Music Review: 'Space Jam' (1996)

At the very least, Space Jam shows one thing about R&B that has, thankfully, not changed: It's still the most flesh-obsessed style of pop. When Quad City DJ's' JeLana LaFleur chants, ''Wave your hands in the air if you feel fine/ We're gonna take it into overtime,'' on ''Space Jam,'' she's talking about a very different kind of pickup game. And a full-court game becomes all-out warfare on ''Hit 'Em High,'' a hip-hop-hooray throw-down that pits LL Cool J against his harder, marble-mouthed successors — Coolio, Rhymes, Cypress Hill's B-Real, and Wu-Tang Clan's Method Man. Thanks to those two songs, you may never think of basketball in the same way. Maybe we're witnessing the birth of yet another subgenre: R&B-ball. B-