I'd be interested to see where they fit into this analysis (which I think has a lot going for it but could also be accused of cherry picking). They're a lot newer than most of what's being reviewed here, but with a black lead singer, socially progressive lyrics, and extremely rhythmic songs, I'd love to read someone smarter than me try to piece together their role in this drama. Of course, whether it has a notable connection to trends in American black music is beyond me, but I'd be curious what they make our author here think about.

Mongolia has a history of more-or-less following Tibetan Buddhism that predates the modern Chinese state. So the cultural connection is real, though in her particular case may not be driving anything.

It was in fact Tibetan spiritual advisement to aggressive Mongol groups that the Chinese used to justify their early incursions into Tibet... or, something like that anyway. Melvyn Goldstein's has a lot of interesting details along those lines.

But yeah, it could have something to do with Orientalism too, I guess...

Sorry, Goldstein's book is The Snow Lion and the Dragon. Don't know what happened there.

You're going to claim that Luda's rhymes are more clever than Wayne's? On what planet? Some of the things said in this article are true, but that places major strain on your credibility as a reviewer.

That's what I would have said if I wasn't so insulted by the Lil' Wayne dis.

What is the most infuriating to me about all of this is just how frequently people who don't really pay very close attention think they know everything that's happening in hip-hop. I don't know about our illustrious author, but the friends of mine who don't really like hip-hop these days and pine for the golden age... they don't really listen to that much new hip-hop.

Oh, they're not speaking from a place of total ignorance, they hear some stuff here and there, and they make fairly reasonable inferences from that. But do they display any doubt about whether or not they can speak authoritatively for the entire genre at this point? No. And I'm not even talking about really underground stuff or whatever -- I don't even think people who say that all the hip-hop that makes it on the radio sucks are paying close enough attention to say that, because there is some pretty decent stuff on the rotation at hip-hop stations, sometimes. What they hear are the mega-anthems, the stuff that gets driven into the ground by playing 24/7. Dare I ask when that music has ever been good in any genre? These people probably care what albums win grammies, it's absurd.

P.S. Soulja Boy, and a number of singles like that are the kind of fairly stupid, incredibly fun song that many of these same people would love if it were old or guitar-driven. Think Journey's "More than a feeling" or even "Mr. Brightside" by The Killers in a more recent vein, or any number of Snoop and/or Dre tracks from back in the day. I love those songs, sometimes, but I don't take very many of them seriously. There's always been a place for that, and there always will be.

I checked the full study, and the argument that it's alcohol-fueled, while plausible, appears to me to be based on a misreading of the UK's supposed dominance of the study, which is not the case if you look closer. Here are a few details:

1) Finland was the only Scandinavian country included in the study.

2) The UK rates were pretty durn close the rates in places like Germany, the U.S., Australia, the Netherlands, etc. I'm not trying to claim that those other countries don't have drinking problems, but their cultural similarity seems more important to me.

If we assume that the rest of Scandinavia is similarly high, which may be dicey but fits most accounts I come across, then I think we're left with a pretty clear picture looking at Europe that Scandinavia rates the highest, followed by most of the rest of Northern and Eastern Europe with no clear pattern, followed by the historically Catholic countries. The British settler colonies (U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand at least) are reasonably close

To the me the clear outliers from this pattern are Austria and New Zealand on the high side (not known for crazy binge drinking, particularly, as far as I know) and Canada on the surprisingly low side. Turkey also gets a nod for surprising me with how high it is, as it's right in the pack with Europe, but that may just spring from my relative ignorance about Turkey.

And as noted by a bunch of others, sample sizes are pretty low. But I think the emphasis on how high the UK was really just comes from the fact that this came from a UK paper.