WHEN he’s in town, Grandmaster Flash, the D.J. and music pioneer, likes to take his 9-year-old daughter, Christina, one of his six children, for an after-school snack near her home in the Bronx. One recent afternoon, they went to the Bay Plaza Shopping Center, in the shadow of Co-op City, and ate at their usual spot, Ponderosa Steakhouse.

“It’s usually pretty empty,” said Grandmaster Flash, born Joseph Saddler, “so I don’t have to go through the Flash thing.” To explain “the Flash thing,” he imitated a gushing fan: “I can remember back in 1975, when I bought you that grape soda! You were really thirsty.” He tries to remember these people, he said, “Because everybody likes to feel that they know you.” Especially in the Bronx, where Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five helped invent hip-hop in the 1970s.

Though he still keeps a home in the Bronx (as well as on Long Island), Grandmaster Flash, 50, spends most of the year on the road, D.J.ing parties and corporate events. He revisits his career in his new memoir, “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats,” written with David Ritz, the music biographer. The book also chronicles his former cocaine addiction, abusive relationships and fights with record labels; he compared working on it to being caught with his pants down. “I was crying, unearthing things,” Grandmaster Flash said. “It was absolutely therapeutic.”

“I’m a strong believer in meditation,” he added.

After dropping his daughter off at her home, Grandmaster Flash could not resist giving a tour of the streets and parks “where my turntable adventuring began,” as he put it. (That he was tooling around in his latest toy, a three-week-old black Cadillac Escalade Special Edition, with the radio blaring Hot 97, didn’t hurt.)

“This is all Flash territory, here,” he said at 168th Street and Boston Road. A few blocks away, he pointed out the domain of Kool Herc, a fellow D.J. and hip-hop progenitor. “He was the overlord,” he said. “You had to know people in order to go up in there.”

He pulled up to Tinton Avenue and 163rd Street. “We used to rope this off and do our block parties,” he said. “But the buildings didn’t look this lovely.” He got out of the car to examine a light post where he used to illegally jack electricity for his turntable. “Sometimes I got electrocuted, and it felt good.”

After getting a little lost in the old ‘hood, Grandmaster Flash arrived at Sylvia’s, the Harlem soul-food mecca, to meet his assistant, Shelina Parker, and his manager, Mark Green. Over a grilled chicken salad that he picked at (the Grandmaster is health conscious), they planned his schedule for the coming year.

At this point he has scratched nearly everywhere. “I want to go to — what’s that hot country with a lot of money? — Dubai,” he said. Corporate appearances that pay less than $10,000 are sniffed at.

It wasn’t long before he had a Flash moment. A Japanese tourist summoned the courage to approach him and said, “I was a D.J., I remember you from the Roxy.” Grandmaster Flash smiled and nodded curtly, pretending to remember.

ON Friday evening the Dominican singer Juan Luis Guerra, the Latin Recording Academy’s 2007 man of the year, will take the stage for a Madison Square Garden concert fronting his 16-piece band, 3 back-up singers and 4 dancers. If past New York shows are any indication, the crowd will be electrified by his anthemic merengues on the developing world’s problems and charmed by his metaphor-laced love ballads, singing along with virtually every word. But in a sense they’ll be doing it all in secret.

That is because Mr. Guerra sings in Spanish, rendering his lyrics largely incomprehensible to many New Yorkers, including plenty who love socially conscious lyrics and appreciate a fine turn of phrase.

“I’d love to be more skilled in English, to get songs like ‘Ojalá que Llueva Café’ into English,” Mr. Guerra said, citing the song about rural poverty that vaulted him to fame in 1989. “I’d love it if Americans could understand Dominican culture, Dominican metaphors.”

It is a vexing musical problem. Diplomats speak through interpreters, books are translated, movies are subtitled. But music jumps language barriers more awkwardly: the catchall term “world music” is in most cases shorthand for “music whose lyrics we can’t understand.” Mr. Guerra may have plenty of non-Spanish-speaking admirers — his current tour includes stops in Stockholm and Amsterdam — who love him for his gentle voice, catchy melodies, booming brass section and beguiling tropical rhythms but who have little idea what the songs are about.

That wouldn’t be so much of a problem if Mr. Guerra’s songs were of the “Bésame Mucho” variety, which (in case you didn’t know) means “Kiss Me a Lot.” But with Mr. Guerra’s songs people are actually missing something.

In an interview in Miami, where his tour started last week, Mr. Guerra, who is bearded and 6 foot 6, recounted explaining his songs to his English teacher in New York. “The song that most caught her attention was ‘Ojalá que Llueva Café,’ ” he said. “After I explained it to her, she said: ‘Americans have to hear this song. Sooner or later, they have to hear this song.’ She told me I had to find someone to translate it.”

Easier said than done. The gist of the first verse is this:

May it rain coffee in the countryside.

Let a downpour of cassava and tea fall.

From the skies a drizzle of white cheese,

And to the south a mountain of watercress and honey.

But setting the translation to music and performing it in English would be a bit like creating a Swahili version of “Born in the U.S.A.” That is most true in what Mr. Guerra calls his “social merengues,” many of which have become anthems in Latin America. Though they are about health care, poverty and immigration, with lyrics that have brought many to tears, they play the neat trick of also being danceable party songs.

Take “Niágara en Bicicleta,” a depressing portrayal of public hospitals in the developing world, named for a Dominican phrase indicating a situation as hopelessly difficult as traversing Niagara Falls on a bicycle. The narrator faints and is rushed to an emergency room, where the receptionist listens to the lottery numbers, a nurse talks to him in language usually reserved for dogs, and there’s no electric power for an EKG. The chorus is classic Guerra: where irresistibly danceable lyrics mesh reality with fantasy.

Don’t tell me that the doctors left.

Don’t tell me you don’t have anesthesia.

Don’t tell me someone’s drunk the alcohol

And sewn the thread for stitches into a tablecloth.

Don’t tell me the forceps are lost,

That the stethoscope is off partying,

That The x-ray machine has burnt out

And the serum has been used to sweeten the coffee.

His love songs often take place in a metaphorical alternate universe: poppy flowers predict the future, butterflies dance with grains of salt, a dolphin paints a wave on a woman’s breast. Sometimes his lyrics have led to criticism. In “La Bilirrubina” lovesickness causes a man’s bilirubin levels to rise, a condition more likely caused by hepatitis or chemotherapy. “You sing it to a doctor,” Mr. Guerra said, “and they tell you things that make no poetic sense. Scientific sense, yes. Poetic sense, no.”

Several of his songs have been translated but always into languages that are more forgiving than English with rhymes and sentence structure. There’s a Portuguese version of “Burbujas de Amor” (“Bubbles of Love”), a sensual Guerra composition inspired by a passage in Julio Cortázar’s novel “Hopscotch” that became popular in Brazil after being recording by the singer Raimundo Fagner. But though Mr. Cortázar’s novel won a National Book Award when it was translated and published in the United States, it would be a challenge for an English speaker to keep the romance with a direct translation of Mr. Guerra’s lyrics:

I’d like to be a fish

So I could soak my nose in your fishbowl

And make bubbles of love everywhere.

On the rare occasions that Mr. Guerra composes in English, his signature quirks are present. In “Medicine for My Soul,” the original mostly English version of his latest album’s title track, “La Llave de Mi Corazón,” a Louisiana man calls a radio station for cultural advice on his love for a Dominican woman.

Should I go and visit her?

Should I learn a Spanish word?

Should I cry, should I face

Some political concerns?

Should I join a social club?

Should I peel a coconut?

Moving in, moving on, merengue, bachata y son.

It was his record label, EMI Televisa, that insisted on doing a mostly Spanish version, Mr. Guerra said, but he said he felt that the English version remains better. (The Spanish version won 2007 Latin Grammys for Best Song and Best Record.)

Understanding the words doesn’t keep a listener from enjoying a song of course. Mr. Guerra himself was an incurable Beatles fan growing up, and their use of harmony influences his arrangements to this day. But he didn’t get the lyrics.

“Never,” he said. “I never knew what they were saying until I was older. Not long ago I started studying the words of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ with my niece, and I finally understood the song. I used to sing it and have no idea what it was about.”

Snoop Dogg took this picture of himself on the cell phone of Wired 96.5's G-N Kang late Tuesday night while the rapper partied at G (111 S. 17th) after playing the Festival Pier with 311. Snoop partied till close in the club's Mogul Room where a seemingly endless parade of hotties, including Kang, and many notties dropped in to hang with Snoop and crew. Phillies Ryan Howard and Shane Victorino paid their respects to the rapper at the party sponsored by Landy Cognac. Snoop was scheduled to be there for less than an hour but hung until close. NFL Network analyst/former Iggle Brian Baldinger were among guests as were 100.3 the Beat's Janita "Applebaum" Styles and husband Jessiah Styles who were also celebrating his 35th birthday. Clothier to the Stars Baba Taiye Renfrow of Distante (1510 Sansom) could also be found hanging late in the club's VIP area.

Pop star Shakira is to lead nationwide demonstrations in her native Colombia on Sunday demanding the liberation of hundreds of hostages held by rebels in the jungle for years.


Around 80 solidarity rallies are also planned in other cities around Latin America and the rest of the world, including one in Paris that will include recently freed Franco-Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt.

"On July 20, I want to shout out, with you, for the independence and liberty of those who are still hostage of the FARC in Colombia," Betancourt told the French parliament early this month.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) continues to detain an estimated 700 hostages. Up to 2,000 more are believed to be held by the National Liberation Army, another leftist rebel group.

Sunday's rallies are calling for their immediate release, and those of prisoners held by other rebel groups.

Around five million people are expected to take part in demonstrations in some 1,000 towns and cities across Colombia.

The marches coincide with independence day celebrations in the southern town of Leticia, which are to be attended by President Alvaro Uribe and his guests, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Alan Garcia of Peru.

Shakira, Colombia's world-famous pop icon, is to sing Colombia's national anthem at the start of that commemoration before launching into a concert in support of the hostage liberation demonstration.

Juanes, another Colombian singer, and other high-profile musicians will also be lending their voices to the initiative, which will be the third national demonstration of its type in Colombia. The last one took place on February 4.

In the capital Bogota, more than 50,000 people dressed in white are expected to fill the central city square.

Some of the 14 other hostages who were freed with Betancourt through a Colombian military operation will be present here and in other cities.

Three US defense contractors liberated at the same time are back in the United States and will not be participating, however.

There are fears of a possible attack during the event. On Friday, Bogota authorities arrested two suspected FARC rebels, seizing from them about 30 kilograms of explosives which they allegedly planned to use during the march.

Olga Lucia Gomez, head of the Free Country Foundation working for the captives' release, said the rallies "are to demand not only the liberation of the rebels' hostages, but also all those being held against their will by whoever they may be."

Julio Roberto Gomez, president of a workers' union, told a media conference it was also an opportunity to shine the spotlight on the hundreds of hostages -- many of them poor rural residents -- who were not famous enough to generate individual public campaigns.

Politically, however, the Colombian peace process appears to be at an impasse.

Uribe's conservative government has vowed to seek direct contact with the FARC in an indication that it sees no future in mediation by France, Spain and Switzerland.

But the rebels have rejected direct talks and asked for mediation by leftist Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, which, in turn, has been rejected by Bogota.

As rapper Nas puts forth then backs off the N-word in titling his new album, artists and academics have many words about it.

"We are committed to ending hate - word and talk. It doesn't do anyone any good, whether it's a journalist on TV, or a rapper on the radio."

- The Rev. Wendell Anthony, on why the Detroit chapter of the NAACP symbolically buried the N-word, July 2007

"It is absolutely silly and unproductive to have a funeral for the word n-, when the actions continue. We need to have a movement to resurrect brothers and sisters, not a funeral for n-. 'Cause n- don't die."

- Abiodun Oyewole of the Last Poets on "Project Roach," on Nas' new album, "Nas," July 2008

It's the word that won't go away.

On Tuesday, the acclaimed and controversy-seeking rapper Nas finally released his new album, which he had announced would be named after the word.

Nigger.

The word that's been employed by Mark Twain and Richard Pryor for artful purposes. The word that was spat out in a 2006 racist tirade by Seinfeld stand-up comedian Michael Richards. The word that many have sought to ban, including Jesse Jackson - who was overheard this month using it to criticize Barack Obama during a break from a Fox News interview.

In October, Nas said the title would take the form that ends with -a, the way Halle Berry used it to pay Warren Beatty the ultimate compliment in Bulworth. The form that's "a term of endearment," in the words of hip-hop-quoting author Michael Eric Dyson, "used in opposition to how the white culture was using it."

But Nas - the 34-year-old rapper born Nasir Jones, the son of jazz trumpeter Olu Dara - thought that wasn't incendiary enough. The esteemed MC raised in New York's Queensbridge housing projects has been one of the most highly regarded lyricists in hip-hop since his debut Illmatic - ranked as one of the greatest rap albums of all time - came out in 1994, when he was just 19.

So in putting together the follow-up to his confrontational 2006 album Hip-Hop Is Dead, he announced he'd be ending it with the more explosive -er, the form of the word that, as linguist Geoffrey Nunberg says, "trails its history of hate and violence into the room."

That term would also trail its history into retailers such as Best Buy and Target, where most CDs are sold. In May, Nas acknowledged to MTV News that he was feeling the heat: "Record stores are going to have a problem in this day and time selling a record with that title."

Last month, his label, Def Jam, announced that the album's title would be another N-word: Nas. And one of Nas' most provocative new songs - "Be a N- Too," which was expected to be the album's first single and which borrows its tune from the Dr Pepper jingle - is not included on the CD. (The album does, however, include a surprisingly hopeful Obama endorsement called "Black President" and a pointed attack on a cable news network in "Sly Fox.")

"Be a N- Too" is missed, because it echoed the indictment of racism in Lenny Bruce's 1960s stand-up routine, in which the trailblazing comedian repeated every taboo racial slur he could think of to show "it's the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness."

Four and a half decades later, the debate over the word still rages. On Princeton University professor Cornel West's 2007 CD of words and music Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations, he debates Dyson on the subject of the N-word.

The pop-culture-savvy West, who has made cameo appearances in Matrix movies, worries that "millions of young brothers and sisters use the word, and that self-hatred is more deeply internalized."

But, he said in a phone call, "Nas is a towering artist. I support his artistic freedom, and his deep love for black people and for justice, I think, permits him to use any word he wants to use. It's a little different than nonenlightened folk with bigoted views."

Nunberg, who comments about language for NPR's Philadelphia-based Fresh Air and teaches at the University of California-Berkeley, calls the N-word "the strongest and most axiomatic case of a small collection of racial and ethnic slurs that have achieved a new status in recent years. Words associated with a history of racism that is still very vivid and still operative."

The N-word, Nunberg says, is an especially potent "reclaimed epithet" whose usage is considered allowable only within the group to whom it applies. One of the ways in which the N-word is a special case is its omnipresence in popular culture. "One reason for blacks to avoid using it is that it's used by whites to justify using it. 'They say it.' You hear whites defending it that way."

The battle is fought by hip-hoppers as well as academics. Last year, Russell Simmons of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network recommended that the word, along with vulgarities such as bitch and ho, be voluntarily removed, bleeped or deleted by the recording and broadcast industries. 50 Cent called the proposed title of the Nas album "stupid."

But leading "conscious" rapper Lupe Fiasco, in an interview this year, praised Nas' name for his album, calling it "a great idea, honestly. The word n- is the history of the United States of America. Economically, for instance. The word n- derives from a term directed at a slave. Slaves built this country. . . . 400 years of free labor.

"Certainly people are rich right now because their great-great-great-grandfath.. fortunes were built on the back of those n-. So along with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, there should be a piece of paper just with the word n- written on it. Because that word speaks so much to the prejudice and the racism of the history of this country. Just in that one word."

On the liner notes to Nas, the rapper writes: " 'Ni**er' or 'ni**a,' not even the lesser evil 'negro,' could never be our title. . . . Ni**er is a word that comes out of the horrible African American slave trade. That slave trade is a massive part of American history but people want to sweep it under the rug like it never existed. . . . So sad we Americans are."

Nas' critics are skeptical. Hip-hop lyrics "aren't revolutionary or constructive," says John McWhorter, the Mount Airy-bred author of All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America. "What they are is antiauthoritarian."
"Given that in 2006 and 2007 there was a good deal of debate over the word that I'm allowed to say because I'm black. . . . How can you be antiauthoritarian now? What button are you going to push? If you predicted what somebody would have called their album in 2008, wouldn't it have been N-?"

The point of putting out an album by that name, McWhorter says, "is people will complain, and he'll be censored, and then he'll have a track in which he complains about being censored." Indeed, Nas does just that, lamely, on "Hero": "Still in musical prison, in jail for the flow / Try telling Bob Dylan, Bruce, or Billy Joel they can't sing what's in their soul."

McWhorter stresses he's "not appalled" by profanity-strewn hip-hop, and is a fan. "But the idea that this upturned middle finger is the height of wisdom when it comes to thinking about what ails black America - it just isn't true."

Saul Williams didn't attempt to go as far as Nas. The African American poet and rocker titled his album, released in the fall on the Internet and this month in stores, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust.

"That's because the word n- is abhorrent and hateful, but niggy is cute," he says. "I wanted to show how we could take something that is hateful . . . and transform it through art into something that was clever, something that was thought-provoking."
Williams doesn't think niggy's heinous linguistic cousin should be done away with, either. "I know that when they do inoculations against diseases they usually inject the disease into us," he says. "I'm not so sure it would benefit us to forget the poison. To forget the oppression."

Nas' inability to title his album what he intended "shows you that the marketplace is real," Williams says. "I wouldn't say that Nas failed. Because I think what Nas wanted to do was point out the surrealness of the uproar surrounding that term. And having the album untitled with his back showing those rip marks? To me, that has n- all over it."