It's no secret they are most often deployed against rappers from the South. (The Queens rapper has said on several occasions that the title wasn't intended to shade any particular region, artist or trend, but his clarifications did little to mitigate the fury of those who did believe the genre was falling as Southern styles like snap and trap arose.) Popularity, though, doesn't portend respect.Ī microaggressive term like " mumble rap," which has been applied so broadly it barely means anything at this point, or the cliche phrase "real hip-hop" are all ways of discrediting the artistic merits of some styles in order to prop up others. It's been this way for the past 15 or so years, since around the time Nas named his 2006 album Hip Hop is Dead and set off a tsunami of finger-pointing and finger-wagging about who killed it. Those dark 808s, sharp snares, speeding hi-hats and moody minor-key melodies - all staples of trap music. Yet 25 years removed from OutKast's win, a significant portion of popular rap comes from or sounds like the South. How do we come to place so much worth and power in the people and institutions that decide we have little? How was it that, for so long, the story of hip-hop - a genre prized for its ability to make visible those who have been rendered invisible - has involved largely writing off and out the section of the country that houses the highest percentage of Black people? And how is that anything other than a deliberate devaluing of a people's stories, language and expression? It's bias and erasure begetting more bias and more erasure - not unlike what women in rap (and women in music as a whole) continue to face. At some point, these things aren't just coincidence or a matter of some sort of objective measure about what is and isn't great or is and isn't important. A 2012 Rolling Stone list of the 50 Greatest Rap Songs featured four (a 2017 update of the 100 Greatest Rap Songs only turned up 11 more) a 2017 Complex list of the 90 Best Rap Albums of the '90s managed 15 a 2019 XXL list of the 50 Best albums of the 2000s yielded 11 the results of a 2019 BBC poll of 108 critics about the 25 best rap songs turned up four. A 2011 XXL special edition covering the 250 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs of the '90s included only 26 from the South. The magazine's 1998 list of the top 100 albums included only four Southern releases. In the '90s and early 2000s, when the Source was held as the bible for all things hip-hop, only two Southern artists ever received the coveted 5 Mic rating - OutKast, for Aquemini, and Scarface, for The Fix. The South Got Something To Say: A Celebration Of Southern Rap Stream NPR Music's Southern Rap Canon Playlistįor decades, the East Coast's cultural hegemony, which delineates the rap South as inferior, has been upheld and largely uninterrogated, most quantifiably by the media. Those who win respect often do so on the basis of exceptionalism. Their effectiveness is measured by their ability to mimic the sound of somewhere else - to be something other than what they are. It's rarely considered that Southern rap sounds the way it does as an aesthetic decision rather than due to inability, and its practitioners are saddled with the burden of disproving that assumption rather than the privilege of showing up on their own terms. There's long been a dismissal of Southern rap that's rooted in a kind of respectability politics that mirrors that of anti-Black racism and white classism - Southerners, and by extension their contributions to rap, are often treated as though they are anti-intellectual and unsophisticated. That tension comes to bear in hip-hop, much the way all facets of life, for better and worse, are exposed and exaggerated within music and the mechanisms that power it. The notion of "coastal elites" has taken on a particularly loaded connotation in the Trump era, but the lack of acknowledgement of the ways in which life differs outside the progressive East and West corridors is real.
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