The South Got Something To Say: A Celebration Of Southern Rap
At the 1995 Source Awards, André 3000 issued a proclamation, or a prophecy: "The South got something to say." Inspired by his words, this list represents some of the most impactful songs, albums and mixtapes by Southern rappers. It was assembled by a team of Southern critics, scholars and writers representing the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Mississippi, Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana and Virginia.
We offer this list not as an authoritative canon but as an enthusiastic celebration that recenters the South's role as a creative center of hip-hop and presents the region for all that it has been and given to us.
1989
Dismiss the locker room talk and sophomoric humor of the 2 Live Crew if you will, but this 18-track, four-movement album is not only the reason your favorite trap rapper can say whatever the blank she wants as long as she slaps on an "Explicit" label, but it also offers an overdue study in how essential sampling is to hip-hop, a genre that endures because it's an amalgam of every precursor borne of the African diaspora. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals had little choice in overturning the Southern District of Florida's ruling that the Crew's third album was too obscene for audiences; its numerous references to the preceding decades' most memorable musical and filmic simulations and send-ups of sex had already slipped by censors. (For all those samples, get thee to Wikipedia and, for real heads, to Brian Coleman's Check the Technique.) As Nasty As They Wanna Be allows us to examine how we got from a moment when hip-hop was niche, making fun of middle-class respectability politics, to its present-day ubiquity, hypersexuality out front and all the way live.
Producers Luther Campbell — here as Luke Skyywalker, a stage name he'd lose to a successful suit by George Lucas and 'nem — and Mr. Mixx (David Hobbs) re-create the cinematic atmosphere for the adult storytelling, hijinks and guffaws to unfold. Relocating Trinidad-born, Brooklyn-bred Fresh Kid Ice (Christopher Wong Won) and upstate New York native Brother Marquis (Mark Ross) from Southern California, Campbell and Hobbs push the
