8 Mile

In rap, there is no room for reinvention. Christina Agiullera can produce one album as a choir girl and the next as a sewer fiend and that's well and good because in the pop world, reinvention of the artist is a survival technique. Rap, by nature, needs to be authentic. The medium is so inherently angry and arrogant and spirited that the slightest twinge of phoniness, whether in lyric or in street-credibility, will corrupt the music irreparably. You must rap who you are and lesson one is, as the mantra goes,” keep it real”. If you reinvent, you acknowledge falsehood, and all is lost. Reinvention is admitting, “I was once like this, but now (because I sense what the public might want) I am completely different.” When Snoop and Dre come back after a hiatus and profess: We're doing the same stuff we did back when The Chronic made you bounce