Dirty Decade: Rap Music and the U.S. South, 1997-2007
Matt Miller, Emory University
Essay Sections:
Conclusion:
What is at stake in the creation of imagined spaces
of rap? Or an imagined South? Spatial imaginaries arise, already connected
with material concerns and economic struggles. A shift in imagining the
geography of rap opens possibilities to new participants. Imagined in
a different way, the economic, material, and cultural resources of the
South, once reserved for an entrenched white elite, open to the possibility
of other claimants. The imagination of space (and the relative centrality
or marginality of particular interpretations of imaginary spaces) lies
not at the periphery of larger inequalities of economic, cultural, or
political power, but is central and constitutive.
This exploration of the Dirty Decade responds to Tara McPherson's assertion that "specific understandings of how the South is represented, commodified, and packaged become key." 122 The mutability of the Dirty South (and the related phenomenon of crunk) and its widespread appropriation makes it easy to dismiss as a contrived and superficial marketing gimmick, but the Dirty South contested the received southern imaginary and stirred up the business of rap music in ways that had real consequences and which related to larger structuring forces of region, race, and class. That the battles over classification formed around music recalls previous historical moments: "Music, like many other aspects of culture," Michael Haralambos has written, "is associated with particular groups of people," and "distinctions in music in part refer to and are related to distinctions between social groups." In his own work on Chicago and Delta blues, Haralambos looked "further than the music to explain the more derogatory terms — 'nasty', 'dirty' and 'alley music'," a perspective that is also key to the Dirty South's wider import. 123 "Contamination by other people," Terence McLaughlin has observed, "is what we really fear about dirt." 124 |
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The cover of this CD by Insane shows the importance of local New Orleans identity (1995, Big Boy Records). |
Understanding the context and consequences of the emergence of rap scenes in southern cities, and how their development shaped the re-imagining of both the South and rap music generally, requires new thinking. Patricia Yaeger's analysis of the role of dirt in southern women's fiction illuminates deeper meanings of "Dirty South." Yaeger frames the South as "a region where race has been at the heart of aesthetic practice," while "southern literature probes or reflects an abyss between white and black ways of knowing." The "unofficial information systems that have been subjugated to nominally 'higher' ways of knowing" that exist in the South form an explicit or implicit subtext in much southern rap, contesting dominant narratives of rap as a genre and the South as a regional imaginary.
125 The Dirty South simultaneously embodies a grounded, oppositional historical consciousness and an imaginary that can be commodified and marketed, responding to a range of needs on the part of southern rap performers and their audiences. The mutability of the Dirty South allows the "abyss" that Yaeger observes to be mapped onto other overlapping social and geographical divisions, from regional identity and class among African Americans, to that which exists between established and ascending rap scenes.
As Yaeger demonstrates with regard to southern women's fiction, dirt is a central trope in the process of creating boundaries and categories: "dirt becomes a rhetorical place marker for cosmos- or system-creating, a signpost that allows southern citizens to recognize a middle-class macrocosm and its underclass boundaries." In a point that sheds light on the Goodie Mob's "Dirty South" and the wider uprising to which this song contributed, Yaeger adds that dirt "also serves as a disrupter of systems. That is, it becomes the stuff of rebellion, the foundation for play, the ground of racial protest and gender unrest, as well as the earthy basis for children's delight in sullying grown-up categories." The Dirty South's potential to exploit "pollution's charismatic properties, its capacity to carry the [listener] toward the limits of the local, to experiment with emancipation" relates centrally to the concept's enthusiastic reception in rap and beyond. 126 |
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| Sports logos communicate a sense of place, as in this cover of a 2005 release by Gucci Mane (2005, Big Cat Records). |
The instability of the Dirty South imaginary rests uneasily upon its own success. The emergence of the term coincided with the maturation of a rap industry in large southern cities, especially Atlanta. Not only did the Dirty South provide an entrée into rap geography for new artists, but over the next ten years, the music made by these artists rose to dominate radio playlists around the country. Out of a sense of southern lack, neglect, and disrespect, the Dirty South renamed and reclaimed an empty quarter on the national rap map.
The "southern turn" in rap music involved, in addition to a complex and highly strategic play of identities, stereotypes, and imagery, a rearrangement of values within the music. The relocation of rap's creative center to the urban South resulted in changes in the conception of rap's narrative voice, becoming much less focused on the rendering of complex narratives of individual experience and moving towards an exhortative, collective expression. The musical aesthetics that underlie rap music production shifted towards a focus on loud and low bass tones and tempos matching the expectations of audiences dancing in clubs. While rap has always been, with a few notable exceptions, dance music, the southern turn involved an increased emphasis on corporeal enjoyment at the expense of narrated experience.
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The Dirty South succeeded in attracting national attention to previously ignored rap scenes in Atlanta, New Orleans, and Miami, but the catch-all "southern rap" oversimplified the connections between place and style. The possibility that more than one variant of rap can emerge from the same place at or around the same time is not conducive to a reductive, place-based marketing angle. One or two key individuals can steer a city's rap scene in a particular direction, structurally and/or stylistically. In their eagerness to accept an organic relationship between place and music, music journalists rarely confront their own considerable influence as well as that wielded by music industry personnel at various levels. Although the contours and flavors of southern rap take shape through preferences and priorities at the grassroots level, they are also the product of processes characterized by manipulation and strategic intervention. Even in cities where a local style seems widely accepted, conflict and disunity related to struggles for stylistic or commercial dominance are never far from the surface. |
| CD single of Goodie Mob's "Dirty South" (2006, LaFace). |
The Dirty South served as a marketing hook and an alternate political imaginary, but as its proponents have achieved goals of genre inclusion, acceptance, and a piece of the commercial action, they have moved on to a different set of concerns. The Dirty South as a reference or identification in rap is likely to become more infrequent, even as its ripple effect leads to uses of the phrase in ways increasingly disconnected from the rap music culture from which it came. Dirty South became a term with highly positive associations with the burgeoning southern rap scenes. With working-class black culture more central than ever to the national entertainment industry, the Dirty South also became a point of pride for many hip white southerners, and something to be emulated for aspiring rappers from outside the South. The Dirty South was no longer just rap's Dirty South. The politically oppositional orientation of the Dirty South — expressive of the reclaiming of former sites and symbols of enslavement and segregation, and the legitimation and celebration of "lowdown and dirty" working-class African American culture — diminishes as the concept spreads outwards into global markets, and is often eclipsed by the superficial notions of edginess afforded by the appropriation of contemporary southern urban blackness.
Essay Sections:
Published: 10 June 2008
© 2008 Matt Miller and
Southern Spaces
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