Wynter, L. (2002) p.189

But going on twenty years later, hip-hop is still consolidating its hold while evolving within the mainstream. The reason, argues marketing and demography writer Mark Spiegler, is because the roots of hiphop's cultural output are fundamentally different from those of a James Dean film in the 1950s or even a Beatles album in the 1960s. For all that they captured and inspired in their time, Dean's Rebel Without a Cause and the Beatles' Rubber Soul came down from studios. Hip-hop comes up from the streets for distribution by studios, and even then the culture is relentlessly self-aware, always checking itself against its own reality.

"Hip-hop springs from the experiences of young blacks living in cities," Spiegler wrote in 1996.6 "It's based on a real culture, giving it more permanence than earlier teen trends. People who want a part of hip-hop culture always have something new to latch on to, because the culture is always evolving." And as it evolves, the more Darwinian savvy marketers have learned to adapt in order to cash in.