Speaking to the polyglot with grace, style and sass

No matter how grammarians punctuate the phrase, hip-hop lives by the hyphen. From its birth in the Bronx at the hands of West Indian immigrants to its flowering in regional scenes from Atlanta to Oakland, the music has juxtaposed the universal with the untranslated: Top 40 samples wrapped around slangy rhymes outsiders can’t possibly grasp; the most common human impulses -- sex, money, partying, power -- expressed in simple choruses that give way to verses as locally rooted as gossip shared over inner-city fire escapes.

Like jazz, hip-hop gives voice to Americans not allowed, by virtue of their ethnicity, to feel universal. And so it has reinvented the very image of common culture, taking us away from false universals and toward a new vision of a harmonious Babel.

Akon, the St. Louis-born, Senegal-reared, New Jersey-schooled, Atlanta-based singer-songwriter-producer, embodies hip-hop’s cross-fertilization with an imaginative power particularly suited to this time of green card protests, Barack Obama and internationally cast hits such as “Lost” and “Heroes.” His 2004 debut “Trouble” established his easy-supple singing style and his authenticating back story; since then he’s guested with a list of stars as long as your arm. And with his rich new album, “Konvicted,” (in stores today) this graceful hybridizer has solidified his vision, pointing the way for R&B; to progress in polyglot America.

Born Aliaune Thiam, Akon has made an immigrant journey more complex than his musical tales of a gangster made good imply. Though he did spend three years in prison for auto theft, this 25-year-old isn’t the ghetto warrior he sometimes claims to be -- his father, the percussionist Mor Thiam, is a globe-trotting bohemian who kept his family hopping between the States and Senegal while he worked with artists including Freddie Hubbard and choreographer Katherine Dunham. Akon learned American music through the filter of an African sensibility, and the sound he cultivates grows in both directions.

Early ties to Wyclef Jean’s Refugee Camp crew set Akon on the path toward an internationalized hip-hop; like Jean, he’s integrating West African and Caribbean roots into a sound that never falls into the feel-good cliches of “world beat.”

Some of the singer’s best work appears not on his major releases, but on the mix tape “Illegal Alien Vol. 1,” where he plays the griot over deep beats. His collaboration with dancehall artist Baby Cham on the remix “Ghetto Story 3” also startles. Over synthesizers bubbling like curry, Akon and Cham interweave self-portraits, each young man telling of being left alone in the alien city by hard-working parents who couldn’t protect them from the criminal drift. It’s chilling and totally believable, much more memorable than Cham’s remix with Alicia Keys.

Akon sometimes hits this level of intensity on “Konvicted.” The very first track, “Shake Down,” has him spitting out thuggish threats over the original gangsta insignia, sampled gunshots. But on this album, the ambitious entrepreneur means to further cultivate the audience he captured with the ballads “Lonely” and “Locked Up,” from “Trouble,” and so it mixes those gangster boasts with poppy club “bangers” and some of the sweetest love songs produced this year.

The formula works because Akon can move through these styles with grace, his vocal ease the crowning touch in mixes that revel in playful motion.

The gentle lilt of Akon’s voice gains a razor gleam on the gangster numbers and a blue glow on slow dances, as in the horn-kissed “Never Took the Time.” Like his apparent role model R. Kelly, Akon is skilled at dramatic introspection; “The Rain,” is basically a tribute to that embattled Chicago star, with Akon punctuating his list of self-doubts with reggae-style shouts and operatic backing vocals.

He has something of a social conscience too despite his real-life involvement in the dubious-diamond trade (apparently having skipped Kanye West’s critique in the video for “Diamonds Are Forever,” Akon has invested in a mine). “Mama Africa,” on “Konvicted,” pays tribute to Bob Marley, and elsewhere he links modern-day ghetto violence to the legacy of slavery.

Like West, Akon the producer favors a frothy sound that hearkens back to the mid-1980s -- another era when American R&B; mingled with Jamaican and Afro-British sounds; he also likes those doctored vocal samples West made famous. On “Trouble,” he sometimes got stuck in these cool grooves, but “Konvicted” shows his range.

One end of that spectrum -- the one that’s bringing Akon chart success right now -- involves hip-hop eroticism. The first two singles from “Konvicted,” hot on the charts right now, are both club hits that show Akon at his most lascivious. “Smack That,” instantly memorable for bringing Eminem out of several months of mourning for his slain best friend Proof, is a completely irresistible booty-bumper about a seduction involving the hand-to-body act the title implies. “I Wanna Luv You,” distinguished by one of Snoop Dogg’s deliciously sleepy sex raps, had a much more explicit title (switch out the word “Luv”) until the censors got to it.

Both tracks participate in rap’s establishment of the stripper as feminine ideal -- which should be no surprise, given that Akon’s Konvict Music label is behind singer T-Pain’s huge hit of last fall, “I’m In Love With a Stripper.” For this, Akon must be chided. It’s not only sexist to so wholeheartedly focus on women’s bodies, it’s getting boring -- and just as cartoonish as 1980s hair metal’s taxonomy of big-haired vixens squirting themselves with hoses atop shiny American cars.

Yet put “Smack That” on in a bar or the car and even the most serious feminist would have trouble resisting its snap-music polyrhythm, topped by the smooth staccato of Akon’s voice. Eminem’s rap keeps pace, but the master sounds a bit stumble-bumble next to his silk-clad friend. In a single tongue-twisting chorus, Akon brings the hip-hop sound back to Africa, and then to Atlanta, and back again. This is the sound of America’s unceasing diaspora. Even at its nastiest, it’s enlightening.

Akon

“Konvicted” (Konvict/Universal)

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Albums are reviewed on a scale of four stars (excellent), three stars (good), two stars (fair) and one star (poor). Albums reviewed have been released except as indicated.

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ann.powers@latimes.com