(FORTUNE Magazine) – Word to Senator Bob Dole: get with it, bro. The Republican presidential hopeful recently scored big points bashing rap music and record companies such as Time Warner (parent of Fortune's publisher), but the market has already voted: rap, and particularly the small "gangsta" segment, is no longer cool.

Rap's swing vote--young, white suburbanites that Dole may want to court--are tuning it out in favor of modern rock and street R&B, a hybrid of smooth soul and raw hip-hop that artists like TLC perform.

The Recording Industry Association of America, which tracks music sales, reports that rap's market share fell from 9.2% in 1993 to 7.9% in 1994. Coleman Research of Raleigh, discloses that music tastes of white teens and Xers (ages 15 to 28) in major markets flip-flopped between 1992 and 1994. Rhythmic music, which includes rap, was favored by 22% of them in 1992; only 10% preferred music called modern rock, grunge, or alternative, which bands like Offspring and Pearl Jam play. Last year 28% picked grunge, while just 11% chose rhythmic.

Says Sonya Askew, buyer of rap, gospel, and R&B at the Camelot Music retail chain: "The appetite of our white teenage buyers for gangsta rap used to be as great as some of our black consumers'. Now more young white customers are buying a mix of styles."

Rap's appeal to white kids was vicarious, suggests Glen Sansone, an associate editor at College Media Journal. "Suburban kids could experience what the ghetto was like just by buying a Dr. Dre or Ice Cube record." After the L.A. riots the violent records became "anticlimactic," adds rap veteran Bill Stephney, CEO of Stepsun Music Entertainment. Stephney is now high on street R&B, noting that women like Mary J. Blige and Adina Howard drive the genre, offering a counter to misogynist rap.

Hard-core rappers are now rhyming kinder and gentler. Bad boy Tupac Shakur's tender "Dear Mama" lyrics might even give Republicans pause: "Mama, I finally understand for a woman it ain't easy trying to raise a man / You always was committed / A poor single mother on welfare."

- Faye Rice