Even more surprising — and much more fruitful — was the 2003 album "Dear Catastrophe Waitress," a triumphant and unexpected collaboration with the mainstream pop producer Trevor Horn.
This narrow understanding of hip-hop is even more surprising because part of the genre's brilliance is how it's moved away from the margins and seeped into the mainstream in unexpected places and ways — providing soundtracks for ads, shilling brands, giving teenagers new slang.
After winning the Palme d'Or from Quentin Tarantino's Cannes jury in 2004, it made the unexpected leap from arthouse to mainstream, gaining unexpected support from ordinary citizens whose spouses, sons, daughters, brother and sisters were soldiers in the field.
In 2002, Mr. Le Pen came in second in French national elections, an unexpected inroad into the political mainstream.
Furthermore, the experimental electronic duo Fuck Buttons – whose thrillingly intense music exists resolutely outside the mainstream, despite its unexpected appearance during the Olympics opening ceremony – will be over on the Park stage.
But two days after Raf Simons declared he was bringing sexy back to minimalism, Céline took an unexpected turn, away from the mainstream chic she has shaped and towards surrealism.
Given Webb's unapologetic defense of his reporting and clear-eyed view of the CIA, it's not unexpected that a host of mainstream "journalists" who owed their careers to kissing the asses of foreign policy elites and U.S. intelligence officials would pile on against him.
But the unexpected move by the ADL, a mainstream group that has denounced what it saw as bigoted attacks on plans for the Muslim center, could well be a turning point in the battle over the project.
It was a huge hit in France last year, and opens stateside today, in the hope of joining "The Closet," "Amélie" and "The Crimson Rivers" in what has become an unexpected surge of French films finding mainstream acceptance in the United States.
They were part of the circle of musicians contributing to the groundbreaking indie rock band Arcade Fire, which exploded into the mainstream firmament with an unexpected Grammy win for album of the year in 2011.
