In May, when a rapper was invited to perform at the White House as part of an evening devoted to poetry, it was met with predictable conservative outrage. That the kerfuffle was over Common, the most neutered of all rappers, only underscored the bad faith beneath the squawking. Still, the episode was a reminder that rap — the idea alone — can still rattle nerves well into its middle age.

This week Common ruffled different conservative feathers when Maya Angelou, who appears on his new album, “The Dreamer/The Believer” (Warner Brothers), expressed dissatisfaction that the song she contributed to also features Common’s use of a certain racial epithet.

Only conservatives of a certain generation could mistake Common for a firebrand of any sort, though in the context of contemporary hip-hop, his interest in uplift is what really makes him a dissenter.

Two decades ago, at the outset of his career, those interests didn’t set Common apart from his peers; it made him a man of the times. Socially conscious hip-hop was a viable career choice then, a tradition that’s been more or less killed, rendered irrelevant with hip-hop’s pervasive crossover success.

If there were a time for its comeback, though, it would be now, in the face of occupations, of continued recession, of deflated idealism. And yet current economic realities have made almost no mark on hip-hop this year. Preaching, which would have been a perfectly acceptable mode in the 1990s, would likely be all but ignored in today’s hip-hop.

Instead the battle lines have been redrawn in novel ways, and message-driven hip-hop has begun to find a home again, not just on the fringes, but near the center of the genre. Nowhere is that clearer than in the success of Kendrick Lamar, a young rapper from Compton, Calif., and a vivid stylist who’s succeeding possibly in spite of his thoughtfulness. Last summer, he released “Section.80” (Top Dawg), a startlingly beautiful album that recalls the early- to mid-’90s semiactivist jazz-influenced hip-hop of Digable Planets and, crucially, the Los Angeles underground heroes Freestyle Fellowship, who took their social concerns and created new ways of rapping to reflect them.

In a coincidence of scheduling on Monday night, Common performed at the Highline Ballroom and Mr. Lamar at S.O.B.’s, showing the contrast between being socially minded then and now. There’s an ease to Common’s presence that’s inclusionary; his vision is earnest and open. “I’m to hip-hop what Obama is to politics,” Common raps on his new album — groan. Righteousness is not its own aesthetic reward.

There was something wily about Mr. Lamar during his performance, though. He’s an enlightened thinker, but hardly a preacher. Nor is he flamboyant in his beliefs. What he is is committed and savvy, an artist putting his ample charisma in the service of greater ideas. Sometimes he’s straightforward — his song “No Make-Up (Her Vice)” is the sort of empowerment anthem that will be familiar to any longtime fan of Common’s romantic side. But the songs that received the most enthusiastic response during this show were the difficult ones, like “A.D.H.D.”

Mr. Lamar evidently enjoys the challenge of bridging worlds. His highest-profile moment this year was probably his arresting guest verse on Drake’s “Take Care,” on which he talks about the seductions of fame, about needing a strong backbone to hold onto one’s principles, and about ultimately giving in. He’s a pragmatist and an agitator all in one. He accepts the system as it is, and tries to use it to his advantage. That doesn’t necessarily mean that social conscience and financial success are more reconcilable now than they have been in the past, but rather that the ways that they intersect have become trickier and more subtle.

That’s less true for the older generation that is still making vital music. “The Dreamer/The Believer” is Common’s sharpest album in years. Same goes for “Undun” (Def Jam), the Roots’ new album, which feels like their most purposeful and vibrant work since their mid-’90s heyday. But other recent albums with a strong through-line of social awareness don’t feel mired in it in the same way as these albums.

Consider Stalley’s lush mixtape “Lincoln Way Nights: Intelligent Trunk Music,” which was accessible enough to get him signed to Rick Ross’s Maybach Music Group label, or “Pl3dge” (Grind Time), the strong album by Killer Mike on which he waxes on about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Oscar Grant and the fragility of the American dream while still retaining the bullying flow that made him famous alongside Outkast a decade ago.

This year has also seen some striking standalone songs, including the police-brutalitycentric take on the Strokes’ “New York City Cops” by Himanshu Suri of Das Racist, and also the gripping Digable Planets’ “Letter to My Son” by the Memphis rapper Don Trip, a harrowing first-person narrative about a family broken by mistrust, anger and the legal system. (The bracing YouTube original dates to 2009, and in it Don Trip sets up the camera himself — it almost feels parodic — but now it’s a full-bodied major label release, with Cee Lo Green singing the soaring chorus.) It belongs alongside the great hip-hop parenting songs like Ed O.G. & Da Bulldogs’ “Be a Father to Your Child” and Xzibit’s “Foundation.”

Over the summer the blog Dirty Glove Bastard compiled a great Don Trip anthology, “DGB Presents the Unofficial Best of Don Trip,” full of thoughtful, deeply felt drug-dealer narratives, locating street economies as part of wider, more pervasive economic and social concerns, a conclusion Don Trip appears to reach with more regret than, say, the Clipse or Young Jeezy.

Whether Don Trip can be more than an Internet favorite remains to be seen. It’s notable that the last couple of generations of hip-hop stars have been curiously detached from conversations about social issues almost altogether. That’s created a small groundswell of resentment, as seen last summer with the release of “Watch the Throne,” Jay-Z and Kanye West’s collaborative album, which triggered conversations about how the two stars weren’t taking their sociopolitical obligations seriously, even while the album contained some of the most savvy work either of them has ever recorded.

But though Mr. West and Jay-Z have both spoken openly about their politics from time to time, they belong to the category of celebrity for whom equality and progress are important subjects, but are measured in terms that might rattle agitpoppers — financial to be sure, but also in range of influence and cultural pervasiveness.

The stars that immediately followed them, Lil Wayne and Drake, often feel detached from politics altogether. Lil Wayne is a wordplay obsessive, and his protégé Drake digs deep within, but typically has blinders on to the rest of the world — a politics of one.

That’s more or less what Common took Drake to task for on “Sweet,” from his new album, in which he effectively called him soft. Not politically insensitive or misogynistic, or anything else that requires taking a stand — just soft. It’s a quixotic choice for Common, whose last high-profile squabble was with Ice Cube, more than 15 years ago, in a face-off with obvious sides and agendas.

But focusing on Drake is a blatant case of parental anxiety, the pot calling the kettle black. An elder on uncertain footing in the hip-hop world, Common looks around for an enemy he recognizes, and finds Drake, who early in his career — before his breakthrough “So Far Gone” mixtape — showed the clear influence of Common and the Native Tongues.

Even now Drake and Common aren’t so different. “Look What You’ve Done,” from “Take Care,” is Drake’s tender celebration of his mother and his uncle, a moving declaration of the importance of family. In intensity and mood it’s reminiscent of the “Pop’s Rap” songs that Common used to close his early albums with, on which his father would hold forth for a few minutes over jazz piano. Maybe Common forgot: All politics is personal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/arts/music/social-minded-hip-hop-makes-a-comeback.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=arts