COKE IS IT.

In September, the magazine W announced that cocaine is again a fashionable vice. In pop music, cocaine never went away. Even if some people cluck disapprovingly, most accept the tendency of pop stars to use drugs--to fuel creativity, calm nerves, and liquidate record-company advances. When Keith Richards fell out of a coconut tree in Fiji last April and injured his head, the incident was greeted by jokes about whether there was much left inside his skull to harm. TV shows like VH1's "Behind the Music" thrive on stories of musicians on drug binges, snorting lines off recording-studio consoles. This fall, Eric Clapton, who has been sober for years, decided to reinstate "Cocaine," the louche hit song from his 1977 album "Slowhand," in his live set.

What is a life-style choice in pop is a livelihood in hip-hop. Almost every m.c. raps about selling cocaine, whether he's a veteran like Jay-Z, who likes to invoke his stint as a teen-age dealer, or a newcomer like Rick Ross, who built his 2006 debut album, "Port of Miami," around the conceit of being the biggest coke dealer in town. Two hip-hop acts, Clipse and Young Jeezy, rap about dealing more than about anything else, and their music has prompted critics to christen a new subgenre: cocaine rap. Clipse is Gene (Malice) and Terrence (Pusha T) Thornton, a pair of brothers from Virginia, whose brilliantly terse and abrasive second album, "Hell Hath No Fury," came out last month; Young Jeezy is a twenty-eight-year-old from Atlanta, whose woozy and uneven second album, "The Inspiration," was released last week. These m.c.s boast of their skill as salesmen, not of their lives as partygoers.

In the early nineties, rappers tried to placate moralists by trotting out set pieces about pitiable crackheads, a gesture about as effective as hanging a "No Smoking" sign outside an office building. Clipse and Young Jeezy don't bother with cautionary tales, though the Thornton brothers do apologize for their lawlessness on a skipping track called "Momma, I'm So Sorry." The song is punctuated by whimsical puffs of a chord organ and a reference to the drug-busting detectives from "Miami Vice": "Momma, I'm so sorry I'm so obnoxious. I don't fear Tubbs and Crockett."

Drug dealing is a cryptic presence in cocaine rap, alluded to by dozens of synonyms and euphemisms but rarely by name. Many listeners will grasp the meaning of "snow." (Young Jeezy's nickname is the Snowman. When his logo, three stacked spheres, began appearing on high schoolers' T-shirts last year, anti-drug groups complained and school districts banned the shirts.) But what about "keys" (kilos of cocaine); "trap house" (a place where cocaine is cooked into crack); "fishscale" (uncut cocaine); "triple beam" (a scale used to weigh the drug); "work," "weight," and "birds" (terms for parcels of cocaine)? In these songs, bricks, squares, pies, stones, and yams are coke, and the cooking, mixing, and weighing required to prepare the drug for clients becomes the inspiration for often inscrutable wordplay. As the Thorntons rap on a track called "Wamp Wamp," "Mildewish, I heat it, it turns gluish. It cools to a tight wad; the Pyrex is Jewish. I get paper, it seems I get foolish. Take it to Jacob and play, 'Which hue's the bluest?' "

Hip-hop has always been driven by an imperative to employ the most vibrant words possible; cocaine rap takes this command to an inventive extreme. Young Jeezy and Clipse want to boast about flouting the law and at the same time protect themselves from potential prosecution. ("Take it out the wrap; then I put it on the scale, but keep that on the low, 'cause I ain't tryin' to go to jail," Young Jeezy raps on the track "Keep It Gangsta.") The result is complex poetry: songs that simultaneously broadcast and hide their meaning.

Young Jeezy became popular in 2005, eventually selling 1.7 million copies of his major-label debut album, "Let's Get It: Thug ...