed, rap embodies a postmodern aesthetic, absorbing every conc eivable musical style--R&B, funk, soul, reggae, techno, pop, house--while migrating to every national culture, local scene, and realm of culture. In turn, hip hop and rap have influenced all other musical styles and culture, involving a breaking down of boundaries between music, image, spectacle, and everyday life. Hence, rap is becoming the familiar soundtrack to postmodern technoculture, part of advertising, film and TV, and the new digital and multimedia culture. As it knocks down borders between musical styles, absorbing every conceivable type of music, rap crosses the national borders of the world becoming a key component of global culture. Rap is currently rocking the casbah and the ghetto, rolling across the mountains and the deserts, hopping across oceans, and becoming hip to cyberspace and the new technologies, bringing sound and attitude into digital space. Firmly ensconced in cyberspace and everyday life from London to Los Angeles, rap is becoming the flagship of the global popular, bringing style, attitude and voice to marginalized groups and hip entrepreneurs who package its sounds to a growing audience throughout the world. Hence, in the postmodern global cultural scene hip hop now rules. A dominant cultural form in many parts of the world, hip hop is hybridizing and localizing, producing new cultural matrices from Sao Paolo to San Francisco. Rap articulates the hip hop ethos and gives voice to the subcultures that are producing and circulating it. As a new and democratizing cultural force, rap levels the playing field, opening doors to new cultural players, circumventing the old guard and corporate sharks ready to pounce on and exploit all new alternative cultures. Circulating ideas, images, sound, and style, it is becoming central to the new multimedia global culture and is an expression of a multicultural world with no borders and limits. Given to excess, it explodes boundaries of good taste and cultural propriety, bringing a new loud, plebeian and disruptive ethos into the interstices of the mainstream, announcing a multicultural and potentially subversive presence, as well as vitality of marginalized culture in the new world (dis)order. An organic expression of urban hip hop culture, rap quickly became the