Dirty Decade: Rap Music and the U.S. South, 1997-2007
During the decade of 1997-2007, rap music produced in cities such as Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis, Miami, and Houston transformed the margins into the rap mainstream. These years saw southern artists rise to national prominence, with a related surge in major label interest and investment in southern rap, a process encapsulated and expressed by the idea of the Dirty South. Through an examination of artists, music, promotional imagery, scholarly writing, and journalism, Miller surveys rap scenes in several southern cities. He explores the Dirty South as a geographical imaginary, and examines the widespread appropriation and adaptation of the trope of "dirtiness." Next, Miller turns to the emergence and marketing of “crunk.” Crunk, like the Dirty South, is a contested and problematic intersection of musical style and spatially keyed identities. The essay concludes with a foray into the visual culture of the Dirty South, revealing how rap music imagery has affirmed, critiqued, and confounded received ideas of the South. Throughout, musical and visual examples provide contextual support.
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Cover of the 1996 "Dirty South" CD single (LaFace).
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Introduced in a 1995 song by the Atlanta-based group Goodie Mob, the idea of the "Dirty South" spread quickly throughout the rap music subculture and industry, and by the early years of the twenty-first century moved into more general usage in a variety of contexts not directly related to rap.
The concept of the Dirty South as elaborated by the Goodie Mob and other rappers and producers in several of the major cities of the South was complex, contradictory, and multidimensional.1 This multidimensionality encompassed ideas of a racist, oppressive, white South historically continuous with slavery; a 'down-home' black South marked by distinctive speech and cultural practices; a sexually libidinous South; a rural, bucolic South; a lawless, criminal South; and a sophisticated urban South. The Dirty South was forged in conversation with older or alternate modes of imagining the South, spanning a continuum from Gone with the Wind-flavored Confederate apologetics at one end to the idea of the South as a unique African-American homeland on the other.
The Dirty South spread from a relatively insular rap music subculture to a wider, popular usage during the late 1990s along with the acceleration of investment on the part of major music corporations in the rap scenes of several large southern cities, including Atlanta, New Orleans, and Houston, as well as Memphis, Miami, and Virginia Beach. The passage of "Dirty South" from the specific context in which it emerged to a wider, popular culture resulted in a significant diminution of nuance in the discourse surrounding it. The understanding of the "Dirty South" and southern rap music generally finds articulation in the already familiar stereotypes of the South as variously backwards, abject, slow, corrupt, communal, down-to-earth, rural, or oversexed.
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The emergence of the Dirty South represented a seismic shift in the established geographical imaginary of rap music, centrally related to claims of authenticity and marketability. Before the Dirty South, artists from places like Atlanta, Houston, or Miami were not completely excluded from rap, but seemed compelled to adhere to certain stylistic and conceptual limitations in order to sustain a wider rap music authenticity that would ultimately contribute to their long-term economic prospects within the national market. In a similar manner to 'West Coast' (L.A.-based) 'gangsta' rap, which rose to prominence in the late 1980s, the emergence of the Dirty South involved a combination of participation by previously marginalized participants as well as a shift in stylistic and conceptual conventions.
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The rise of New Orleans' Master P signaled southern rap's growing dominance (1997).
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Click on each city to read Miller's short history of its rap scenes
Other scholars caution against a naturalized or taken-for-granted understanding of "'organic' relationships between music and the cultural history of [a] locale" and argue that participants appropriate "music via global flows and networks to construct particular narratives of the local." This process results in music "styles which are the result of an 'interlocking of local tendencies and cyclical transformations within the international music industries'."4 Others have underscored that music and the people involved in its production and consumption at various levels of scale do not take a passive or secondary role in this process. "Music," writes Martin Stokes, "does not then simply provide a marker in a prestructured social space, but the means by which this space can be transformed."5
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Sports logos and a skyline featuring the famous arch signify St. Louis in Chingy's 2003 Jackpot (Capitol).
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Taken in aggregate, these scholarly claims suggest a dynamic and mutually influential relationship between music and place. Connections between a style of music and its place of origin often appear to be organic because of the layered ways in which style and place make meaning through repetition and reinscription, establishing implicit or explicit ties (rhetorical, structural, stylistic, or otherwise) to the history of a social, musical, and cultural context.
From the time of its emergence in the Bronx in the mid-1970s, rap has been centrally concerned with place-based identities. Geography plays an essential part in the conception of authenticity that characterizes the genre, and the history of rap music entails a continual growth of place-based imaginaries. Rap has put places on the map — like the South Bronx or Compton — that the mass media either ignored or portrayed as dangerous and hopelessly blighted. However, the representation of previously marginalized places does not occur in any sort of a uniform pattern — only particular places, at particularly historical moments, are eligible for admission to the canon of authentic rap music places. Understanding the ways that place-based identities change within rap is of central importance.
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It is relatively difficult for a particular place to become familiar to wider rap audiences, but once achieved, artists, producers, and record labels from that city enjoy a significant advantage over those from seemingly more marginal places. A place becomes significant to rap geography through a combination of factors. First and foremost, the city must produce rap music which is of interest to outside audiences. For this to happen, creative and infrastructural development must occur on the "supply" side. On the "demand" side of this equation, the music produced in a given locale must accommodate national audiences' sonic, lyrical and thematic expectations in a way that does not push existing boundaries beyond their breaking point.
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Atlanta's Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz at a local landmark (1997, Ichiban Records).
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Music companies and other mediating forces try to identify the ideal blend of novelty and sameness, aware that an overemphasis on either of these two poles entails different risks. While it is not impossible for an artist or record label from a marginal place to become successful in rap, the process of mutual reinforcement favors already-established places. Running counter to this privileging of incumbents within rap music geography are worries about saturation or exhaustion (that a particular place can only produce a limited number of marketable artists) and, to a lesser degree, speculative exploration (that going to obscure places might yield a novel interpretation of the form).
Place-based affiliations can elevate an artist's status. Being able to claim a certain place — one known widely to the African American youth subculture that exists around rap music in the U.S. — affords an artist leverage to move his or her career forward. Represented at various levels of abstraction, places exist in a nested hierarchy which spans between generalized metaregional affiliations (East or West Coast and now Dirty South) and extremely specific connections to particular black neighborhoods. While establishing a place-based identity can prove profitable for artists and labels, there are less desirable consequences, often in the form of expectations of an intrinsic and monolithic relationship between performer and place that excludes as many artists as it empowers. Ultimately, the attachment of a distinct musical identity to a particular place introduces a paradoxically enabling/constraining dynamic which exercises a substantial effect over all rap music production from that place. The sound of any given place within the national-level rap imaginary is a fluid, contested and necessarily over-simplified idea that becomes more problematic as it achieves larger levels of scale.
From its beginnings in New York's neighborhoods, rap spread first to other large cities in the northeast, then jumped across the continent to southern California, for reasons that had much more to do with the preexisting structure of the music industry than with any sort of monopoly on talent held by the California-based rappers and producers who entered the national rap market in the late 1980s. However, California-based artists and independent record label owners took advantage of the opportunity and in turn helped to develop what would become known as the "gangsta rap" subgenre. This style was characterized by lyrics which emphasized criminality, violence, and rebellious anger, tempered by a celebration of the extravagant lifestyles of pimps and drug dealers.
.Within the lyrics of this hyper-masculinized genre, women were infrequently represented. When they were, it was within a schema where the only positive model was that of the older, self-sacrificing single mother. Younger women were scorned as either stuck-up "bitches" or promiscuous "hoes." As in other emergent rap scenes, artists, producers, and label owners in these places were overwhelmingly male, and the emergence of well-known female rappers was a slow process. However, in New York, California, and other places where rap scenes coalesced, women and girls played a central role as part of rap's audience. As Kyra Gaunt argues, "black girls' sphere of musical activity (e.g. "handclapping games, cheers, and double-dutch") represents one of the earliest formations of a black popular music culture."6
Due to their proximity to both the centers of power in the entertainment industry and centers of rap creativity in largely African American communities around L.A., Southern California-based independent record labels and their artists were able to firmly establish themselves as competitors in the national rap market in the late 1980s. This development occurred in a complementary fashion with the collective creation of the idea of a distinctive geographically based style and point of view. While relatively vague and mutable, the conventions of West Coast 'gangsta' rap — which included particular musical, thematic, visual, and lyrical markers — were perceived to be distinctive despite significant areas of overlap with other rap music.7 The emergence of "authentic" rap from the West Coast in the form of acts like N.W.A. or Ice-T led to a steady progression of more pop-oriented rappers who exchanged authenticity for access to wider audiences, as in the case of MC Hammer, Tone Loc, or Young MC.
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The U.S. southeast represented as the "Third Coast" (2003, Starzmusic).
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Until the late 1980s, when Los Angeles emerged as an up-and-coming center for rap music production, New York had enjoyed an exclusive claim on the genre. Two regionally based stylistic spheres began to take hold. New Yorkers still dominated rap in the northeast throughout the 1980s, but as the decade progressed, many rap acts began to emerge from areas outside of the core neighborhoods associated with the genre's early years. New York retained a symbolically and structurally central position, but suburbs like Long Island and nearby places like New Jersey and Philadephia began to be grouped with New York-based artists to form a cultural-industrial bloc called "the East Coast." Meanwhile, the Los Angeles-based scene engendered another regional imaginary, "the West Coast." This metaregional division was used to categorize artists, companies, and audiences and was soon imbued by audiences, critics, and music industry personnel with an understanding of basic differences in style and viewpoint which characterized each contingent.
Hip-hop scholar Murray Forman has noted the correspondence between "the rise and impact of rappers on the West Coast" and a "discursive shift from the spatial abstractions framed within 'the ghetto' to the more localized and specific discursive construct of 'the hood' occurring in 1987-88."8 Did West Coast artists and audiences initiate this change? Or did they simply hitch their wagons to an emerging trend in rap? What is clear is that the considerable influence of West Coast-based gangsta rap along the lines of musical style, lyrical content/, and imagery was paired with a general movement in rap towards an emphasis on "regional affiliations as well as . . . a keen sense of . . . the extreme local."9 As Forman notes, the emergence of a place-based concept of authenticity relates to changes in the conception of rap's narrative voice: "The tendency toward narrative self-awareness and a more early definable subjectivity effectively closed the distance between the story and the storyteller, and the concept of place-based reality became more of an issue in evaluating an artist's legitimacy within the hip-hop scene."10
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As Adam Krims argues, this "poetics of locality and authenticity can work through sound, visual images, words, and media images together."11 Reference to the local in the lyrics and titles of songs such as NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" or 2 Live Crew's "Miami" offers one way of figuring place. On the more abstract level of musical style, the metaregions of rap are tied to regional flavors. Highly mutable and unstable, differences in musical style relate to the different cultural mix at work in various places, as well as to the efforts of empowered individuals or companies. In L.A., African Americans, some with roots in southern states like Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas engaged with Southern California Latino youth culture, with its mellow soul music and lowrider cars.12 In Miami, another distinct blend formed, as African Americans with roots in the U.S. South formed but one element of a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, and heavily Caribbean cultural mix.
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A map of Mississippi "places" rapper Dirty South (2001, Hard 2 Hit).
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An early rap record from New Orleans (Rosemont, 1988). |
For all of its novelty in the areas of vocal performance, narrative voice, and musical backing, rap was strongly tied to previous genres of African American music, a fact which helped make the music accessible to Black southern audiences. In addition to sustaining an interest in and a market for "mainstream" rap produced for national audiences, inhabitants of southern cities soon began the process of creating rich musical subcultures based around locally specific interpretations of the form. Usually oriented towards dancing, these forms were often characterized by a decreased emphasis on lyrical complexity, a prioritization of audience participation and engagement, and certain constellations of musical or lyrical devices. Southern scenes incorporated and absorbed the changes and products of the national rap music industry, accepting or rejecting them according to their own preferences.
For the most part, the development of the rap scene and production infrastructure in the South was not due to major label investment, but was rather the product of the collective (although not necessarily coordinated) efforts of local audiences, artists, independent record label owners, club owners, record or tape sellers, and a host of other microeconomic players whose activities are ultimately essential for the emergence of a larger collective musical culture. The pursuit of local musical preferences in Miami, Houston, Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis, and Virginia Beach outpaced the majors' ability to track, exploit, and profit from these emerging markets — a lag due as much to "broader culture formations and practices that are within neither the control nor the understanding" of the major music corporations as to the limitations of technology or corporate strategy.14 Because of their cultural and geographic distance from emergent rap scenes in cities such as Atlanta and New Orleans, major music corporations left these local or regional markets to independent entrepreneurs until their profitability was beyond dispute. In this sense, the majors chose an overly cautious course that resulted in a diminished share of the potential profits. Their investment followed rap audiences inside and outside of the South, whose tastes were being shaped and supplied by the efforts of independent local entrepreneurs. When the majors did arrive on a scene, they sought to ally themselves with these local independents and harness the advantages — in the form of both infrastructural development and the cultivation of "authenticity" — that their established commercial and artistic networks provided.
Rap scenes, styles, and local industries coalesced in Atlanta, Houston, Memphis, New Orleans, Miami, and Virginia Beach. While these urban centers were often discursively subsumed under the rubric of "the South," in reality, the development of rap as a genre in various southern states was a highly uneven process in which certain places became hubs of the emergent industry and style, while others languished in the hinterlands of these cities. Sheer size or the presence of a large African American population alone did not guarantee that a city would become established as a center of rap production, but these factors clearly influenced the range of possibilities in the South generally. Nevertheless, it is incorrect to conceive of rap music in the South as a phenomenon that stops at the city limits of the urban centers that have become known for their artists and scenes — it was and remains a much more diffused process within a hinterland/urban center arrangement. Artists, producers, and record label owners in those urban centers depended upon relationships with other like-minded folks in the cities' hinterlands in order to stage concerts and sell recordings.
With a climate, history, and cultural mix that diverges in important ways from Atlanta, Memphis, Houston, or New Orleans, Miami exists as much within the hemispheric South as it does within the historical U.S. South. Geography and demography informed cultural production from the city — as rap mogul Luther Campbell asserted, "the Cubans and the Caribbean blacks gave this city its personality . . . . The Latin style blended with the black, Caribbean rhythm and colors."15 The city occupies a midpoint between the Caribbean and the urban Northeast, a liminal space of contact between the people and cultures associated with these places and those with ties to proximate states like Alabama and Georgia. These factors encouraged an early adaptation — or even a parallel evolution — of the rap form. A distinctive local interpretation emerged out of the everyday musical culture of the city's poor neighborhoods (including Liberty City, "Miami's most notorious sprawling ghetto, . . . Overtown, [and] some parts of Opa Locka and North Miami") which came to be known as "Miami Bass" in the early 1990s.16
Gigolo Tony's 1989 album Ain't It Good To Ya (4-Sight). |
The Miami style came to be defined by relatively fast (around 125 b.p.m.) tempos, with vocal performances that were heavily rooted in call-and-response and relied upon short, repeated phrases rather than extended narrative raps.18 As in other diasporic forms like dancehall reggae, "vocal and musical quality [were] as important to listeners as [was] the strictly lexical register" when it came to Miami Bass, and the rapidly-diffusing genre introduced a number of innovative and exciting developments.19 The sonic qualities of many of these recordings were reminiscent of the 'electro' style that had briefly flourished in New York around 1982, when artists like Mantronix and Afrika Bambaattaa used futuristic themes and imagery to complement sounds generated with drum machines, sequencers, and synthesizers, drawing heavily upon the work of the German group Kraftwerk.
The first commercial attempts to produce recordings of this local style came in the mid-1980s. Many participants credit 2 Live Crew's "Throw the D" (1986) as the first bass record, but it was joined by efforts from early Miami artists like Gigolo Tony, MC A.D.E., Clay D., The Gucci Crew, and veteran DJ and producer Pretty Tony. Female artists like Missy Mist, Debbie Deb, and Candy Fresh were among the artists who recorded in the formative years of Bass. In addition to Luther Campbell's various record labels, other independent record companies such as Pandisc, Joey Boy, and 4-Sight flourished as the popularity of Miami Bass grew in block parties and teen clubs, as well as "car races, car audio stores, clubs, skating rinks, and even strip clubs."20 The latter formed one of the dominant spaces that informed Miami Bass lyrics and imagery with regard to women. The world of adult entertainment in the city and the emergent rap scene were highly intertwined, as shown in the film Dirty South (1996). While female rappers did not represent any less of a minority in Miami than in other places, many critics viewed the representation of women in general within Bass lyrics and album artwork as hypersexualized objectification. One commentator who supported her argument with many songs and videos by Miami- and Atlanta-based groups observed, "there remains a thin line between sex and sexism, and what's troubling, judging from the videos, is that the women in these clips don't have any clearer a sense of the difference than the men holding the mikes."21 The bass music produced in the city divided into two distinct camps: a raucous, chant-heavy variety oriented towards rowdy nightclub crowds who demanded salacious lyrics, and a more understated style that often eschewed lyrics entirely so that club or car-based listeners could enjoy the booming bass tones without distraction.
Trick Daddy's disembodied head floats over a stormy sky (1998, Slip N Slide Records). |
Miami Bass flourished in the early 1990s, and much of the groundwork for this growth was laid by Luther "Luke Skyywalker" Campbell, who made impressive strides in establishing the business infrastructure to support the genre and providing a platform for its creative development. At its peak, Campbell's rap empire encompassed multiple record labels and various nightclubs (including a 'teen club' called the Pac Jam). He came to national prominence around 1990, when efforts by Moral Majority-affiliated critics to ban the sale of his bawdy records pushed him into the unlikely role of First Amendment champion. By the time Campbell's legal troubles had wound down, Miami bass was hitting its stride. As a 1994 issue of The Source dedicated to Miami — touted as "hip-hop's hidden hotbed" on the cover — indicated, Bass was enjoying a level of exposure and interest in the rap world that was unprecedented for a place outside of the East Coast / West Coast framework. The production of Miami-style bass music quickly spread to other southeastern cities like Orlando, Jacksonville, and Atlanta.
Gigolo Tony, "Smurf Rock" (1986 Gold Star Records/4-Sight Records) (20 sec.) This song by an early Miami rapper shows a playful approach that is strongly rooted in African American vernacular music traditions. |
2 Live Crew, "Ghetto Bass" (1986 Luke Skyywalker Records) (20 sec.) The emerging Miami Bass scene is the lyrical subject of the b-side of "Throw The D." |
Missy Mist, "Gettin' Bass" (1989 Never Stop Productions) (20 sec.) In this excerpt, the Bronx-born rapper describes the equipment needed to produce a live Bass experience. |
DJ Magic Mike, "The Man with the Bass" (1994 Cheetah Records) (20 sec.) Orlando-based producer DJ Magic Mike crafts instrumental pieces that showcase exceptionally deep and long bass tones. |
DJ Uncle Al, "Uncle Al Mix It Up" (1993 On Top Records) (20 sec.) Uncle Al's high-energy vocal style is typical of live performances by Miami Bass DJs. |
Trick Daddy, "In da Wind" (2002 Atlantic/WeA) (20 sec.) Trick Daddy is one of the more recent Miami rappers to rise to national prominence. |
The earliest version of James Smith's Ghetto Boys (1987, Rap-A-Lot). |
Regardless, The Geto Boys was nothing if not controversial — as one critic observed, it "was so verbally abusive that Geffen severed all ties with Def American, which never worked with Rap-A-Lot again."24 The notoriety gained by these events no doubt helped propel their next album — 1991's We Can't Be Stopped, distributed by California-based independent Priority Records — to national prominence, cementing Rap-A-Lot's (and by extension, Houston's) reputation as "a central entity in the southern rap scene, . . . [and] a beacon for many southern rap artists who were geographically or culturally distant from . . . New York or Los Angeles."25
The group that rose to prominence in the early 1990s was the most recent of several attempts by Smith to put together a "Ghetto" or "Geto" Boys. The biographies of the group's principal members speak to the lack of a unified tie to place — while both Willie D. and Scarface were from Houston, they grew up in different neighborhoods, separated by geographical distance as well as social class. The diminutive Bushwick Bill had family roots in Jamaica and had moved to Texas as a teen. This incarnation of the group was described in 1992 as "the hottest music figures to come out of the Houston area since Clint Black."26 Rap-A-Lot continued to release music by Geto Boys veteran Scarface ("the label's biggest star"), as well as the significantly less angry Odd Squad, and found regional support for subsequent efforts by Odd Squad member Devin the Dude and a variety of Houston-based artists, including Ganksta N-I-P and The Fifth Ward Boyz.27 In 1995, Smith broke with Priority and negotiated a deal with Noo Trybe/Virgin to distribute Rap-A-Lot. While its centrality in the Houston scene declined as other independents rose to prominence, "the label's rags-to-riches story continues to exert a strong influence on Houston rappers."28
The South as a desert wasteland in an advertisement for 8-Ball's triple CD, Lost (1998, Suave House). |
Other labels and artists added to the momentum Rap-A-Lot had initiated. Rapper Bun B and rapper and producer Pimp C had grown up in Port Arthur on the Texas-Louisiana border, but as UGK they gravitated to Houston's rap scene. Their 1992 debut on local label Big Tyme Recordz caught the attention of Jive Records, who released several albums by the group, including the highly acclaimed Ridin' Dirty in 1996. UGK's sound featured slower-than-average tempos and live instrumental backing music or sampled equivalents playing bluesy grooves, a style that came to be known as "Texas funk." Despite their status as "one of the key acts defining southern hip-hop" in the mid-1990s, UGK was not able to fully capitalize on their popularity.29 Five years passed before they released another album, and in 2002, Pimp C was sent to prison for aggravated assault. Though "few listeners outside the South" heard UGK's music during their heyday, their growing reputation further elevated Houston's profile.30 Suave House Records also played an important role in the continuing expansion of Houston's rap scene in the 1990s. The label was founded by Memphis native Tony Draper, who brought his hometown's hottest rap duo 8-Ball & MJG with him when he relocated to Texas.
Innovative artists and stylistic approaches continued to emerge from Houston — in 2005, critic Kelefa Sanneh claimed that the city "has been producing some of the country's best and weirdest rap since the late 1980s" — and the local subgenre called "screw" played an important role in this process. The genre was pioneered and named after DJ Screw, whose homemade "screw tapes" presented a technological reworking of rap songs which involved playing the song at half-speed (producing extra-deep bass and percussion and groaning vocals) and repeating small portions of the song in a technique called "chopping." Screw's music turned out to be the perfect soundtrack for another emerging local scene, based around the consumption of narcotic cough syrup (called 'syrup' or 'lean'). Screw has been cast as a reflective outgrowth of this drug scene, but Sanneh finds that connections between the musical style and "the city's slow, rambling speech patterns" or "the region's thick, muggy climate" are no more compelling than the argument that screw tapes were simply the perfect entertainment for a highway-happy city where you might spend more time driving to the club than being there. Whatever the connection between screw and the environment from which it emerged, screw has defined Houston's identity within the national rap music culture, and has formed a central part of locally-felt local rap music identity: "Just about every new album or mixtape from Houston is still available in two versions: regular or slow."31
Lil Flip in an advertisement for Houston jeweler Johnny Dang (2004). |
Geto Boys, "Do It Like a G.O." (1990 Rap-A-Lot Records) (20 sec.) The Geto Boys were the first Houston group to break through to national audiences. |
Mr. Scarface, "I'm Black" (1993 Rap-A-Lot Records) (20 sec.) Former Geto Boy Scarface recorded several solo albums before becoming president of Def Jam South in 2000. |
Odd Squad, "Coughee" (1994 Rap-A-Lot Records) (20 sec.) The work of the Odd Squad embodies a soulful and less aggressive take on the Houston rap style. |
Underground Kingz (UGK), "Front, Back & Side-to-Side" (1994 Jive Records) (20 sec.) This Port Arthur-based duo delivers a funky 1994 ode to low rider cars. |
Eightball & MJG, "Boom Boom" (2001 Suave House Records) (20 sec.) One of Houston's top rap acts moved to the city from Memphis in the early 1990s along with their record label. |
Lil' Flip, "Game Over" (2004 Sony) (20 sec.) Lil' Flip became one of Houston's newest stars around 2004. |
DJ Michael ‘5000’ Watts featuring Archie Lee, “Weight a Minute Freestyle” (2004 Swishahouse) (20 sec.) Elements drawn from Houston's "screw" style have influenced other rap being produced there, as in this track by Michael "5000" Watts featuring Archie Lee. |
The Greater New Orleans Bridge sets the scene for Mystikal's national debut (1995, Jive). |
The New Orleans rap scene incubated in concerts, nightclubs, teen clubs, house parties, and block parties throughout the city, as well as through radio play and recording sales. It drew upon qualities already in existence, including a fractionalized urban geography of neighborhoods, housing projects, and wards that often structured business arrangements and formed an axis around which artistic and commercial competition could revolve. The city's highly-developed traditions of expressive culture — represented by Mardi Gras Indians, brass bands, and "second line" parades — provide analogues to the emerging rap scene in terms of the intensity of creative engagement and the strong sense of competition driving the efforts of rival groups or factions. These two central features — the city's relative isolation vis-à-vis the centers of rap music industry and its deeply rooted traditions of expressive culture, including those related to carnival — profoundly influenced the development of the New Orleans rap scene and style.
Rapper Cheeky Blakk bounces in front of the New Orleans skyline (1996, Tombstone). |
A similar release by DJ Jimi in 1992 helped establish a distinctive sound, and a vital scene coalesced around the new style of music soon christened "bounce." Local independents like Cash Money, Parkway Pumpin', and Pack supplied the growing demand with releases by Juvenile, Lil Slim, Magnolia Slim, Pimp Daddy, Everlasting Hitman, Silky Slim, Cheeky Blakk, and dozens of others. Grounded in a participatory approach to performance and composition, the style that these artists helped to create relied upon a dance orientation, vocals structured by call-and-response, and lyrics featuring local references. Chanted phrases which often unfolded in basic melodic patterns formed part of the polyrhythmic layering of the music along with elements such as handclaps and highly-inflected bass drum patterns similar to those in second line parades.
Bounce dominated the New Orleans market, but the city also saw the rise of a number of artists who did not fit neatly into that category. West Coast gangsta rap acts like N.W.A. and Tupac Shakur had always enjoyed popularity in the city, and Cash Money and Big Boy Records released many records that were either within this genre or that mixed it with ideas drawn from bounce. Mystikal, on the Big Boy label, became one of the earliest artists from the Crescent City to break nationally, possibly due to the fact that he eschewed the bounce sound almost entirely. His rapid-fire, animated lyrical style helped convince the established independent label Jive to sign him in 1995.
Soon after Mystikal's signing, New Orleans' profile in the rap world received another boost when Master P's No Limit Records signed a lucrative deal with California-based independent Priority records. Building upon his "underground" success with minimal marketing and radio support, Master P leveraged a $30-million deal with Priority in 1996 in which he retained the rights to keep his master recordings. Throughout the late 1990s, he released a string of platinum-selling albums, earning a reputation as one of the top new rap moguls in the country. While Master P used several producers with long histories in the New Orleans scene, his engagement with local artists diminished as his success grew. His 1995 compilation Down South Hustlers: Bouncing and Swingin' (the first double rap CD) featured a host of prominent local New Orleans artists, but by the late 1990s his roster had narrowed to a few members of his immediate family and the fading star Snoop Dogg.
Advertisement for Juvenile's bounce-flavored song "Ha!" (1998, Cash Money). |
In 1998, New Orleans' second remarkable partnership formed between major labels and a local independent. Cash Money Records, a label headed by the Williams Brothers, with Mannie Fresh as in-house producer, established itself in the early 1990s as the top-selling local label with releases by Pimp Daddy, Kilo G, Ms. Tee, and UNLV. While the Williams brothers had largely parted ways with most of these artists by the time they sealed a multimillion dollar deal with Universal in 1998, Cash Money retained several promising artists, including B.G. and Juvenile, whose 1998 song "Ha" brought the New Orleans sound to national audiences. Members of the label's roster continued to defect, however, until Lil' Wayne represented the only Cash Money artist receiving national attention.
No Limit and Cash Money began to decline in terms of relevance and market share as 2000 approached. However, the local "bounce" scene, which had experienced a lull in the late 1990s, was reenergized around 2000 by the emergence of several gay male "sissy" rappers, including Katey Red and Big Freedia, and others. Along with other artists like Hot Boy Ronald, Josephine Johnny, and Gotti Boi Chris, they produced music for small independent labels that was well-received in the local market and bore a strong New Orleans stylistic imprint. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina dealt this grassroots rap scene a hard blow. While some artists and producers have returned, New Orleans rap may never re-establish the pre-Katrina level of neighborhood participation and enthusiastic popularity. The areas most affected by flooding were also those which provided the most consistent support for the local rap scene.
MC Gregory D & DJ Mannie Fresh, "Where You from? (Party People)" (1989 Uzi Records) (20 sec.) In this song, Gregory D celebrates the distinctive culture of New Orleans. |
MC T. Tucker & DJ Irv, "Where Dey At" (1991 Charlot Records) (20 sec.) This song kicked off the "bounce" genre and catalyzed a conceptual revolution in New Orleans rap. |
Mia X, "Da Payback" (1993 Lamina Records) (20 sec.) This bounce song by New Orleans' most successful female rapper responds to the misogyny and sexism of local male rappers' efforts. |
Skull Dugrey, "Darkside" (1995 No Limit Records) (20 sec.) Gangsta rap has always been popular in New Orleans, as seen in this gothic tale spun by Skull Dugrey and released on Master P's label. |
Mystikal, "Y'all Ain't Ready Yet" (1995 Jive Records) (20 sec.) With an idiosyncratic style and athletic delivery, Mystikal became one of the earliest New Orleans-based rappers to move from regional to national markets. |
Juvenile, "Ha!" (1998 Cash Money Records) (20 sec.) Juvenile's hit song brought a local New Orleans flavor to national audiences. |
S.W.A., "We #1" (2002 Kwik Burn Records) (20 sec.) Gay male "sissy" rappers have achieved local popularity in recent years. |
Advertisement for La Chat CD, (2001, Koch) |
In 1992, Memphis rap was still largely self-contained and unknown in wider circles, a fact which led the city's top rap act, 8Ball & MJG, to depart for greener pastures in Houston with Suave House label owner Tony Draper. Other early- to mid-1990s artists such as Al Kapone and Kingpin Skinny Pimp formed points around which the local scene grew. Several of these artists recorded for local independent On The Strength. Their popularity was further fueled by frequent appearances on mixtapes released by local DJs like DJ Squeeky, "an Orange Mound DJ who got his start spinning at the neighborhood's Club Memphis."35 Another pair of mixtape DJs, DJ Paul and Juicy J, began producing original material using local rappers, eventually forming a crew called Triple Six Mafia (later Three 6 Mafia). This group, led by DJ Paul and Juicy J and featuring male rappers Lord Infamous, Project Pat, and the female rapper Gangsta Boo, became known for compositions featuring "spare, low-BPM rhythms, simplistic chants . . . and narcotically repetitive, slasher-flick textures," features which were instrumental for the emergence of the crunk style.36 Their first releases came out on their own Prophet Records, but with independent success, Three 6 Mafia signed with Sony's Relativity, and in late 1997 released their first record under the new arrangements. In 2000 they changed their label's name to Hypnotize Minds. With releases by the group and protégés like Project Pat, Three 6 Mafia came to be the most successful Memphis rap enterprise during this decade.
Memphis landmarks on advertisement for 2003 Three 6 Mafia release (Sony). |
OutKast featuring Goodie Mob, "Call of da Wild" (1994 LaFace) (20 sec.) An underexposed track from OutKast's debut album showcases sophisticated rap skills and forward-thinking production work. |
Diamond featuring D-Roc, "Bankhead Bounce" (1996 Elektra/Asylum) (20 sec.) Before he joined the Ying Yang Twins, D-Roc brought the rap spotlight to an Atlanta neighborhood with his catchy song and accompanying dance. |
Goodie Mob, "Dirty South" (1996 LaFace Records) (20 sec.) The song crystallized a way of thinking about the South at a moment when southern rap was on the verge of becoming a national phenomenon. |
DJ Kizzy Rock featuring DJ Smurf, "Crank this Shit Up" (1996 Ichiban Records) (20 sec.) Music designed for local club scenes relies on energetic music and exhortative lyrics. |
Lil' Jon & the East Side Boys, "Get Crunk" (1997 Ichiban Records) (20 sec.) Lil Jon has become the public face of crunk. |
Ying Yang Twins, "Wait" (2005 TVT Records) (20 sec.) The Ying Yang Twins took crunk from a scream to a whisper in this 2006 hit. |
Trap Squad, "What's Happenin?" (2006 Asylum Records) (20 sec.) "What's Happenin?" was the first single from Trap Squad's Asylum Records debut |
D4L, "Laffy Taffy" (2005 Asylum Records) (20 sec.) The wide exposure of this infectious "snap" ode to strip club dancers speaks to Atlanta's centrality in the southern rap universe. |
OutKast, Atlanta's best-known rap act (1994, LaFace). |
Like other cities covered in this essay, the rap scene in Atlanta did not begin to build any sort of significant momentum until the late 1980s. Early rappers like Mojo and the club DJ known as King Edward J attracted local audiences, but remained obscure outside the city. The earliest rapper to develop any degree of more-than-local prominence was Peter "MC Shy D" Jones, a transplanted New Yorker who built a career rapping in Atlanta and Miami. At first, the dominance of Miami pulled Jones to work with Luther Campbell, recording and performing with 2 Live Crew. "In the late '80s," writes Roni Sarig, "Atlanta became a sort of colonial outpost of Miami hip-hop."37
Goodie Mob on the cover of XXL magazine (1998). |
In early 1992, Arrested Development was the first group associated with Atlanta to attract the attention of national audiences and critics. Composed of college students who for the most part had grown up outside of the South, but who were able to exploit the stereotyped expectations of national audiences about what a southern rap act should properly look and sound like, Arrested Development's imagery evoked a black South in which poverty and rurality figured centrally. A sample-heavy, "East Coast" production style and a lack of references to club life, partying, and dancing signified the group's disconnection with local aesthetic and thematic priorities, and while their first album achieved critical acclaim and high sales numbers, their long-term effect upon the local Atlanta scene was minimal.
The Ying Yang Twins show their allegiance to "the ATL" (2005, TVT Records). |
Atlanta rap slogan on a basketball jersey (photograph by Matt Miller, 2007). |
SMK, "Da Gangster Walk" (1991 Brutal Records) (20 sec.) This song by rapper/producer SMK instructs listeners on the dance and associated style of music that took Memphis by storm in the late 1980s. |
Three 6 Mafia, "Hit a Muthafucka" (1997 Relativity) (20 sec.) The work of Memphis' best-known rap group is marked by extreme imagery and sonic constructions that figured centrally in the "crunk" style's emergence. |
Kingpin Skinny Pimp, "Where Ya From?" (2000 Basix Records) (20 sec.) In this excerpt the rapper lists a variety of labels, cliques, and places related to the Memphis rap scene. |
Project Pat featuring La’ Chat, "Chickenhead" (2001 Relativity) (20 sec.) Project Pat and La Chat engage in a humorous exchange of insults between the sexes. |
Advertisement for Missy Elliot's first album (1997, East/West). |
Slightly older than The Neptunes, producer Tim "Timbaland" Mosely and rapper/producer Missy Elliot have done much to elevate Virginia Beach's profile, but the two artists left the area in the mid-1990s, as a collaboration with R&B singer Aaliyah propelled them into the pop spotlight. Over the course of the next few years of multiple solo and collaborative albums and constant production work, the inventive and eclectic Timbaland became one of the top producers in rap, R&B and pop. Backed by Interscope, he founded a label, Beat Club, and signed white Georgia rapper Bubba Sparxxx as its first artist in 2001. With platinum sales from 1997 onwards, Missy Elliot became "the biggest female artist in hip-hop history."42 As her recording career leveled off, she ventured into reality television in 2005 with her rap-themed reality show, The Road to Stardom.
Timbaland (right) and Magoo. |
The Neptunes moved to New York in the late 1990s, and drew widespread attention in 1998 with their production work for the rapper Noreaga. The pair crafted hit songs for rap acts such as Mystikal, Jay-Z, and Scarface, to pop icons including Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, No Doubt, and Beyoncé. The pair founded the Star Trak label, distributed by Arista, and signed Virginia rappers Clipse as their debut artists. In 2002, they bought the Mastersound studio in Virginia Beach where they had previously worked alongside Timbaland and Missy, changing the name to Hovercraft Studios.
In terms of chart position, crossover, and influence, Virginia Beach produced some of the most successful producers and rappers during the Dirty Decade. The profiles of Timbaland, the Neptunes, and Missy Elliot have diminished, resulting in the disappearance of Virginia Beach from current rap geography. The Tidewater region has not sustained a grassroots scene capable of providing an ongoing supply of aspiring artists and producers, and its relationship to rap's Dirty South is tenuous and fragile. For Pusha T of the duo Clipse, "'I was raised here, but Virginia isn't what I know as Southern,' . . . 'There's no way I could call this the Dirty South. This is the middle ground before you start going Deep South. This is the mixing pot of everything; it's dead smack in the middle.'"43
"Timbaland & Magoo, "Peepin' My Style" (1997 Atlantic/Q Records) (20 sec.) Timbaland showcases his laid-back rap style and layered, eclectic production on this track. |
Missy Elliott, "Get Ur Freak On" (2001 Elektra/WEA) (20 sec.) A world music sound from Timbaland helped this song reach the top of the charts and Missy to become one of the most successful women rappers in history. |
Clipse featuring Pharrell Williams, "Mr. Me Too" (2006 Re-Up Gang/Star Trak) (20 sec.) Virginia duo Clipse raps over a sparse, futuristic beat from The Neptunes. |
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Overlapping this period in which the South was essentially invisible in the world of rap music came a second stage in which southern identity and imagery were used to challenge the status quo in rap. This approach is well represented by the Goodie Mob's "Dirty South" (1996), in which the group used the mapping of very specific and detailed Atlanta urban geographies to support a scrappy and, to some extent, defensive posture vis-à-vis the prevailing norms of geographic affiliation in rap. In the lyrics and imagery of the song, group members reject negative stereotypes (such as southern ignorance or inability to make credible rap music) and assert positive ones (such as community, family, and everyday culture). "Dirty South" was one of many songs released in the mid-1990s that pitted the South's diverse African American urban youth populations against the rest of the country and the world, within the artistic arena of rap music.
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Dirty South T-shirt (photograph by Matt Miller, 2006).
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The Dirty South existed at the intersection of two different types of affiliation. On one hand, southern and northern blacks found common ground in an intense dislike for any sort of nostalgic or sanitized representations of the eras of slavery and segregation. The experiences of blacks in the South and their relationships with whites could easily be metonymically construed to represent black experience and black/white relations in the U.S. generally. The rhetorical rejection of the images and ideas related to a white supremacist South that often characterized southern rap of this period formed a point of identification between young black southerners and their counterparts in other areas of the U.S., which black southern artists were capable of strategically exploiting.44
However, while the explicit discussion of 'southernness' sometimes engendered solidarity between southern and northern black youth, it also expressed divisions between these two groups. Within the context of rap, black southern participants often expressed an attitude of defensiveness or outright hostility towards blacks from other places in anticipation of dismissals of their efforts by listeners whose expectations were oriented to the more established sites of production. These feelings of division between northern and southern blacks were informed by "raced, sexed, and gendered scripts of pathological black masculinity" that predated the rap era, and by the South's status as a "pariah region" in the national context generally.45 The defensive framing of southern qualities suggests that artists in this period were unable to express 'southernness' without referencing, and ultimately reinscribing, to some extent, persistent negative stereotypes.
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A map of rap's Dirty South found on the Internet.
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To the extent that they were familiar with the local preferences and practices that emerged in cities and towns across the South in the 1980s, mainstream audiences and participants in the national-level music industry often viewed the music and its audience as anomalous or even atavistic. As the popularity of Arrested Development demonstrated, national critics and audiences were more comfortable with representations of southernness in textual or visual imagery than they were with engagements of the musical style increasingly associated with southern rap scenes. Even iconic southern groups like OutKast straddled an undervalued local urban club scene and a more nationally oriented rap scene, two venues which possessed substantially different values of spatial authenticity.
During the late 1990s, preferences of national rap audiences became more closely aligned with those of audiences in the major urban centers, black suburbs, and even small towns across the South. While earlier artists from Atlanta, Miami, or New Orleans chose between participating in relatively self-contained local markets and trying to beat New York or Los Angeles-based rappers at their own game, by the late 1990s, they had succeeded in redrawing the stylistic map of the game itself. While Arrested Development or the Goodie Mob deployed speech patterns, familiar imagery, and lyrical references to locales such as Adamsville or East Point, later rappers expressed "southernnness" through the use of musical and stylistic signifiers widely understood by their audiences. Artists including Lil Jon, The Ying Yang Twins, Juvenile, Trina, Trick Daddy, and David Banner benefited from the creative work of earlier rappers who made more literal and direct reference to southern signifiers.
The late 1990s saw yet another transition: an assertion of a wider, generic "southern" identity was increasingly abandoned in favor of more specific articulations of local identities keyed to city or neighborhood. However, unlike the "invisible South" years, this lack of attention to the spatial imaginary of a wider South results from a taken-for-granted acceptance of the South and the authenticity of its rap music among national audiences and markets. For the time being, the South occupies a central position in the rap universe. Changing tastes of national audiences, dynamically related to changing ideas about the relationship of rap to place and to an evolving Southern imaginary, led to increased interest from independent label owners in exploiting local musical subcultures rather than identifying atypical artists or performers whom they could mold to national tastes.
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Miami-based rapper Trick Daddy on the cover of The Source (April, 2001).
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For music critics and journalists, the "Dirty South" became shorthand for the growing numbers of rap artists from the former Confederate states. Sometimes appearing as a geographical referent, at other times the Dirty South described a genre of music. On the website allmusic.com in 2008, the Dirty-South-as-genre appeared as "a stoned, violent, sex-obsessed and (naturally) profane brand of modern hip-hop," the anonymous writer asserting that OutKast and Goodie Mob "were the best the genre had to offer, since both their music and their lyrics were much sharper than such contemporaries as the No Limit posse." Allmusic.com also features an entry for "Southern Rap," offering an overview of the most successful artists from the South with no attempt at thematic or stylistic unification.
The 2008 entry for "Dirty South" on Wikipedia, while lacking the dismissive tone of allmusic.com, is hardly more helpful. As part of a larger entry on "southern hip-hop" that features a series of subgenres or local styles, Dirty South is listed as "the biggest and most popular genre of southern rap," which itself is "just a general term for Rap made in the South." "Dirty South rap," write Wikipedians, "is largely characterized by its bouncy, upbeat, exuberant, club-friendly tunes and simplistic, heavily rhythmic lyrical delivery." "Dirty South" is also used as a geographical referent, "a term for the South minus any states whose Southern character is debatable." The shifting boundaries of "the South" in these definitions, and the fact that this uncited characterization of Dirty South as a discrete genre is not generally shared by music journalists, scholars, or artists who have commented on the subject, underscore the difficulties of dealing with a concept as mutable and adaptable as "Dirty South."
The Source: "Dirtiest Dirty Issue Ever"
In the mid-1990s, the growing interest in rap scenes of the South found expression within rap music magazines through special issues about Atlanta and Miami. Soon, the coverage moved from considering these cities as anomalous to situating them within a larger, southern rap culture. By September 2003, when The Source was published with two different covers featuring OutKast or Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz, the southern takeover of the rap industry and fan base seemed complete. Trumpeted as "the dirtiest dirty issue ever," it included an article on the emerging "crunk" subgenre, entitled "The New South." Artists like Mississippi's David Banner and Atlanta's Lil Jon and Bonecrusher represent the rising generation of southern rappers. |
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The triumph of the Dirty South on the cover
of The Source, September 2003. |
cats from the third coast got some manners. The idea that you can do your thing, get your money and still not hate on the next man (or woman). At least in the South, they understand that hip-hop has grown enough for all of us to eat. Look at how many people Cash Money, No Limit and the Dungeon Family have put on over the years. It's common practice down South to spread the wealth.46
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One need not look far for contradictions to this vision of a feel-good communal South with rural undertones. Osorio's "Southern hospitality" — marked by "manners" and a willingness of southern artists and labels to "stick together" —lies over an imagined potential for lethal violence."There's no need for studio gangstas and desk thugs. 'Cause if you bark up the wrong tree, you just might getcha jaw broke, wig split, neck snapped . . . or forehead poked out . . . thinking this is just rap."47 In her commentary, violence, community, and rap authenticity combine to form a highly problematic vision of the South and its rap music. Describing the action in Three 6 Mafia's "very successful, graphic, straight-to-video movie" entitled Choices (2001), producer and rapper Juicy J offers a similar perspective: "[the film] is basically how it goes down in Memphis . . . It's not a pretty scene. A lot of these small towns got crazy niggas killing and cutting each other's throats."48
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Rural imagery marks the work of this Albany, Georgia-based group (2006, Geffen). |
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The trope of dirt and dirtiness thrived in the decade since "Dirty South's" release. Mississippian David Banner combined religious imagery with a dirt-based southern identity in his album MTA2: Baptized in Dirty Water (2003) the cover of which portrays a giant Banner rising monstrously from the Mississippi River. The white Georgia-based rapper Bubba Sparxxx, who tried to push the idea of a "New South" over a "Dirty South" (possibly because of the strong association between Dirty South and black ethnic identity), included a song called "Back in the Mudd" on his 2003 album Deliverance, the title itself a reference to the most influential cinematic portrayal of a violent, decadent, incestuous, perverted (read: dirty) South in recent filmic memory.52
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The title of UGK's 1996 album refers to a criminal "dirtiness" related to drugs or guns (1996, Jive).
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Within rap, the idea of "dirtiness" imbues a form of southern authenticity. This dirtiness can exist across the South with local variants. In the case of the Alabama-based duo Dirty, a reviewer on the website www.down-south.com used a local Montgomery, Alabama slang term to describe the group: "Dirty is Gump. [There is] no other way to explain them, you can find some influence of some Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana and Georgia shit on the album, but the album is a hybrid of all that and their own shit, [it's] Alabama shit, [it's] all theirs." A 2000 prediction by Montgomery-based record label owner Mike Jackson demonstrates the stakes involved in a location in the rap imaginary, as well as the ubiquitous resort to the "map" metaphor: "Just like Nelly did it for St. Louis," claimed Jackson, "DIRTY will put Alabama on the map."53 In Alabama and Mississippi, the ability to "represent" on a national level is still largely confined to a limited number of people, almost always based in cities like Montgomery or Jackson (home of David Banner).
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Alabama-based group Dirty shows the rural side of the Dirty South (2001 UMVD labels)
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While dirtiness continues to be an important, if receding, trope within rap culture, the effects of the Dirty South imaginary rippled across other cultural spheres and adapted to new contexts in idiosyncratic ways. A Nebraska college football player originally from Horn Lake, Mississippi, described his technique as '"Dirty South' running, a combination of power, speed and agility."54 In late 2003, activists in Louisiana formed Dirty South Earth First to oppose logging operations by Maxxam, "a Houston-based holding company and forest products concern."55 Two years later in Louisiana, police closed Dirty South Kennels for its association with illegal dog fighting.56
Sports remain a common arena for appropriations of the "Dirty South" — there are Dirty South Runners, Dirty South [Trail] Riders, and a Dirty South [Basketball] Classic held at Norcross High School in 2005.57 In her study of black-sourced expressions in the news, Margaret Lee observed, "Journalists attempt to create an image of 'coolness' and 'hipness' through the use of well-established or popular black slang expressions."58 The Dirty South has proved itself adaptable to sports and entertainment writing. Statements describing "The Braves ditching the Dirty South for the West," or New Orleans' Hornets "making everything Dirty South comfortable for the visiting [Sacramento] Kings" confirm Lee's conclusion.59
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Comparison of imagery from mid-2000s CD and book covers reveals the Dirty South as multifaceted and contradictory. (New West, 2004 ; Avon, 2005 ; Wm. Morrow, 2004 ; Triple Crown Publ., 2005).
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A similar impulse underlies the appropriation of "Dirty South" by a variety of creative artists outside of the rap world. In March 2004, Ace Atkins, "a onetime Auburn football star . . . [and] crime reporter for the Tampa Tribune," published his fourth novel, Dirty South, the title, one reviewer explained, being "a reference to the new black sound coming out of places like Atlanta and New Orleans."60 While the exotic portrayal of "that glitzy and druggy world" of hustlers and rap music moguls in the housing projects of New Orleans entranced many reviewers, the appropriation of the Dirty South opened Atkins up to a particular line of criticism: "It's hard to hear the music in its pages."61 The imagery used on the cover of Atkins' book reveals the mutability of the Dirty South imaginary: one edition shows a desolate bayou, while another features neon signs and markers of urban decadence localized to New Orleans and Bourbon Street.
Geography poses no obstacle to the appropriation of the Dirty South. A nineteen-year-old shooting suspect in Canada is described as "white, 6-foot-2, 205 pounds" with "a 'Dirty South' tattoo on his neck," while a Melbourne, Australia-based producer and DJ calling himself Dirty South was hailed as "Australian dance music's newest star" by June 2006.62 The appeal of "Dirty South" in St. Louis, where rappers like Nelly and Chingy rose to prominence with style and material similar to that being produced in southern urban hotspots, was not limited to the rap sphere, as demonstrated by a 2006 advertisement for a rock band called "Dirty South."63 The website for a cover band from Northeast England called The Dirty South advertises "moonshine-laced southern rock" and features imagery and language that engage facile southern stereotypes (rebel flags, cowboy hats, "geetar," "hollerin'") in a manner somewhat comparable to blackface minstrelsy or the movie The Blues Brothers.
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The English southern rock cover band The Dirty South blends hillbilly and confederate imagery; at right, Australian DJ/producer Dirty South.
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Crunk Sections:
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The crunk concept existed in southern rap circuits for several years before it emerged to fuel a putative subgenre, thanks to the efforts of rapper and producer Jon "Lil Jon" Smith (b. 1972), who started in Atlanta's bass music scene in the 1990s: "Crunk is a term," said Lil Jon, "that's been used in the South for as long as I can remember."70 Referring to his 1996 release "Get Crunk (Who U Wit)," Jon recalled, "We were the first ones to use it in a hook and tell people to 'get crunk.' We started calling ourselves a crunk group, so we kind of paved the way."71 Jon produced two gold records independently in the late 1990s, then signed with New York-based TVT Records in 2001, helping it become "Billboard's top indie label of 2004." He continued to promote crunk as a rap subgenre, which found enthusiastic reception by listeners and critics.72
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Lil Jon was central in popularizing the crunk concept (1997, Ichiban Records).
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Lil Jon's role in the establishment of crunk speaks to the ways in which strategically positioned individuals or groups can exploit their access within the music industry to exercise significant influence over wider sense-making practices on the part of audiences, critics, and music companies. While the distinctiveness of Lil Jon's performance and presentation should not be minimized, his music — like that of others tagged as "crunk" artists — could just as easily be understood as occupying a point on a continuum of constantly evolving club-based rap.
The transformation of "crunk" from vague idea to musical subgenre produced mixed results for artists from southern cities. For those in the right place (chiefly Atlanta), with music that fit the crunk conventions, this was a positive development. In addition to Atlanta-based artists like Lil Jon, The Ying Yang Twins, Bone Crusher, and Pastor Troy, Mississippi's David Banner and Memphis' Three 6 Mafia (arguably the uncredited inventors of the genre) also rode the crunk wave in the late 1990s. However, the essentialist conflation of geography and musical style that lies under much of the critical and promotional discourse around crunk limited the possibilities for those who were not in a position to capitalize on them. As Mississippi-based rapper Kamikaze complained, "The industry has us in a climate where every cat that come out the South gotta be crunk. They got us pigeonholed."73
An emphasis upon call-and-response lyrical constructions in the form of "hooks" or "chants" intended to be repeated by the audience is a central feature of crunk, one that it shares with Miami Bass, New Orleans bounce, and other, older, southern club-based rap styles. Crunk songs often use tempos around 75 b.p.m., which, being relatively slow within the rap spectrum, allows for sparse beats to be accented with double-time hi-hat parts and bass drum fills. Beats and basslines are augmented by minimalist synthesizer riffs. The crunk vocal style is often characterized by collectively shouted or screamed performances, often in a call-and-response structure. Producers working in the crunk style often use drum machines, sequencers, and other "instruments," rather than samples from older recordings. They design the spare music with club sound systems in mind, which are capable of producing an intensely physical experience.
While some critics lauded the "complex, smart Southern production work" behind crunk, others found the music "vulgar, gnarly, bass-heavy," "joyless and bleak" with "rough, distorted basslines" similar to "gothic dirges."74 The association of the "riotous, anthemic music" and its "rebellious chants" with "rambunctious behavior" figured centrally in artists' and critics' attempt to compare it to previous genres of youth music.75 As Lil Jon describes it, "crunk music is something parallel to rock 'n' roll or punk rock because of the energy it gives you."76 For artists and audiences, crunk is about the generation and release of collective energy. As Miami rapper Pitbull explains, "Crunk is just getting wild, off the chain," while Lil Jon aims to "get you [the listener] hyper and to get the party off the hook."77 This release and freedom from hooks and chains articulates the physical abandon that makes "rumps shake and jugular veins throb," offering momentary release from social pressures while serving a generalizable need for cohorts of young people to define and create their own leisure spaces.78
Crunk's destructive imagery shines through on the cover of a 1999 compilation of southern rap (Tommy Boy Music). |
There are divergent opinions as to whether crunk continues or departs from ideas and practices associated with the afro-diasporic music sensibilities that inform earlier genres of African American music. For those who understand crunk as "a superficial music obsessed with perversity," the style's novelty is emphasized in descriptions of "rowdy choruses less like classic call-and-response hollers and more like howls of pain."79 For many crunk artists, however, the style does not represent a repudiation or abandonment of the values and practices of prior African American popular music styles, but rather a continuation. "All of it," says Pitbull, "is African-based. It's all about the percussion and the changes behind them."80
A more poetic perspective comes from David Banner, the so-called "Mississippi Madman," who connects the energy of crunk with African American spirituality and youthful abandon: "Crunk is the closest thing there is to church music . . . you have to look at it from a spiritual perspective . . . it's the closest thing to pure adrenaline, the closest thing to pure freedom, that these kids have."81 In another interview, Banner further elaborates the spiritual dimension of crunk: "I think of crunk as being part of what religious people call the Holy Ghost. . . . It's just a spirit you have. People go to church to find the Holy Ghost. We go to the clubs to find the crunk. It's like a ball of fire in your spirit."82
A Three 6 Mafia spinoff mixes occult imagery with themes of club-based rowdiness (1999, Relativity). |
The nightclub is a frequent setting for crunk songs and imagery (2004, TVT Records). |
While some crunk lyrics fantasize violence for mass consumption, I argue that, in addition, they relate to recent African American youth subcultural practices in the form of the nightclub experience as a central site for collective expression. While almost never expressed explicitly in crunk lyrics, the anger, rage, and violence expressed in the music evokes contemporary social conditions of African American young men, as well as the media imagery that helps justify the persistence of these conditions. Like previous forms of black popular music, the stylistic and thematic changes that marked the emergence of crunk appear "closely related to changes in the state of mass black consciousness."86 Though its style and content/ are far from being simply determined by the social context, crunk can be understood as engaging and responding to the extreme marginalization of black youth, particularly black men, in the post-Fordist, neoconservative climate.
As Tia DeNora has demonstrated, the possibility for music to be used to organize subjective experience on a non-cognitive, embodied level is a dimension of music's relationship with agency that is often slighted in favor of an emphasis on semantic or symbolic meanings.87 I suggest that rather than focusing on what the lyrics of crunk say, it is more productive to turn our attention to what crunk does for listeners (or what they do to themselves with it) in order to understand the power of the music. While the "rebellious chants" of crunk express a literal message of release and anger, they are one component of an experience produced through the combination of musical and performative features, most often enjoyed in an embodied manner.
Atlanta-based Crime Mob raps about women's participation in crunk's rowdiness (2004, Reprise/WEA). |
The club experience intensifies the expressive power of crunk. Sometimes compared to "slam-dancing" or "moshing" associated with punk, the dancing at clubs or concerts associated with crunk often is a rough and chaotic affair, with participants feeding on each other's energy as "the club gets truly unruly, when elbows are wildly thrown and moshlike mayhem erupts on the dance floor."88 In addition to conjuring collectively embodied aggression and release, punk and crunk share a connection (real or imagined) with urban working-class culture.89
Lil Jon consciously frames his success in terms that emphasize down-to-earth attitudes. In a description contrasting the action in one of his music videos with a "normal video," Lil Jon states: "No mansions. . . we ain't about that [bourgeois] shit. We about being regular." Jon then describes the plotline for the video produced to promote the 2002 song "I Don't Give a F---," in which the artist and his rather nondescript and burly sidemen "aren't on the guest list" and eventually "rush the VIP [the most exclusive section of the club]", demonstrating, to some degree, a resistance to the glorification of wealth and status that has often characterized rap culture.90
The association of crunk with the lower social orders mirrors its association with the lower regions of the body or with previous stages in human evolution. The descriptions of crunk as "simple, catchy," "crude," or even "outrageously puerile" often imply a distinction between two broad classes of music, which correspond to the intellectual and the corporeal (metaphorized as high and low, respectively): "like Lil Jon, and more than a few of his other Southern brethren, [Georgia rapper Pastor] Troy's aiming for that grossly reactive section of the brain that governs activities below chest level. Which is where most pop music aims anyway, though Southern artists tend to be more upfront about it."91
In a similar vein, the understanding of crunk's relationship to southern rap and its place in the genre system of rap in general has produced further confusion: "The use of the word has far surpassed the actual amount of music released within its ambit."94 An example of this is the description of Atlanta rapper T.I. as a "crunkster," when his style of composition and performance falls well outside the parameters of the genre as it has taken form.95 Another reviewer writes that crunk was "made and minted in the US Dirty South, in new hip-hop strongholds from Atlanta to Houston," ignoring the fact that, with a couple of notable exceptions, "most of these cats grew up in the same Atlanta neighborhood."96 Crunk bears a strong association with Atlanta's rap industry and culture, but is also understood as a set of stylistic conventions that an artist can adopt or adapt.
The inroads that crunk artists made into mainstream musical consciousness met with less than universal enthusiasm. Despite Lil Jon's breakthrough to pop success with the production of R&B singer Usher's song "Yeah!" in 2004, an Atlanta-based reviewer criticized him as a "numbingly simple chanter [rather] than noteworthy rapper," and noted that Jon, once marginalized as "Southern" or "underground" or "independent," "now has the cachet to get A-list acts to join in on the inanity."97 Clearly, some reviewers wished the obnoxious music would just go away; "crunk is likely to be remembered with just a hangover a decade from now."98 For others, the work of crunk artists like Lil Jon pales in comparison to that of preceding figures such as OutKast and Goodie Mob: "These tracks [on Lil Jon's 2003 Kings of Crunk] have catchy choruses, chanted under some delusional notion that screaming vulgarities over a beat is what the Southern hip-hop movement is about." In this critique, Lil Jon's ability to relate to audiences with catchy choruses and beats (many of which he produces) represents a betrayal of a static and monolithic "movement" represented by elite artists "who have shown you can stay true to the 'dirty,' spit creative lyrical content/ and still move a crowd."99
Crunk's detractors often expressed a mixture of musical and moral objections to the genre and its representative artists. After a positive review of Lil Jon's music by Kelefa Sanneh, one Canadian reader complained that the New York Times critic was only interested in "champion[ing] the worst in pop music," and decried the "appallingly cynical attitude" evidenced by Lil Jon's "tireless use of racially offensive language and his blatant objectification of women (in his lyrics and in his videos)."100 Another writer connected crunk to an earlier generation's version of the archetypal southern, African American musical bogeymen, 2 Live Crew:
. . . their legacy thrives in the 'crunk' style, which depicts the sexuality of young black men and women in ways that, to put it mildly, conform to the fevered imaginings of the worst white racists. The standard defense is to say that this stuff is a parody. But of what? For millions of young people around the world, including many African Americans, these words (and video images) define blackness."101
These points deserve serious consideration, although I would argue that "grotesque" is a more appropriate frame for the representations in crunk than "parody." Lil Jon and other crunk artists like the Ying Yang Twins have forged close ties with strip-club-culture and have not hesitated to make the eroticized, objectified female body (or parts thereof) central subjects of their expressions. Still, it is difficult to separate the critique of sexism in crunk from the association of the music with "lower social orders." The perception of crunk artists and their antecedents like 2 Live Crew as representing a nadir of vulgarity and depravity speaks to the ways in which class affiliations (and related racial formations) affect our understanding of what is "crude" or "vulgar" — not to mention the taken-for-granted assumption of vulgarity for any expression related to sex, desire, or eroticism generally.
Sign posted outside a nightclub, Columbia Dr., Decatur, Georgia (Photograph by Matt Miller, 2007). |
The rise of "crunk" from an obscure rap slang term to a new subgenre depended upon several factors: the centrality and increasing dominance of Atlanta in the rap industry; a growing appetite on the part of audiences for club-style rap from the urban South; and the efforts of key individuals (especially Lil Jon) as well as their corporate partners (TVT Records) to promote and define particular interpretations of the music. The inspiration and energy that drove crunk's expansion flowed from the grassroots activities of audiences and artists in the South's major cities, but its existence as a subgenre depends upon "systems of orientations, expectations and conventions that circulate between industry, text, and subject."102
Snap group D4L was "laffing" all the way to the bank after their 2005 hit (Asylum Records). |
The forces that propelled crunk from the underground to the mainstream were multiple and intertwined. The shaping of the crunk style largely occurred in strip clubs or nightclubs, and was part of a wider process of the grassroots evolution of southern dance music styles as artists refined their expressions to achieve maximum effect with audiences.103 However, the way that crunk was marketed as a "movement" and as a new genre of rap depended centrally upon Lil Jon and a few other empowered artists, followed quickly by journalists seeking novelty and controversy.104 Both grassroots popularity and corporate hype figured centrally in Lil Jon's success: without these two factors, his rise to the status of the public face of crunk would not have been possible.
Crunk quickly became esconced within corporate networks, but, like punk rock, it resisted complete co-optation. Lil Jon's efforts with regard to crunk were characterized by shameless self-promotion and conscious attempts to manipulate rap's genre system and critical discourse to his own advantage. Like other rap impresarios, he tried to expand upon his success in the music industry through branding and marketing products like the "energy drink" Crunk Juice (which was also the title of his 2004 album), as well as "a clothing line, a porn DVD, . . . a record label and now a series on MTV."105 At the same time, however, more than economic concerns motivate Lil Jon, who had put in years of work as an Atlanta DJ and producer, and also worked as an A&R representative and promoter for Jermaine Dupri's So So Def Records before launching his own recording career. Even after his rise to prominence, he has frequently collaborated with obscure or up-and-coming artists by producing their music or making a guest appearance on their records: "we look at ourselves that we're on the same level with everybody . . . I [collaborate] with anybody if I like their [music]."106
Detail from cover of snap mixtape, DJ Scream presents Trap Squad: Trap Talk (2006). |
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Visual Culture of the Dirty South:
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Confederate Grey Area: the Rebel Flag in Rap
The rebel flag looms behind the outline of Georgia in this ad for an album by DSGB (2001, Khaotic Generation). |
Defenders of the rebel flag often frame it as a historical relic devoid of racial animus, claims contradicted by a study revealing that for whites in Georgia in the mid-1990s, racial attitudes and southern identity were strongly related and "the widespread defense of the Confederate-emblazoned flag among whites has much more to do with racial concerns than with other aspects of southern heritage. . . ." 110 The racial undertones of the flag are not lost on blacks, for whom it represents a basic symbol of white racist intransigence that conjures some of the most repulsive incidents of "Southern" history.
The Atlanta-based Goodie Mob introduced the "Dirty South" into the rap mainstream through their 1995 song of the same name, and elaborated its meaning through lyrics, video imagery, and interviews. Explicit thematic strains found in "Dirty South" included the shadowy world of the illegal drug trade in which neighborhood-based groups battle for their share of the spoils and try to avoid corrupt police; the mistrust that is a legacy of the white racist past; and an ideal of slower, friendlier, everyday life in southern black communities. Implicitly, via geographically coded lyrics, the song questions the valuing of some places over others within the material and symbolic dimensions of rap. An analysis of the "Dirty South" music video in light of statements by group members reveals how the production engaged, and was informed by, the outcry over official displays of the rebel flag and debates about the flag's meaning. Members of Goodie Mob make more explicit the understanding of "dirtiness" as it relate to the racist history of the South symbolized by the rebel flag. The video shows the group's members rapping the song's lyrics in a variety of places, including the porch and front yard of a small house, an open field, and a dystopian, post-apocalyptic industrial landscape. In many of these scenes,the members of Goodie Mob are joined by others, forming a multigenerational portrait of friends, colleagues, and family. These images of all-black social spaces are intercut with images of a white girl who sits alone in a fenced-in basketball court, absorbed in making a chalk drawing on the asphalt.
Still image from the Goodie Mob's 1996 video for "Dirty South" (LaFace Records).
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The cover of Lil Jon's 2001 CD (TVT Records). |
However, not all of those who appropriated the rebel flag for use in hip-hop culture are so unequivocal in condemnation. Rapper Andre 3000 of the Atlanta supergroup OutKast, when questioned about a rebel-flag belt buckle in a 2001 issue of Vibe, replied, "I wear the belt for southern pride and to rebel. . . . I don't take the Confederate flag that serious as far as the racial part is concerned."112 To some extent, then, artists from the South have used the rebel flag in ways that express deeply held feelings of anger and resentment over the southern past (and the present it informs) and that also serve to distance themselves from the white southern imaginary, a move that helped establish their authenticity within the rap music field. These uses existed simultaneously with the appropriation of the flag as a generic symbol of a marginalized, underdeveloped territory of rap music geography.
Ludacris at Vibe Hip-Hop Awards, 2005. |
Still, the rebel flag is hard to use without stirring controversy, which may explain some of its continuing appeal. How, for instance, to interpret Ludacris' 2005 appearance on the Vibe Hip-Hop awards in a leather suit with rebel flag motif, a suit he discarded at the end of his performance for one in African nationalist colors red, black, and green?114 Acknowledging the imbrication of much southern rap music within the corporate structures and values of the music industry, how much change or consciousness raising is possible from the most self-consciously political displays of destruction and violation of the rebel flag? Consider that 2003 issue of The Source, "The Dirtiest Dirty Issue Ever," which featured an article entitled "Native Sons," about three rising talents of the South — Atlanta's Lil Jon and Bone Crusher, and David Banner. The article directly linked these rappers to the historical struggle against white supremacy, evoked by allusion to Richard Wright's novel in the title, "Native Sons":
One day before America's 227th birthday three of southern hip-hop's most revered leaders, David Banner, Bone Crusher and Lil Jon, are on location up North, specifically Brooklyn, tearing up the most infamous symbol of the Old South, the Rebel Flag. Banner's sharp new fronts [i.e. his gold teeth] grit and Bone Crusher's girth quakes the ground as the threads of intolerance are lacerated. The message is loud and clear: The dawn of the New South has arrived.115
Detail from cover of the Gravediggaz 1994 CD 6 Feet Deep (V2 North America). |
The cover of Ying Yang Twins 2003 CD Me and My Brother shows typical crunk facial expression (TVT records). |
A giant, monstrous figure on the cover of David Banner's 2003 MTA2: Baptised in Dirty Water (UMVD labels). |
This exploration of the Dirty Decade responds to Tara McPherson's assertion that "specific understandings of how the South is represented, commodified, and packaged become key."122 The mutability of the Dirty South (and the related phenomenon of crunk) and its widespread appropriation makes it easy to dismiss as a contrived and superficial marketing gimmick, but the Dirty South contested the received southern imaginary and stirred up the business of rap music in ways that had real consequences and which related to larger structuring forces of region, race, and class. That the battles over classification formed around music recalls previous historical moments: "Music, like many other aspects of culture," Michael Haralambos has written, "is associated with particular groups of people," and "distinctions in music in part refer to and are related to distinctions between social groups." In his own work on Chicago and Delta blues, Haralambos looked "further than the music to explain the more derogatory terms — 'nasty', 'dirty' and 'alley music'," a perspective that is also key to the Dirty South's wider import.123 "Contamination by other people," Terence McLaughlin has observed, "is what we really fear about dirt."124
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The cover of this CD by Insane shows the importance of local New Orleans identity (1995, Big Boy Records).
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As Yaeger demonstrates with regard to southern women's fiction, dirt is a central trope in the process of creating boundaries and categories: "dirt becomes a rhetorical place marker for cosmos- or system-creating, a signpost that allows southern citizens to recognize a middle-class macrocosm and its underclass boundaries." In a point that sheds light on the Goodie Mob's "Dirty South" and the wider uprising to which this song contributed, Yaeger adds that dirt "also serves as a disrupter of systems. That is, it becomes the stuff of rebellion, the foundation for play, the ground of racial protest and gender unrest, as well as the earthy basis for children's delight in sullying grown-up categories." The Dirty South's potential to exploit "pollution's charismatic properties, its capacity to carry the [listener] toward the limits of the local, to experiment with emancipation" relates centrally to the concept's enthusiastic reception in rap and beyond.126
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Sports logos communicate a sense of place, as in this cover of a 2005 release by Gucci Mane (2005, Big Cat Records).
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The instability of the Dirty South imaginary rests uneasily upon its own success. The emergence of the term coincided with the maturation of a rap industry in large southern cities, especially Atlanta. Not only did the Dirty South provide an entrée into rap geography for new artists, but over the next ten years, the music made by these artists rose to dominate radio playlists around the country. Out of a sense of southern lack, neglect, and disrespect, the Dirty South renamed and reclaimed an empty quarter on the national rap map.
The "southern turn" in rap music involved, in addition to a complex and highly strategic play of identities, stereotypes, and imagery, a rearrangement of values within the music. The relocation of rap's creative center to the urban South resulted in changes in the conception of rap's narrative voice, becoming much less focused on the rendering of complex narratives of individual experience and moving towards an exhortative, collective expression. The musical aesthetics that underlie rap music production shifted towards a focus on loud and low bass tones and tempos matching the expectations of audiences dancing in clubs. While rap has always been, with a few notable exceptions, dance music, the southern turn involved an increased emphasis on corporeal enjoyment at the expense of narrated experience.
The Dirty South succeeded in attracting national attention to previously ignored rap scenes in Atlanta, New Orleans, and Miami, but the catch-all "southern rap" oversimplified the connections between place and style. The possibility that more than one variant of rap can emerge from the same place at or around the same time is not conducive to a reductive, place-based marketing angle. One or two key individuals can steer a city's rap scene in a particular direction, structurally and/or stylistically. In their eagerness to accept an organic relationship between place and music, music journalists rarely confront their own considerable influence as well as that wielded by music industry personnel at various levels. Although the contours and flavors of southern rap take shape through preferences and priorities at the grassroots level, they are also the product of processes characterized by manipulation and strategic intervention. Even in cities where a local style seems widely accepted, conflict and disunity related to struggles for stylistic or commercial dominance are never far from the surface.
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CD single of Goodie Mob's "Dirty South" (2006, LaFace).
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1. Matt Miller, "Rap's Dirty South: From Subculture to Pop Culture," Journal of Popular Music Studies 16:2 (2004): 175-212.
2. Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose, and Tad Jones, Up from the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1986), xiii.
3. Sara Cohen, "Sounding out the City: Music and the Sensuous Production of Place" in The Place of Music, eds. Andrew Leyshon, David Matless, and George Revill (New York: The Guilford Press, 1998), 287.
4. Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson, eds., Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 2004), 7-8.
5. Martin Stokes ed., Ethnicity, Identity, and Music: the Musical Construction of Place (Providence, RI: Berg, 1994), 4.
6. Kyra D. Gaunt, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop. (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 183. See also Roberta Rainwater, "Rhythm, Song Trademarks of '90s Patty-Cake," Times-Picayune, April 26, 1990; "Pizza Pizza Daddy-O" at http://www.folkstreams.net/film,73.
7. Cheryl Keyes, Rap Music and Street Consciousness (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 5; Adam Krims, Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 74-75, 77-78.
8. Murray Forman, The 'Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 179.
9. Ibid., xvii.
10. Ibid., 170.
11. Adam Krims, Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 124.
12. Lawrence B. De Graaf, "The City of Black Angels: Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890-1930," Pacific Historical Review 39:3 (August 1970): 323-352, 331.
13. Kelefa Sanneh, "Memphis Bleak," Village Voice (June 20, 2000), 144.
14. Keith Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (New York: Routledge, 1999), 19.
15. Luther Campbell and John R. Miller, As Nasty As They Wanna Be: The Uncensored Story of Luther Campbell of the 2 Live Crew (Fort Lee, N.J.: Barricade Books, 1992), 223.
16. James Bernard, "Bass 9-1-9," The Source 54 (March, 1994): 40.
17. Campbell and Miller, As Nasty As They Wanna Be, 22.
18. J-Mill [Jeremy Miller], "Prince Raheem," The Source 54, (March, 1994): 22 ; Idem, "Bass Game: Clay D Returns to His Roots on His Latest Bass Odyssey," The Source 54, (March 1994): 32-33.
19. Norman C. Stolzoff, Wake the Town & Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 19.
20. Brett Atwood, "Bass Music Rises From South As Acts Seek Majors' Interest," Billboard 106:38 (September 17, 1994): 46.
21. Janine McAdams, "Let's Talk About Sexism On Recent Raps; Wreckx-N-Effect, Disco Rick, Duice, Dre Revealed," Billboard 105:4 (January 23, 1993): 21.
22. Roni Sarig, Third Coast: OutKast, Timbaland, and How Hip-Hop Became a Southern Thing (New York: Da Capo Press, 2007).
23. Joe Nick Patoski, "Money in the Making," Texas Monthly (August 1998): 136.
24. Ibid.
25. Forman, The 'Hood Comes First, 330.
26. Catherine Chriss, "For Houston's Geto Boys, Anything Goes in the World of Gangsta Rap," Houston Chronicle, Texas Magazine section, April 17, 2005.
27. Patoski, "Money in the Making," 1998.
28. Ibid.
29. Sarig, Third Coast, 56.
30. Kelefa Sanneh, "The Strangest Sound in Hip-Hop Goes National," New York Times, sec. 2, April 17, 2005. (Accessed electronically through LexisNexis Academic on April 13, 2007.)
31. Ibid.
32. Kelefa Sanneh, "The Woozy, Syrupy Sound of Codeine Rap," New York Times, sec. 2, April 18, 2005. (Accessed electronically through LexisNexis Academic on 13 April 13, 2007).
33. Sarig, Third Coast, 281.
34. J-Dogg [John Shaw], "Parallels in the Development of Memphis and New Orleans Rap, " Rec.Music.Hip-Hop Usenet Newsgroup, Dec. 9, 1997. (Accessed electronically through Google Advanced Group Search on February 2, 2006.)
35. Sarig, Third Coast, 272.
36. Tony Green, "Twerk to Do," Village Voice (Oct. 23, 2001): 149.
37. Sarig, Third Coast, 103.
38. Roni Sarig, "Dungeon Family Tree," Creative Loafing (Atlanta), Sept. 18-24, 2003. See also "Additional reporting by Tony Ware," Creative Loafing (Atlanta), September 18-24, 2003.
39. Sarig, Third Coast, 146.
40. Sasha Frere-Jones, "The Sound," New York Times, sec. 6, February 8, 2004.
41. Sarig, Third Coast, 158.
42. Ibid., 164.
43. Ibid.
44. Leigh Anne Duck, The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 4.
45. Riché Richardson, Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 5, 9.
46. Kim O. [Kim Osorio], "The Front Lines: Southern Hospitality," The Source 168 (September 2003): 40.
47. Ibid.
48. Carlton Wade, "Three 6 Mafia: Mark of the Beats," The Source 168 (September 2003): 166.
49. Ibid.
50. Kim O., "The Front Lines," 40.
51. Mary Colurso, "On Sellouts, Superstars, and Other Stuff," Birmingham News, December 22, 2000.
52. Allison Graham, Framing the South: Hollywood, Television and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 182.
53. "Universal Inks Record Deal With Emerging Alabama Rap Group Dirty," PR Newswire, December 13, 2000.
54. Elizabeth Merrill, NU Rookie I-Back Lights Up Backfield." Omaha World Herald, sec. C, August 11, 2004.
55. Alex Markels, "Protesters Carry the Fight to Executives' Homes." New York Times, sec. 3, December 7, 2003.
56. Michael Perlstein, "Fighting Back." New Orleans Times-Picayune, sec. A, May 29, 2005.
57. "Track & Field," Times-Picayune, Aug.6, 2005; Larry Hartstein, "Daily Briefing," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 18, 2005.
58. Margaret G. Lee, "Out of the Hood and into the News: Borrowed Black Verbal Expressions in a Mainstream Newspaper," American Speech 74:4 (1999): 379.
59. Shane Harrison, "Sound Check: Sound Bites," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, sec. P, Sept.15, 2005; Martin McNeal,. "Kings Control Hornets and Win," Sacramento Bee, sec. C, December 19, 2003.
60. Patrick Anderson, "Southern Living and Dying," Washington Post, sec. C, April 5, 2004; Peter Mergendahl, "Books at a Glance." Rocky Mountain News, sec. D, March 26, 2004.
61. P.G. Koch, "New Rap for Nick Travers; Glitzy, Druggy Milieu Works," Houston Chronicle, May 2, 2004; Collette Bancroft, "Twenty-One Hours to Live." St. Petersburg Times, sec. P, March 21, 2004.
62. "Hunt on for Shoot Suspect," Toronto Sun, Oct. 9, 2005; "Master Remixer on Deck," Hobart (Australia) Mercury, June 1, 2006.
63. "Book Blog," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, sec. F, June 11, 2006.
64. Chris Riemenschneider, "Drive South." Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, sec. F, February 1, 2004.
65. Robert Christgau, "Consumer Guide: Inter-Century Freundschaft," Village Voice 49:36 (September 8-14, 2004): C90.
66. Jeff Vrabel, "Spin Control," Chicago Sun-Times, sec. "Sunday Showcase," August 22, 2004.
67. Niels Jansen, "Totally Unofficial Rap-Dictionary (Bi-weekly Posting, part 1/2)," Rec.Music.Hip-Hop Usenet Newsgroup, December 1, 1995; Prolifik, "This Is Driving Me Krunk." Rec.Music.Hip-Hop Usenet Newsgroup, October 7, 1998.
68. Side-bar story, Rolling Stone (August 19,1999): 91.
69. Wade, "Three 6 Mafia," 166.
70. Hattie Collins, "Crunk: Lots More Goodies in Store." Music Week (February 5, 2005): 11.
71. Steve Jones, "Get Crunk Huh!" USA Today, sec. E, July 25, 2003.
72. "Power Players: Indie Labels," Billboard 117:19 (2005): 30.
73. Joycelyn A. Wilson, "Show & Prove 2: Kamikaze, the Movement," XXL (October 2003): 72.
74. John Lewis, "Lil Jon and The East Side Boyz Islington Academy Mon.," Time Out (January 26, 2005): 108; Ricardo Baca, "Bring In Da Crunk: More Take Notice of Hyper Sound with Southern Accent," Denver Post, sec. F, September 16, 2003.
75. Hattie Collins, "Crunk," 11; J. Freedom Du Lac, "From Memphis, Cranking Up the Crunk; Rap's Red Carpet Rolls Out for Al Kapone," Washington Post, sec. C, July 25, 2005; Andy Battaglia, "Hip-Hop's Dirty Martini." Washington Post, sec. C, Nov. 17, 2004; "Box Office: The Lowdown," Independent on Sunday, sec. "Features," February 6, 2005.
76. Jones, "Get Crunk Huh!"
77. Josefina Loza, "Pitbull," Omaha World-Herald, Mar. 30, 2006; Jones, "Get Crunk Huh!"
78. John Soeder, "Nonstop Selling Eclipses Singing at Hip-Hop Show," Cleveland Plain Dealer, sec. E, August 17, 2005.
79. Baca, "Bring In Da Crunk"; Lewis, "Lil Jon and The East Side Boyz Islington Academy Mon."
80. Loza, "Pitbull."
81. Ricardo Baca, "The Rap on the Third Coast," Denver Post, sec. F, March 15, 2004.
82. Jones, "Get Crunk Huh!"
83. Baca, "Bring In Da Crunk."
84. Lewis, "Lil Jon and The East Side Boyz Islington Academy Mon."
85. Parliament, "Give Up the Funk," 1976; Trammps, "Disco Inferno," 1976; see Sarig, Third Coast, 277 for a connection between crunk's destructive imagery and that of Texas bluesman Blind Willie Johnson.
86. Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 339.
87. Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 47.
88. Jon Caramanica, "Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz," Rolling Stone 931 (September 18, 2003): 34.
89. Jones, "Get Crunk Huh!"
90. Celeste Fraser Delgado, "Crunk Candy: On Location with Lil Jon, Trick, Hootchies, and Director Mamas," Miami New Times, June 23, 2003.
91. Sonia Murray, "Lil Jon, Crew Crank Up Chant with A-List Assist," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, sec. E, November 16, 2004; Martin Edlund, "Strip Crunk," New York Sun, June 28, 2004; Lewis, "Lil Jon and The East Side Boyz Islington Academy Mon."; Tony Green, "Twerk to Do": 149.
92. William Safire, "On Language: Kiduage," New York Times, sec. 6, November 28, 2004; Andrew Pettie, "Reviews: Music," Daily Telegraph (London), January 22, 2005; Collins, "Crunk," 11; "Box Office: The Lowdown," Independent on Sunday, 27; Loza, "Pitbull."
93. Steve Dollar, "Cool 2 Know," Newsday, sec. B, April 19, 2006; "CD Reviews: Hip-Hop," The Irish Times (March 31, 2006): 15.
94. Collins, "Crunk."
95. Silvio Pietroluongo, Minal Patel and Wade Jessen, "Singles Minded; Country and Crunk among Year's Top Hitmakers," Billboard 116:52/117:1 (December 25, 2004/January 1, 2005): 70.
96. "CD Reviews: Hip-Hop," The Irish Times, 15; Baca, "Bring In Da Crunk."
97. Murray, "Lil Jon, Crew Crank Up Chant with A-List Assist."
98. "CD Reviews: Hip-Hop," The Irish Times, 15.
99. Trish Davis, "New on Disc," Hartford Courant, sec. CAL, January 9, 2003.
100. Mike Schultz, [letter to the editor] "Crunk as in Stunk," New York Times, sec. 2, December 5, 2004.
101. Martha Bayles, "Troubled Soul: The Man Who Started It All Heads for the Finish Line," The Weekly Standard 10:43 (August 1, 2005.)
102. Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures, 28.
103. Collins, "Crunk"; Ricardo Baca, "Lil Jon Crunks it up for All-Stars," Denver Post, sec. F, February 17, 2005; Jones, "Get Crunk Huh!"; "Twins Crank Up Crunk." USA Today, sec. 7, June 28, 2005.
104. Delgado, "Crunk Candy: On Location with Lil Jon, Trick, Hootchies, and Director Mamas."
105. Hattie Collins, "Crunk in Charge," London Guardian, sec. "The Guide," August 5, 2006.
106. Soren Baker, "Interview with Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz Feature," Murder Dog Magazine, http://www.murderdog.com/archives/liljon/LilJon&TheEastSide2.html. (Accessed on May 20, 2008)
107. Kelefa Sanneh, "Critic's Notebook: 'Laffy Taffy:' So Light, So Sugary, So Downloadable," New York Times, sec. E, January 12, 2006.
108. Ibid.
109. Katherine Henninger, Ordering the Facade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women's Writing (Chapel Hill, Univ. of N.C. Press, 2007): 28.
110. Beth Reingold and Richard S. Wike, "Confederate Symbols, Southern Identity, and Racial Attitudes: The Case of the Georgia State Flag," Social Science Quarterly 79:3 (Fall 1998): 568.
111. Henninger, Ordering the Facade, 88.
112. Gregory Johnson, "Southern Pride," Vibe (September 2001): 96.
113. Ron Wynn, "Reclaiming Confederate Flag Angers Older Black Generation," Nashville City Paper, August 1, 2001.
114. Mosi Reeves, "Luda Disturbing tha State," Creative Loafing Atlanta, December 7, 2005.
115. Branden J. Peters, "Native Sons," The Source 168 (September 2003): 150.
116. Rodney Ho, "Rapper Has Big Plans to Lighten Up His Look," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 31, 2006.
117. Benjamin Meadows-Ingram, "Okay Okay," XXL (September 2003): 150, 152.
118. Sarig, Third Coast, 273.
119. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 23.
120. Richardson, Black Masculinity and the U.S. South, 215.
121. Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), xiii, 7.
122. Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 18.
123. Michael Haralambos, Right On: From Blues to Soul in Black America (New York: Da Capo, 1974), 35, 33.
124. Terence McLaughlin, Dirt: A Social History as Seen Through the Uses and Abuses of Dirt (New York: Stein and Day, 1971), 6.
125. Yaeger, Dirt and Desire, xii, 125, 110-111.
126. Ibid., 265, 271.
Print Materials:
Bennett, Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson, eds. Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 2004).
Campbell, Luther and John R. Miller. As Nasty As They Wanna Be: The Uncensored Story of Luther Campbell of the 2 Live Crew (Fort Lee, N.J.: Barricade Books, 1992).
DeNora, Tia. Music in Everyday Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Forman, Murray. The 'Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).
Grem, Darren E. "'The South Got Something to Say': Atlanta's Dirty South and the Southernization of Hip-Hop America." Southern Cultures 12:4 (2006), 55-73.
Gaunt, Kyra D. The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
Keyes, Cheryl. Rap Music and Street Consciousness (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).
Krims, Adam. Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
McPherson, Tara. Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham, Duke Univ. Press, 2003).
Miller, Matt. "Rap's Dirty South: From Subculture to Pop Culture." Journal of Popular Music Studies 16:2 (2004).
Richardson, Riché. Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007).
Sarig, Roni. Third Coast: OutKast, Timbaland, and How Hip-Hop Became a Southern Thing (New York: Da Capo Press, 2007).
Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
Films:
Crunk Kings: The Movie (Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2006).
The Dirty South: Raw and Uncut (Slip N Slide, 2000).
Dirty States of America: the Untold Story of Southern Hip-Hop (Image Entertainment, 2004).
Links:
Cocaine Blunts and Hip-hop Tapes
http://www.cocaineblunts.com/blunts/
Down-South.com
http://www.down-south.com/
Twankle & Glisten
http://twankleandglisten.blogspot.com/