Christopher Holmes Smith, in ST 77 (2003), charts the rise of the hip-hop mogul --the young, black, male multimillionaire -- whose commercial viability derives from the strategic deployment of a personal biography tailored to the marketplace, as he secures sales from people who may well share his hometown but not his close ties to the nation's wealthy elite. This familiar trope -- the rags to riches triumph of an outlaw, redeemed -- has a particular resonance for a generation born in the wake of social movements that created unprecedented opportunities for education, employment, and civic engagement. But as much as his (at times, her; but, usually, his) profit potential, the rapper's public persona is structured by specific techniques for framing and narrating the past. Consequently, the stage is set for scholarship on hip-hop that is likely to reframe the debates in which this genre has been enmeshed for the past few decades. At the risk of contradicting all scholarly work, journalistic accounts, and even what practitioners, themselves, usually say about hip-hop, I would like to tender the proposition that it did not arise organically in the late 1970s. Hip-hop is, instead, an artifact of the late 1980s/early 1990s.