It's popular, profitable and black.

Nov. 20, 2002 | Astrologers took note last week as a rare alignment graced their star charts. The auspicious sign: one Eminem, two No. 1 slots. This year's prince of hip-hop scored a pleasing symmetry, with the film "8 Mile" and its soundtrack album reigning atop the box-office charts and the Billboard charts in the same week.

In the marvel of a humanized Eminem, once just another angry thug, is yet another symmetry. The white rapper's transformation is hip-hop's, and in his race is the message that black music has gone mainstream. Eminem's character in "8 Mile" climbs out of his Detroit ghetto on the merit of his stylish flow alone, an achievement all the sweeter for a young white kid in a black man's world. And so is born the record industry's white knight, he who will carry the budding hip-hop genre farther and deeper into the heart of a mostly white target market. Yet as his roman � clef meditates on hip-hop's color barrier, Eminem's observers miss the fact that this exception proves the rule and that his genre is anything but budding. Hip-hop is all grown up. And now, as much as ever, it is by and about Black America.

Invented in the Bronx ghettos of the 1970s, the cultural form of hip-hop has found its target market in suburbs across America. From 1995 to 2001, the hip-hop market share boomed, increasing by 75 percent. (CD sales have sagged badly this year, but that's true across all musical genres.) This achievement was possible only because more than three-quarters of hip-hop record buyers were already white. Booming beyond music, hip-hop's biggest names are increasingly involved throughout the culture industries: fashion, TV, film and print. Twenty years after the Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" hit the pop charts, hip-hop has managed something rock 'n' roll never could: It's popular, profitable and black.