African Americans won landmark victories in civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, but questions of power, including the power of historical symbols, remain far from settled. The use, for instance, of the Confederate Battle Flag, or the "stars and bars" (which I abbreviate to "rebel flag") as a nostalgia-laden symbol for white dominance has persisted decades after the end of de jure segregation. In the years when rap's Dirty South emerged, blacks and their allies challenged various southern state and municipal governments to eliminate Confederate symbolism in official flags and other material forms, including monuments and the names of public streets and buildings.

The rebel flag looms behind the outline of Georgia in
this ad for an album by DSGB (2001, Khaotic Generation).

Defenders of the rebel flag often frame it as a historical relic devoid of racial animus, claims contradicted by a study revealing that for whites in Georgia in the mid-1990s, racial attitudes and southern identity were strongly related and "the widespread defense of the Confederate-emblazoned flag among whites has much more to do with racial concerns than with other aspects of southern heritage. . . ." 110 The racial undertones of the flag are not lost on blacks, for whom it represents a basic symbol of white racist intransigence that conjures some of the most repulsive incidents of "Southern" history.

The Atlanta-based Goodie Mob introduced the "Dirty South" into the rap mainstream through their 1995 song of the same name, and elaborated its meaning through lyrics, video imagery, and interviews. Explicit thematic strains found in "Dirty South" included the shadowy world of the illegal drug trade in which neighborhood-based groups battle for their share of the spoils and try to avoid corrupt police; the mistrust that is a legacy of the white racist past; and an ideal of slower, friendlier, everyday life in southern black communities. Implicitly, via geographically coded lyrics, the song questions the valuing of some places over others within the material and symbolic dimensions of rap. An analysis of the "Dirty South" music video in light of statements by group members reveals how the production engaged, and was informed by, the outcry over official displays of the rebel flag and debates about the flag's meaning. Members of Goodie Mob make more explicit the understanding of "dirtiness" as it relate to the racist history of the South symbolized by the rebel flag. The video shows the group's members rapping the song's lyrics in a variety of places, including the porch and front yard of a small house, an open field, and a dystopian, post-apocalyptic industrial landscape. In many of these scenes,the members of Goodie Mob are joined by others, forming a multigenerational portrait of friends, colleagues, and family. These images of all-black social spaces are intercut with images of a white girl who sits alone in a fenced-in basketball court, absorbed in making a chalk drawing on the asphalt.

Still image from the Goodie Mob's 1996 video for "Dirty South" (LaFace Records).

The isolation of this figure contrasts with the communal life of the Goodie Mob and, by extension, southern African Americans. As the video comes to a close, it dramatically problematizes the clichéd innocence of the white girl. The camera pulls back to reveal that her chalk drawing is of a large rebel flag. Imprisoned in an empty cage — a structure that isolates as much as it protects — the white child represents the reproduction in multiple generations of fenced-off, aloof whiteness.The specific use of a white girl to portray the passive, taken-for-granted (naturalized) perpetuation of racism and oppression builds upon a visual legacy in which, writes Henninger, "images, photographs in magazines and family albums . . . simultaneously assert the continuous, 'natural' existence of the white southern lady and bury the real and symbolic violences of gender, race, and class that this image was designed to mask."111

The symbolic destruction of rebel flags by artists such as Atlanta's Lil Jon or Mississippi's David Banner continues a conversation within rap music circles about the legitimacy of the "South" as a site of authentic rap music. The emergence of the South as a credible geographical imaginary in rap music requires a strong repudiation of the white racist baggage of the "Old South" represented by rebel flags and white-columned plantations popularized by the movie Gone with the Wind — all subjects of symbolic destruction, as in the cover of the DVD for the 2004 documentary Dirty States of America. The CD cover of his album Put Yo Hood Up (2001) shows Lil Jon clad in a pair of black rubber coveralls, his open-mouthed expression of rage and intensity augmented by the added effect of gold teeth, sunglasses, and long dreadlocks, creating a general impression of a demented slaughterhouse worker or other grotesque. The draping of the rebel flag around his shoulders in the picture, far from constituting an endorsement, communicates the hostile occupation of a symbol. The cover image seems the worst nightmare of a white supremacist, a demonic, superpowered black man appropriating, occupying, and defiling the treasured symbol of Dixie.

However, not all of those who appropriated the rebel flag for use in hip-hop culture are so unequivocal in condemnation. Rapper Andre 3000 of the Atlanta supergroup OutKast, when questioned about a rebel-flag belt buckle in a 2001 issue of Vibe, replied, "I wear the belt for southern pride and to rebel. . . . I don't take the Confederate flag that serious as far as the racial part is concerned."112 To some extent, then, artists from the South have used the rebel flag in ways that express deeply held feelings of anger and resentment over the southern past (and the present it informs) and that also serve to distance themselves from the white southern imaginary, a move that helped establish their authenticity within the rap music field. These uses existed simultaneously with the appropriation of the flag as a generic symbol of a marginalized, underdeveloped territory of rap music geography.

The cover of Lil Jon's 2001 CD (TVT Records)

One day before America's 227th birthday three of southern hip-hop's most revered leaders, David Banner, Bone Crusher and Lil Jon, are on location up North, specifically Brooklyn, tearing up the most infamous symbol of the Old South, the Rebel Flag. Banner's sharp new fronts [i.e. his gold teeth] grit and Bone Crusher's girth quakes the ground as the threads of intolerance are lacerated. The message is loud and clear: The dawn of the New South has arrived.115

Even the most devoted advocate of oppositional readings of popular culture would have to admit that the transformative effect of these rappers posing in Brooklyn for a magazine cover is overstated. Bombast aside, the article and cover image that went with it represents the way that, like southern rappers of the mid-1990s, many more recent artists still perceive themselves as carrying the mantle of "revered leaders," with collective memory and pride related to the freedom struggle, combined with their repudiation, appropriation, or destruction of symbols of previous ideas of the South to form the latest "New South" identity. While the uses of the rebel flag in rap provide a unique perspective into issues of collective memory, regional identity, and symbolic play, it ultimately ties in to the specific policitics of rap in ways that are particular: "While southern rappers invoke the concept of 'representin'' that is so fundamental to rap," writes Richardson, "they have primarily used the concept to reflect their ongoing effort to make legible a South that has long been invisible in the rap industry," although it is more appropriate to say that representational politics form a central and dynamic part of the effort in question. The various uses of the rebel flag in rap culture illustrate ways in which multiple imagined "Souths" exist simultaneously, informing, antagonizing, and playing off on each other, all the while complicating the symbolic discourse.

Crunk artists combine musical and lyrical expressions of extreme psychic states — anger, pain, aggressive rage, emotional release — with a visual and physical aesthetic that merges the traditional "fly" stylishness of rap culture with freakish, uncanny, fractured bodies by drawing upon the expressive power of the grotesque. Southern rappers did not invent the "embodied rap grotesque"—faces twisted into grimaces, bodies contorted or distorted, teeth fashioned into over-the-top "grills." In the early 1990s, New York-based Gravediggas (a Wu-Tang Clan offshoot) brought images of rap monstrosity to national audiences with vampire-fanged gold teeth and macabre lyrics evoking the paranormal or demonic. Artists from the South such as Three Six Mafia, Lil Jon, David Banner, the Ying Yang Twins, Pastor Troy, and others all carried this strain of the monstrous within rap forward. Rather than — or in addition to — the stereotypical expressions of masculine power and toughness that often characterize rap imagery, these artists have often represented themselves in ways which emphasize grotesquely contorted or distorted bodies, faces twisted into painful grimaces.

A giant, monstrous figure on the cover of David Banner's 2003 MTA2: Baptised in Dirty Water (UMVD labels).