The Dirty Southern Triad

[CrowleyHead]

Minor epiphanies while reminiscing about various rap tunes affiliated with urban dance genres in the American South such as buck/jook, Atlanta Bass, Miami Bass, Freestyle and so on... most of this I blathered about online elsewhere so bear with me.

The unspoken thing about Atlanta is that it has a stronger black middle class than the two US musical cities that informed the 2000-2015 reign over rap, which were Memphis and Miami
[8:06 PM]
Atlanta however is the one city where there's such a strong contingency of jobs and housing based around the fact that there's so many HBCs and was such a major center of urbanization and economic prosperity.
[8:06 PM]
Memphis would never allow itself to develop a structure like that for it's black community, and likewise with Miami, albeit for diff. reasons.
[8:07 PM]
But if you look at it historically, so many of the rap personas for Atlanta Rappers have over time had so much more to do with being post-Trick Daddy figures than Outkast
[8:08 PM]
Also there is of course the fact that the first big southern rap movement, bass, is more prominently identified with Miami, but for some inexplicable reason it's biggest commercial smashes were all from Atlanta.
[8:08 PM]
"Woomp There It Is", "My Boo", so on
[8:09 PM]
The most visible bass records from Miami were the 2 Live Crew joints, but most of how 2 Live Crew is remembered is for their more commercial shit like "Me So Horny" and not their real
prime

Also throw in the fact that both these sister cities often had their respective rap genres reduced to a sort of 'urban dance music'. Miami of course being affected by the NYC 'problem' of multiple competing genre/ethnic strains/splits.
[8:25 PM]
Obviously Latin Americans end up Dominating Freestyle as an industry both up North and South, but that is very much a sister genre to both forms of Hip-Hop/Electro and soon breaks itself off due to rap's ever increasing masculinization. "Too Many Man"

 

[catalog]

Arthur Jafa calls the mississippi delta "the black jurassic Park"

Arthur Jafa in Bloom (Published 2019)

Sought after by Spike Lee, Stanley Kubrick, and Solange Knowles alike, the visual artist is changing representations of blackness in museums and beyond.

www.nytimes.com

"It’s like this primordial, out-of-time kind of space, but it’s also like ground zero in terms of black musical culture, and if it’s ground zero in terms of black musical culture, then it’s ground zero in terms of American musical culture, which in the 20th century kind of means it’s ground zero in terms of American culture, period.”

And Dean Blunt picks up on your point above about the black middle class element in Atlanta:

i-D

A global platform for emerging talent, i-D celebrates fashion, culture, individuality and youth.

i-d.vice.com

"first place where you have so many classes of black people… sounds like Narnia."

Miami and Atlanta as twin opposing poles of aspiration circling around the "real" of Memphis?

 

[catalog]

Jafa talks about this photographer Birney Imes quite a lot, some great pics of the 80s rural south

Birney Imes's Jukes

Birney Imes's photographs of rural Mississippi are fantastic. From Jackson Fine Art, which represents him: "For more than 20 years Birney...

www.nosuchthingaswas.com

Brash, bold, primary colours.

Homespun drawings, big, in your face.

Deep reds.

Decoration everywhere, including the ceilings.

 

[Leo]

Might explain why Donald Glover didn't call his TV series "Memphis".

 

[CrowleyHead]

Might explain why Donald Glover didn't call his TV series "Memphis".

You also have to remember that with the arrival of Ted Turner in the 80s to Atlanta, that drastically shifted the dynamic of media economy in Georgia's favor. Memphis obviously has a very rich cultural history and it's not like Miami is a 'poor' city by any stretch, but Atlanta is a HUB for a lot of the Southern US.

 

[craner]

I resisted the lure of the CNN Studio Tour when I went to Atlanta. I went to the Coca-Cola museum instead.

 

[Leo]

I resisted the lure of the CNN Studio Tour when I went to Atlanta. I went to the Coca-Cola museum instead.

I hope you made it to a Waffle House, preferably late at night.