"The South Got Something to Say": Atlanta's Dirty South and the Southernization of Hip-Hop America

Abstract

By summer of 1995, Atlanta-based rap group OutKast had watched their first album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, achieve platinum sales of over million. This feat earned them an award for Best New Group from The Source magazine and an invitation to attend publication's second annual awards in New York City. Goodie Mob, another Atlanta group, joined them on trip up north. As Big Gipp, a member of Goodie Mob, remembered, their reception from New York audience was less than favorable: When Big Boi and Dre [of OutKast] got out there at those Source Awards, everybody was like, 'boooo, boooo, boooo.' I remember it was just OutKast and four Goodie Mob members and I was like, man.... Don't nobody even give a fuck about us folk. Leaving Source Awards that night, OutKast and Goodie Mob swore to each other to show all them motherfuckers that one day they're gonna have to fuck with us. (1) Over next decade, OutKast, Goodie Mob, and other southern rappers followed through on their intentions, moving to forefront of America's culture industry. In 2004 OutKast won six Grammys, including an Album of Year award, for their multi-platinum fifth effort, Speakerboxxx/The Lave Below. On that night, no in star-studded Los Angeles audience doubted that, as OutKast had yelled back at booing crowd nine years before, the got something to say. (2) What had to say reveals much about making and marketing of regional and racial identity in modern Most explicitly, rise of Atlanta's South rap music industry shows readiness of some African Americans in post-civil rights era not only to embrace their southernness but to sell it as well. Throughout 1990s, industry leaders and southern tappers promoted Dirty as a new type of rap music. A blending of older rap styles with southern music, accents, and themes, Dirty rap was also a bold statement from rappers who felt estranged from Atlanta's economic and social progress and excluded by their southernness from competing in a rap-music market dominated by New York and Los Angeles. By end of 1990s, however, their unique coupling of regional and racial identity had earned them increased attention from listeners and critics alike and a reputation as innovators of a fresh, new sound and style in culture. The next wave of southern rappers built on this emergent appeal but in process changed meaning of Dirty South. Leaving behind more troubling aspects of their regional identity, southern rappers after 2000 preferred to promote Dirty as a loosely defined, inclusive concept and a lucrative set of attractive commodities. Thus, by time OutKast accepted their Grammys in 2004, Dirty was not only a banner under which a wide variety of southern rappers now congregated. It was also a culture industry that had southernized what cultural critic Nelson George has termed multibillion dollar business of hip-hop America. (3) The importance of Atlanta's Dirty industry can only be understood by placing it in wider context of rap music in During 1970s and 1980s, everyday problems of life in urban black ghettos contributed to subject matter and complex politics of American rap. Though some critics dismissed rap's portrayals of racial identity as juvenile laudations of violence, sexism, and greed, cultural message of East Coast New York rappers and West Coast California rappers registered with young blacks and voyeuristic whites across America, creating for first time a profitable mass market for rap. During 1980s and early 1990s, record sales by New York rappers Run-DMC, Eric B. & Rakim, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Wu-Tang Clan, and Los Angeles-Bay Area gangsta rappers N.W.A., Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur went into millions. Political conservatives, family groups, minority-rights groups, and older African Americans reacted strongly against raw sexuality and violence depicted in urban rap lyrics. …