'YOU'VE COME a long way, baby" should have been the headline when Time magazine put hip-hop icon Lauyrn Hill on the cover. Hill hip hopped her way into the history books on Wednesday, after she won 5 grammy awards, a first for a female artist. Hill took album of the year and best new artist for her unusual blend of hip hop and R&B.

It's the 20th anniversary of the year hip-hop culture went public, and the Time cover showed the importance of a style that started in the inner city and spread across America and throughout the world. This has taken place largely due to the influence of rap music, the core of hip-hop.

Rap has influenced dress, talk and attitude. It became the top-selling musical style in 1998 (81 million CDs, tapes and records). It overtook country music (72 million CDs, tapes and records), the longtime leader in music sales in America.

Hip-hop has also been propelled into the larger American corporate culture. Hip-hop sells. It sells Nike shoes, Sprite soda and Tommy Hilfiger clothing. It exemplifies "cool." Hip-hop art (graffiti) has been embraced by some top art galleries. Break-dancing tours have been sponsored by fashion designers such as Calvin Klein. Some have criticized the popular embrace of hip-hop, but this is shortsighted considering how far hip-hop has risen from its humble beginnings. In the early 1970s, a collage of styles was fused into a culture. DJs in the Bronx played Jamaican dub beats and other obscure records. Masters of ceremony "toasted" or rapped over records played at neighborhood block parties, where former gang members would break-dance against each other. In 1979, the Sugar Hill Gang released the first widely heard version of rap music - "Rappers Delight." Using the hit "Good Times" as background music, the Sugar Hill Gang rapped rhymes about partying, having fun, having money and eating chicken and collard greens. This party single lasted for 15 straight minutes, which would be unheard of today where a 4-minute single is the norm, but it changed a local fad into a nationwide phenomenon.

"When they first came out, people were like, 'Who WERE these guys?'" said Davey D. of San Francisco radio station KMEL. He was a 13-year-old in the Bronx at the time. "Nobody had ever heard of the Sugar Hill Gang until the record came out. They were just kind of put together to capitalize on the rap trend in the streets."

And that single did capitalize on it. "Rapper's Delight" stayed on Billboard's charts for 12 weeks. The National Association of Record Merchandisers voted it the single of the year. Before that moment, hip-hop was strictly a New York thing, but since that bomb dropped, rap music and hip-hop street culture grew into an industry.

The music has created careers for thousands of men and women who record, write and produce music or manage and book performers. It fed the boot-strap capitalistic mentality of Carl Williams, a young man from Brooklyn who had an idea to make clothes that matched the style on the streets. In 1997, Williams' 8-year-old company, Karl Kani, had sales of $43 million. You can hear hip-hop in snappy phrases such as "getting your groove on" or "you go, girl." According to Jesse T. Shiedlower, a senior editor of the Random House Historical Dictionary of Slang, many of the words used in hip-hop will make their way into the slang dictionary, then into the standard dictionary. "Words like 'diss' will get picked up on," he said. You see hip-hop culture in films such as "Bullworth," and you read it in books like Tom Wolfe's latest novel, "A Man in Full." You see it in the political activism of hip-hop groups like Black Star and the Beastie Boys in their "Free Mumia" and "Free Tibet" concerts. You see hip-hop demonized by politicians like Dan Quayle and Bill Clinton. Hip-hop is unavoidable. There was a time when people thought it was a fad, like disco music, but hip-hop has stood the test of time - I hope for years to come.

Lee Hubbard is a Bay Area writer.
His e-mail address is superle@hotmail.com