If hip-hop were a galaxy, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, Manhattan, Strong Island, South Central, Compton and Long Beach would be heavenly bodies large enough to see with the naked eye. With a nice telescope, you would find Atlanta, New Jersey, Miami and, on a clear day, Philly. And nothing else. Until now: Up the Pacific Coast on Highway 5 and down the icon scale from mythic South Central sits Oakland, home of a nascent hip-hop explosion.

In '93, Oakland has become the third most important city in hip-hop, as newcomers and veterans combine to make the city's presence undeniable. Debut albums from the Coup, Ant Banks, Souls of Mischief and Casual; sophomore efforts from 2Pac, Del the Funkee Homosapien, Pooh Man and Spice 1; and new product from veterans Too Short and Digital Underground should make it as impossible to forget Oaktown as it is to recall the city's first major export, MC (capitalist tool). (If you have to think about it, they've done the job.)

Sometimes Oaktown sounds like the Strong Island of California, but don't be fooled. This is no suburb, just a city smaller than Los Angeles – literally and figuratively. Where South Central yearns to be as large as the Hollywood sign it's pissing on, Oaktown rappers only want to be something to lowride and roll blunts to.

No specific sound defines the 510 area code, though Calabama twang-toned rhymes over slow bass-guitar funk loops and P-Funk samples are common. This is music for lazy afternoon cruising to the beat, and no one defines it better than Too Short.

On his fifth album, Get In Where You Fit In, Short plays his usual blaxploitation character, only he ain't battlin' the man, he's on his way to get some. Between "I'm a Player," "Playboy Short" and "Blow Job Betty," Short sounds like he's getting more than Shaft, Sweet Sweetback and Superfly combined. But Short's karma comes back to haunt him in the hilarious "Gotta Get Some Lovin'": "Bounce to the house all by myself/Can't get no pussy, and I'm mad as hell/Magazines can't even do the trick/I guess I have to watch me a porno flick."

Short is no rhyme virtuoso, but underground rap is about peeking into'a foreign world. He's been recording for years, but he's still got an underground flavor, meaning he's got the skill to put his ghetto on tape. Thus, the genius of Get In: the stunning clarity of Short's reality. Short makes no attempt at accessibility, nor demands that you bacdafucup. He just shows you a door into his world: Press play, and suddenly you're a young black boy cruising East Oaktown at about 15 mph on a hot, lifted Saturday, watching the girls in shorts pass and ...

Short and the Oakland freshmen – especially the Coup, Souls of Mischief and Casual – validate the 510, but as they build hip-hop's third superpower, they don't get much help from Spice 1 and Digital Underground.

Spice's second album, 187 He Wrote, shows his slow, highly produced funk beats and G thang are distinct enough to keep him interesting in Oakland. But where small-time, underground Oakdreams fit Short well, as a backdrop for Spice's gangsta rhymes (the album's first song is "I'm the Fuckin' Murderer," and its first single "Dumpin' 'Em in Ditches"), they ring hollow. Spice brings nothing new to the highly competitive gangsta wars: Barely threatening gangsta tales and hardly sinister gangsta beats leave me clamoring for the first road straight into Compton. With 187 sitting in stores half an alphabet down the rack from The Chronic (and soon, sharing S with Snoop's Doggystyle), buying Spice is like watching The Untouchables while a Godfather-Scarface double feature plays up the street.

Walk over to that fabled D section, and sitting between De la and Dre, there's one of Oaktown's oldest groups, Digital Underground. All of Oaktown's on the P-Funk tip, but no one as hard as the Dopeadelic. Their last album was titled Son of the P, and their fourth, The Body-Hat Syndrome, sounds like a Funkadelic album. But DU may be embracing their idols too tight. Not content with mere samples, Syndrome aspires to be as silly, wild and funky as a mid-'70s P-Funk album. Without Clinton's genius to mold it into a conceptually focused package, it fails miserably: Every moment is a slosh of groove loops, scratches, samples, pianos, background voices and other noises. The group crams every idea it has into every song: With so many hooks, you can't get a handle.

Spice and DU notwithstanding, Oakland's star is rising. But just as its bomb hits, someone from the more familiar end of Highway 5 has stepped up and muffled the boom. With his arrest on murder charges, Snoop Dogg has rocked the hip-hop community, creating a moment as startling and significant as the space-shuttle explosion was to NASA: how rapidly the technology of our dreams can bring us face to face with our nightmares. If Snoop is found guilty, the effect on rappers will be greater than that even of the Rodney King beating. If he's jailed, it would mean the highest priest of hip-hop culture's sharpest edge has been cut down, distilled to a one-dimensional representation of black vulnerability. King proved the rappers' symbols were still real. A Snoop conviction would show that rappers can still be reduced to symbols. (RS 670)

TOURE