Perhaps the most remarkable dimension of the Dirty South phenomenon is the way it brings to the fore paradoxical and contradictory ideas about the relationship between music and place. For some scholars, this relationship is more or less "organic" — the stylistic differences between music produced in different places are unavoidable outgrowths of different cultural, economic, political, and geographic contexts. For instance, Jason Berry asserts, "popular music . . . springs from an organic culture: the lyrics, rhythms, and dance patterns reflect a specific consciousness, the values of a given place and time."
2 More concretely, Sara Cohen writes, "music reflects social, economic, political, and material aspects of the particular place in which it is created. Changes in place thus influence changes in musical sounds and styles."
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Taken in aggregate, these scholarly claims suggest a dynamic and mutually influential relationship between music and place. Connections between a style of music and its place of origin often appear to be organic because of the layered ways in which style and place make meaning through repetition and reinscription, establishing implicit or explicit ties (rhetorical, structural, stylistic, or otherwise) to the history of a social, musical, and cultural context.
From the time of its emergence in the Bronx in the mid-1970s, rap has been centrally concerned with place-based identities. Geography plays an essential part in the conception of authenticity that characterizes the genre, and the history of rap music entails a continual growth of place-based imaginaries. Rap has put places on the map — like the
South Bronx or
Compton — that the mass media either ignored or portrayed as dangerous and hopelessly blighted. However, the representation of previously marginalized places does not occur in any sort of a uniform pattern — only particular places, at particularly historical moments, are eligible for admission to the canon of authentic rap music places. Understanding the ways that place-based identities change within rap is of central importance.
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It is relatively difficult for a particular place to become familiar to wider rap audiences, but once achieved, artists, producers, and record labels from that city enjoy a significant advantage over those from seemingly more marginal places. A place becomes significant to rap geography through a combination of factors. First and foremost, the city must produce rap music which is of interest to outside audiences. For this to happen, creative and infrastructural development must occur on the "supply" side. On the "demand" side of this equation, the music produced in a given locale must accommodate national audiences' sonic, lyrical and thematic expectations in a way that does not push existing boundaries beyond their breaking point. |
Atlanta's Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz at a local landmark (1997, Ichiban Records). |
Music companies and other mediating forces try to identify the ideal blend of novelty and sameness, aware that an overemphasis on either of these two poles entails different risks. While it is not impossible for an artist or record label from a marginal place to become successful in rap, the process of mutual reinforcement favors already-established places. Running counter to this privileging of incumbents within rap music geography are worries about saturation or exhaustion (that a particular place can only produce a limited number of marketable artists) and, to a lesser degree, speculative exploration (that going to obscure places might yield a novel interpretation of the form).
Place-based affiliations can elevate an artist's status. Being able to claim a certain place — one known widely to the African American youth subculture that exists around rap music in the U.S. — affords an artist leverage to move his or her career forward. Represented at various levels of abstraction, places exist in a nested hierarchy which spans between generalized metaregional affiliations (East or West Coast and now Dirty South) and extremely specific connections to particular black neighborhoods. While establishing a place-based identity can prove profitable for artists and labels, there are less desirable consequences, often in the form of expectations of an intrinsic and monolithic relationship between performer and place that excludes as many artists as it empowers. Ultimately, the attachment of a distinct musical identity to a particular place introduces a paradoxically enabling/constraining dynamic which exercises a substantial effect over all rap music production from that place. The sound of any given place within the national-level rap imaginary is a fluid, contested and necessarily over-simplified idea that becomes more problematic as it achieves larger levels of scale.
