White fans no longer listen to hip-hop on the sly or surreptitiously rhyme in front of the mirror; they form bands and rhyme on MTV. Pop's most imaginative artist, Beck, works on the assumption that hip-hop is his generation's folk music. Rock's fiercest guitarist, Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello, proudly mimics a stylus wrecking vinyl. Hanson's 1997 sandbox smash "MMMBop" was livened up by a DJ scratch. The pervasive slanguage of hip-hop is not just a goofy racist punch line anymore, it's simply how kids communicate.

Sometime after the death of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, the hip-hop kid--oversize clothes, syrupy slang, skateboard double-parked outside--emerged as the '90s embodiment of youthful white alienation. And, as a result, he's become a flashpoint for politicians and media cynics who insist on pushing the same tired teen "analysis": Numbed and perverted by a Godless barrage of abusive imagery via music, television, film, Sega, and the Internet, otherwise well-adjusted Billys and Beckys have sunk to new depths of antisocialism. They emulate gang members and shoot up school cafeterias. They wear baggy pants and have unprotected sex.

But when you break the racial encryption of this rant, you face an unavoidable reality--millions of white kids are defining themselves through nonwhite culture. Demographically, there's no mystery; the terms majority and minority are busily playing musical chairs. Between 1970 and 1990, the white population in the United States dropped almost 10 percent, while the black population rose slightly, the Hispanic population doubled, and the population of Asians and other nonwhites tripled. The nonwhite middle class is now a substantial suburban presence. Despite pressure to choose "black" or "white," Americans identify themselves more and more as mixed-race or biracial. Hip-hop, during this period, has mirrored the country's multicultural shift, becoming a pitched battle of race and identity. Emerging as the radical (re)vision of pop-rock that punk never managed, hip-hop is the crucial cultural influence for Generation X and beyond. The music-industry numbers are undeniable. According to a SoundScan study, 71 percent of rap music is purchased by white consumers, and R&B (which includes rap) was the top-selling musical genre overall in 1997. Hip-hop style is pop style--Teenage Research Unlimited reported in October '97 that baggy pants were "in" for 78 percent of white teen-agers--and Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, and other fashion designers court hip-hop's imprimatur. From Nike to Sprite, sampling and selling black cool to white consumers is the get-rich-quick scheme of the decade.

For the original black and Latino b-boys who scraped out an urban existence 25 years ago in the South Bronx and Manhattan, hip-hop culture meant break dancing, graffiti writing, MC-ing, and DJ-ing--along with a flashy, seat-of-the-pants fashion sense. Today's white hip-hoppers, with considerably greater resources, attach an endless array of lifestyle statements (tattooing, skateboarding, snowboarding, body piercing) and entrepreneurial projects (fashion, rave promotion, Web design). Their subcultural diversity is bewildering. There's the slam-dancing mooks with their buffed-up chests and testosterone poisoning; the immaculately made-up chicas with their go-on-girl strut; the ska-crazed buds with their bong hits and sunburned tattoos; the rave aesthetes with their selfless mysticism; the cooler-than-you indie-underground geeks with their vinyl jones and extensive mailing lists. And this is a wildly superficial list.