Hip Hop and the South

Abstract

With Atlanta-based duo OutKast winning Source magazine’s “Best New Rap Group” award in 1995, southern hip hop appeared on the national hip hop radar and encroached on the entrenched territory of the rivalry between East Coast and West Coast hip hop. The alleged lyrical shallowness, hyper-regional slang, danceable rhythms, and “provincial” party-music style of southern hip hop (then referred to as “country rap”) initially alienated listeners from this new emerging voice on the hip hop scene. Until OutKast’s Southernplayalisticcadillacmuzik (1994), the rap music industry showed little interest in launching southern albums. This slighting of southern hip hop was symbolically noticeable in the booing during the announcement of Big Boi and André’s victory at the Source Awards ceremony. André’s response to such dissing – “the South got something to say” – was a harbinger of southern rap becoming the third widely recognized regional genre of American hip hop. The acknowledgement of the South’s instrumental contribution to the hip hop scene is often represented through a geographical reference – the Third Coast, which originally referred to Texas, however the term has been adopted to refer to the South’s Gulf coast, or even the whole South in general.