Content area
Full text
WORDS ON MUSIC
It's important to understand and honor your Southern heritage. As we reflect back on that great and terrible conflict between North and South, we must all look deep within ourselves and ask - did the South destroy hip-hop or save it? If you're not sure, Ben Westhoff s Dirty South: Outkast, LH Wayne, Soulja Boy and the Southern Rappers Who Reinvented Hip-Hop (May, Chicago Review Press) is a good place to start learning your history.
Westhoff, who has covered music for the Oxford American, Pitchfork, Village Voice and others, tells the larger story of hip-hop in the South through its many regional scenes: Miami (Luke Campbell, 2 Live Crew), Houston (Geto Boys, DJ Screw, Trae, Paul Wall), Memphis (Three 6 Mafia, Eightball & MJG), Atlanta (Goodie Mob, Outkast, DJ Drama, T.I., DJ Smurf, Soulja Boy), New Orleans (Cash Money, Juvenile, LiI Wayne), Virginia (The Neptunes, Timbaland, Missy Elliot) and Florida (T-Pain). Dirty South necessarily covers much of the same ground as Roni Sarig's Third Coast: Outkast, Timbaland, and How Hip-Hop Became a Southern Thing (2007, Da Capo Press), which you'll note is already required reading on your Southern Music 101 syllabus. A few things have happened since Sarig wrote his book, though. Notably, LiI Wayne transformed from potential-one-hit Hot Boy to wacked-out, chart-topping "genius"; T-Pain conquered the universe with Auto-Tune; and Soulja Boy invented a dance and mastered the art of online self-promotion.
Westhoff does a good job of tracing the formation of each region's distinctive sound, driving around the South in a rented Hyundai to hear firsthand how genres like crunk and bounce got started. Houston's DJ Screw relates that when he accidentally altered a record's pitch to an extremely slow pace, it sounded so good to the stoned crowd in his living room that someone offered him $10 on the spot for a tape. Houston's slowed, slurred "chopped and screwed" style grew from there.
Early Southern hip-hop mirrored punk in odd and surprising ways - it featured rawer, grittier sounds; it maintained a distrust of the mainstream music industry; and it relied on scrappy DIY business...