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Due to the transatlantic time difference I just woke up to a whole raft of interesting (and tellingly varied) takes on the "southernness" of southern music. Jumping off from Jacob Lee's v interesting post about the Band as in a sense quintessentially "southern" due to their music's "agrarian backwoods" imagery/feel, I'd be interested to hear what other list members think of contemporary "Dirty South"/Atlanta hip-hop. A couple of yrs ago I was due to give a conference paper on what in overblown fashion I called the "postsouthern aesthetic" of Atlanta/Dirty South hip-hop, but it never got written, much less presented--which was probably a good thing for everyone, as my ideas were half-baked at best. But I was interested in the ways in which groups like Outkast, Nappy Roots, and solo artists like Bubba Sparxx were playing with signifiers of traditional and/or "authentic" (black and white) "southernness." I was also trying to work out whether Outkast and their affiliates (e.g., Dungeon Family) were putting forward a distinctly metropolitan imagery (and, arguably, constructing a metropolitan sound) that might be termed "postsouthern" (I won't bore you w/ the details, but I was going to relate this to other work I've done on Atlanta as a "postsouthern" city). I'm by no means an expert on contemporary southern hip-hop, but to me there seemed--and seems--to be a (postmodern) turn away from "agrarian" or at least rural images of the South in the work of an earlier southern rap group like Arrested Development. In the early 1990s, the British cultural studies scholar George Mackay published an essay on AD in which he discussed them via rather traditional ideas of the South as "rural" and "organic." But Nappy Roots' debut LP _Watermelon, Chicken, and Gritz_ affectionately parodies the tropes of (black) southern rural identity and culture (as the title indicates). And I expect many of you recall the video for Bubba Sparxx's single "Ugly" a few yrs ago, w/ its parody of rural southern agricultural imagery. To look more broadly beyond the current "Dirty South" scene, I wonder whether anyone might also be able to offer an answer to this question: to what degree can (to use a term invoked by another list member) the "roots" of hip-hop be seen as "southern"? Vanessa Carr and Christopher Scott both raised the v interesting case of Chicago blues (see Benjamin Filene's _Romancing the Folk_ for an excellent discussion of Muddy Waters' career-long negotation of rural southern blues and urban Chicago blues in terms of "authenticity" and the marketplace). A case can probably be made that hip-hop, too, is part of an African-American musical lineage that flourished in the urban North but derives from the rural S (and now flourishes in the South as a kind of musical "return migration"). However, as Paul Gilroy has noted, there is a real danger that in seeing hip-hop as springing from the entrails of the blues or as exceptionally American, one misses the transnational (e.g., Jamaican) origins of the form. And finally and more anecdotally, I always find interesting the way in which _Oxford American_ puts together its annual "southern music" CDs: they're pretty eclectic and not entirely confined to the past, but hip-hop is conspicuous by its absence. Still, in terms of stretching the boundaries of "southern music," the 2005 vol. was esp. interesting: it starts w/ a version of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" by schoolchildren from Uganda and features Zora Neale Hurston performing a Bahamian crow dance... Cheers, Martyn
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