Don't Know Why Norah Jones Is Hot? Critics of Hip-Hop Do
By Jody Rosen

March 3, 2004

Norah Jones' "Feels Like Home" is at the top of Billboard's album chart, where it lodged last month after selling more than a million copies in its first week of release, one of the best one-week sales records of all time. For the last few years, the music business has been dogged by sluggish CD sales and preoccupied with the threat of Internet file-sharing. Now the industry has found an unlikely savior: a self-effacing 24-year-old piano-playing balladeer — a kind of anti-Britney Spears — who rarely raises her singing voice above a whisper, showed up to collect a bagful of Grammys in 2003 wearing a dress from Target and specializes in jazz and country-tinged songs that are decades out of date.

…But what exactly is troubling these millions of middle-aged listeners who seek solace in the music of a woman young enough to be their daughter? Is it the war in Iraq? The sputtering economy?

A better answer may be found elsewhere on the pop charts. Jones' was not the only Billboard milestone last week: For only the second time in history, all of the Top 10 singles were by African American artists. More precisely: All of the songs were by hip-hop performers. A quarter of a century after the American mainstream first encountered hip-hop's radical revision of the pop-song form — replacing sung verses and traditional instrumentation with syncopated speech and dense, machine-generated rhythms — the genre's conquest of hit radio is complete.