Dirty Decade: Rap Music and the U.S. South, 1997-2007
Matt Miller, Emory University
Essay Sections:
Dirtiness in Southern Rap and Beyond, 1995 — :
Within rap culture, the utility and adaptability of the Dirty South popularized by Goodie Mob became evident in the various ways that ideas or images of dirt and dirtiness continued to proliferate in artist names as well as album and song titles. The debut album from a Mississippi-based artist named Dirty South was advertised in
XXL magazine in early 2002. Southern corruption and decadence localized to the county level in the name of the Albany, Georgia-based Dirty County Boyz. In Montgomery, Alabama, the two-person Dirty parlayed the local and regional success of their independently released album into a deal with Universal. Asked about the origin of their name, the group replied, "Dirty, is just a description of the South . . . Envision red hot clay dirt, chicken coops, slow living, good people and family — in other words, cold-hearted slum life—and that's Dirty. Our music brings that kind of energy."
51 This provocative and ironic juxtaposition of two disparate ways of rural, southern life — which turn on the urban connotations of the word "slum" — illustrates the complexity and instability of the Dirty concept.
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The trope of dirt and dirtiness thrived in the decade since "Dirty South's" release. Mississippian David Banner combined religious imagery with a dirt-based southern identity in his album MTA2: Baptized in Dirty Water (2003) the cover of which portrays a giant Banner rising monstrously from the Mississippi River. The white Georgia-based rapper Bubba Sparxxx, who tried to push the idea of a "New South" over a "Dirty South" (possibly because of the strong association between Dirty South and black ethnic identity), included a song called "Back in the Mudd" on his 2003 album Deliverance, the title itself a reference to the most influential cinematic portrayal of a violent, decadent, incestuous, perverted (read: dirty) South in recent filmic memory. 52 |
| The title of UGK's 1996 album refers to a criminal "dirtiness" related to drugs or guns (1996, Jive). |
Within rap, the idea of "dirtiness" imbues a form of southern authenticity. This dirtiness can exist across the South with local variants. In the case of the Alabama-based duo Dirty, a reviewer on the website www.down-south.com used a local Montgomery, Alabama slang term to describe the group: "Dirty is Gump. [There is] no other way to explain them, you can find some influence of some Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana and Georgia shit on the album, but the album is a hybrid of all that and their own shit, [it's] Alabama shit, [it's] all theirs." A 2000 prediction by Montgomery-based record label owner Mike Jackson demonstrates the stakes involved in a location in the rap imaginary, as well as the ubiquitous resort to the "map" metaphor: "Just like Nelly did it for St. Louis," claimed Jackson, "DIRTY will put Alabama on the map." 53 In Alabama and Mississippi, the ability to "represent" on a national level is still largely confined to a limited number of people, almost always based in cities like Montgomery or Jackson (home of David Banner). |
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Alabama-based group Dirty shows the rural side of the Dirty South (2001 UMVD labels) |
Dirty South Outside the Rap World
While dirtiness continues to be an important, if receding, trope within rap culture, the effects of the Dirty South imaginary rippled across other cultural spheres and adapted to new contexts in idiosyncratic ways. A Nebraska college football player originally from Horn Lake, Mississippi, described his technique as '"Dirty South' running, a combination of power, speed and agility."
54 In late 2003, activists in Louisiana formed Dirty South Earth First to oppose logging operations by Maxxam, "a Houston-based holding company and forest products concern."
55 Two years later in Louisiana, police closed Dirty South Kennels for its association with illegal dog fighting.
56
Sports remain a common arena for appropriations of the "Dirty South" — there are Dirty South Runners, Dirty South [Trail] Riders, and a Dirty South [Basketball] Classic held at Norcross High School in 2005.
57 In her study of black-sourced expressions in the news, Margaret Lee observed, "Journalists attempt to create an image of 'coolness' and 'hipness' through the use of well-established or popular black slang expressions."
58 The Dirty South has proved itself adaptable to sports and entertainment writing. Statements describing "The Braves ditching the Dirty South for the West," or New Orleans' Hornets "making everything Dirty South comfortable for the visiting [Sacramento] Kings" confirm Lee's conclusion.
59
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Comparison of imagery from mid-2000s CD and book covers reveals the Dirty South as multifaceted and contradictory. (New West, 2004 ; Avon, 2005 ; Wm. Morrow, 2004 ; Triple Crown Publ., 2005). |
A similar impulse underlies the appropriation of "Dirty South" by a variety of creative artists outside of the rap world. In March 2004, Ace Atkins, "a onetime Auburn football star . . . [and] crime reporter for the Tampa Tribune," published his fourth novel, Dirty South, the title, one reviewer explained, being "a reference to the new black sound coming out of places like Atlanta and New Orleans."
60 While the exotic portrayal of "that glitzy and druggy world" of hustlers and rap music moguls in the housing projects of New Orleans entranced many reviewers, the appropriation of the Dirty South opened Atkins up to a particular line of criticism: "It's hard to hear the music in its pages."
61 The imagery used on the cover of Atkins' book reveals the mutability of the Dirty South imaginary: one edition shows a desolate bayou, while another features neon signs and markers of urban decadence localized to New Orleans and Bourbon Street.
Geography poses no obstacle to the appropriation of the Dirty South. A nineteen-year-old shooting suspect in Canada is described as "white, 6-foot-2, 205 pounds" with "a 'Dirty South' tattoo on his neck," while a Melbourne, Australia-based producer and DJ calling himself
Dirty South was hailed as "Australian dance music's newest star" by June 2006.
62 The appeal of "Dirty South" in
St. Louis, where rappers like Nelly and Chingy rose to prominence with style and material similar to that being produced in southern urban hotspots, was not limited to the rap sphere, as demonstrated by a 2006 advertisement for a rock band called "Dirty South."
63 The
website for a cover band from Northeast England called The Dirty South advertises "moonshine-laced southern rock" and features imagery and language that engage facile southern stereotypes (rebel flags, cowboy hats, "geetar," "hollerin'") in a manner somewhat comparable to blackface minstrelsy or the movie
The Blues Brothers.
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The English southern rock cover band The Dirty South blends hillbilly and confederate imagery; at right, Australian DJ/producer Dirty South. |
Another notable appropriation of rap's Dirty South surfaced in February of 2004, with the release of an album by the Athens, Georgia, rock group
Drive-By Truckers.
Dirty South is one of a series of ironic appropriations of ideas drawn from rap by the band, whose name involves the juxtaposition of imagery associated with the world of gangsta rap and southern-coded
truck driver culture. While group members acknowledge their appreciation for both the spirit and musical content of the new rap sound coming out of certain southern cities, their appropriation of the term "Dirty South" is imbued with an explicit sense of "class consciousness" and is specifically linked by band leader Patterson Hood to "everything that went on in our [Alabama] hometowns politically and economically in the late '70s and early '80s."
64 In a similar manner to the "cold-hearted slum life" referenced by the group Dirty, the Drive-By Truckers' Dirty South traps its inhabitants in a "vicious cycle" that keeps poor and working class people "working for a living till [they] die" in the cities and towns of the South.
65 Like Atkins' novel, though, some reviewers resist the decontextualization of terms and ideas appropriated from rap music culture: as one complained, the album "has a clever title but remarkably little crunk."
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Essay Sections:
Published: 10 June 2008
© 2008 Matt Miller and
Southern Spaces
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