Cometh the time, cometh the rapper

Justins, in New York's Greenwich village, is the restaurant that rap built. Owned by the recording star, producer and label boss Sean "Puffy" Combs, aka Puff Daddy and named after his son, Justins is a monument to rap's prodigious success in the United States. It is also, of course, Puff Daddy's monument to himself. Although restaurants are often uncertain business ventures, Puffy can afford to take the risk: he was recently given a deal worth pounds 50m by Arista Records, which distributes his Bad Boy label. The payment can perhaps be read as a symbolic "thank-you" note to Combs (written in the language of the high-denomination bills - "the Benjamins" - that he likes best), for masterminding a formula for cross-overs with rock and pop that has enabled rap to dominate the mainstream charts like never before.

Puff Daddy's level of success is unprecedented, but rap itself is hardly new. Next year will be the 20th anniversary of the first fully-fledged rap record, "Rapper's Delight", by the Sugarhill Gang. What began with a novelty hit has become perhaps the most enduring and commercially successful form of pop music there has ever been, at least in America, where it is not so much a genre as a way of life. In Britain, things are different, with acts that sell millions in the US barely denting the charts here unless the tune cannibalises an old hit. According to Chris Wells, the editor of the black music paper Echoes, "Rap is like reggae; it's too black for the mainstream, and it's only marketed to specialist areas unless it's strung on to something else, like a tune by Stevie Wonder or Roberta Flack. Also, there's no real UK act that ever really made it." One thinks fondly of the pioneer UK rapper Derek B, whose brief success led to his Porsche being stopped by the police so often that World In Action made a film about it.

In commercial terms, rap might be in ruder health than ever. But it is nevertheless experiencing something of a crisis. Artistically, the music risks losing its authenticity through the pursuit of mainstream hits (as with Puff Daddy's brand of "lite" rap). Alternatively, if it remains stuck in the outdated gangster vernacular of aspirational cliches and reflex references to cars, drugs and guns, rap might become nothing more than "heritage" music, terminally nostalgic for the "old-skool" days of B-boys, block-parties and break-dancing. There is also a kind of moral or ethical crisis centred on rap's business affairs. According to a recent book (Have Gun Will Travel: The Unstoppable Rise and Fall of Death Row Records, by Ronin Ro), when it came to making records for Death Row - Suge Knight's West Coast rival to Puff Daddy's Bad Boy operation on the East Coast - there was not just blood on the tracks; there was frequently blood on the office floor, on the furniture, all over the place. Knight (who once had the white rapper Vanilla Ice suspended from a skyscraper window) is now in prison, but the murders of rappers Tupac Shakur and the Notorious BIG are still unsolved.

The latest of a stream of cartoon-like rap super-heroes hoping to save the form from decadence is called Canibus and he comes from an unusual background: he used to live in south London; his father is a West Indian international cricketer, and his best rap is written from the point of view of a sperm. In the US his debut album entered the charts at No 2, and earned a full-page, as-serious-as-your-life, review in the Village Voice.

Canibus's career began in Justins, when he met Wyclef Jean of the multi- million-selling rap group the Fugees. Puff Daddy's place is an upmarket soul-food restaurant specialising in the kind of Southern, African-derived, dishes that have always had a special relationship with the world of rhythm and blues (in the 1960s, the great soul singer Solomon Burke used to make more money operating the soul-food franchise at his gigs than he did from performing). Decorated in subtle, earthy, colours that echo the muddy fields and burlap sacks of R&B's agrarian past, Justins attracts an affluent crowd of black, middle-class professionals earlier in the evening, but later on things get more lively. The smooth soul on the sound system is replaced by hard hip-hop, and you notice for the first time the muscle- bound bouncers by the door in their T-shirts and Puffa jackets emblazoned with Puff Daddy's "Bad Boy" logo.

On the night I'm there, the atmosphere gets notably looser as the night wears on. At a neighbouring table, a young man and his date are celebrating their engagement. The waitress brings out a cake sputtering with lighted sparklers in place of candles and everyone applauds. A friend comes over to congratulate them and then he and the man go off to the men's room. They are away for a very long time. When the man eventually returns, he rests his head on the side of his chair and his chubby features slide down his face into one amorphous mass, as if the bones supporting it have been surgically removed. He slumps, blank-eyed and incapable of speech, as the girl toys with her cutlery and looks out forlornly into space. Meanwhile, a section of the restaurant has been cordoned off to accommodate a party in honour of the rapper Jay-Z. As the guests begin to arrive, the entrance to the men's room is busier than ever. If you want decadence, here it is. You can even listen to rapping while Rome burns.

It was at another Justins party - for Jay-Z - that Canibus met Wyclef Jean. Jean co-produced Canibus's debut album and gave him his first leg up on the ladder of rap, in what was partly a tribute to the Caribbean background they have in common. Jean comes from Haiti; Canibus - whose real name is Germaine Williams - is Jamaican by origin. "Wyclef's got a real work ethic and so have I," Canibus says when I met him in London last week. "That comes from coming from nothing. Whatever nothing is in the States or over here, in a Third World country nothing really is nothing. It's not like being in the States and not having the money to buy some shoes. In Jamaica, even if you have the shoes, you have nowhere to wear them to. That's real deep, man."

As a child, Canibus moved from Jamaica to the Bronx, to Miami to Washington DC, to Clapham (where he lived for a year when he was 10 and discovered break-dancing and hip-hop exploitation films like Beat Street), to New Jersey and then New York. Every two years he changed cities and schools, following his single-parent mother as she continually moved in order to qualify for bonuses in her work as a secretary for a public housing organisation. Canibus's father, the West Indian cricketer Basil Williams, had separated from his mother before he was born. It is these experiences that inspired him to write the sperm's eye-view rap, "I Honour U", the track from his album due to be released as a single next week.

The album isn't really anything special, but "I Honour U" is a masterpiece, and one of the highest points of rap thus far - Canibus imagines himself as a sperm racing to fertilise the egg in his mother's womb, and wishes he could intervene in the disputes between his mother and father. The rap is interwoven with a mellow female vocal that represents the mother's point of view, and the lyrics are as playfully post-modern as any novelist could wish for. From the vantage point of the womb, Canibus is able to see the future before it happens. He encourages his mother to move to New York, because, he says, "They got a little borough called the Bronx, Ma, and I hear that's where hip-hop is gonna start. Hell yeah, four months in your stomach and I already chose a career". The situation is cartoonish (and rap is often like aural cartoons), yet moving at the same time. "When you cry I hear you and I wish I could dry your tears, but I can't because I'm stuck in here," he goes on. "Five months from being able to stroke your chest, I can't even hold you in my arms because they ain't developed yet."

"It's about my mother and our relationship and about me growing up," Canibus, who is a quietly spoken 23-year-old, says. "I thought that there was no race that you could ever run that compares to the race you ran to get to that egg, where you beat a million people and came out number one. I wanted to say to people that each of us is special. We made it!" The song is also about the relationship between his parents, and the absent father he never really knew. His mother, who prefers the Beatles and the Bee Gees to rap, is ambivalent about the record. "It's an emotional thing," he says. "I don't want to talk about my father to her, and she doesn't understand why I talked about him, but I had to. It was therapeutic."

Though he has spent some time with his father in the past, the bond is still a troubling one. "I know him, and we've had a relationship, although I wouldn't call it a father-and-son relationship," he says. "The record is also a testament to myself, because I could never have a child of my own and not be there for him or her. I don't get into racial issues, but minorities have so few role models and mothers have been doing it too long by themselves. My mother showed me compassion, mercy, diligence and womanly things, but she didn't show me how to be a man. But I grew up, I made it, and I've never been locked up. I had to be there for my mother, and that's what kept me out of trouble."

Twenty years on, there's life in the old rap yet.

The single 'I Honour U' is out now. The album 'Can-I-Bus' is on Universal Records.