Various Artists: Wild Style — Original Soundtrack (Animal); Jenny Burton: In Black And White (Atlantic)

AS HIP-HOP, the rapping and scratching music of the break dancers, bounces out of the urban subculture and into the mainstream, it's reasonable enough to expect the music to suffer a certain amount of slickening up. But as these two albums so effortlessly demonstrate, that's okay, because hip-hop is such a flash-oriented aesthetic in the first place that "going commercial" seems likely only to sharpen its appeal.