Featured // vol. 31, no. 2
Hip-Hop Playlist
essay by Corey J. Miles
Our Past
Browse past issues and articles from the last 30 years
Poetry
What the 808 Tried to Told Y’all
by Dasan AhanuThat Black joy real loudwhen it come from the other sideof benign neglect.A rebellious affirmation so beautifulyou can’t help but be takenin by the dark.Can’t help but give into a resounding amenblaring through the speakersof a candy-painted ‘lac,a heaven-hued DeVille.Ain’t no ignoring this peace.Ain’t no taming this revelry.Ain’t no turning down this song.All you can »
Music
We Outchea
by Regina N. BradleySouthern hip-hop, thee I love, shawty. When writing Chronicling Stankonia, I heeded Toni Morrison’s challenge to make the book I wanted to read. My goal was for it to be a book that showed love to my place as a Down South Georgia Girl (though if I’m being honest, I think I’m really writing that book right now). »
Memoir
Wisdom Beats
To Stay Black in the South
by Pyar J. Seth“Those songs that continue to play long after the last note has faded. Grandma. It was sonic southernness. It is everything I know.” Grandma. Care was her method. Always. But she needed a break, and Mom knew it too. Attentive eyes. Mom took after her mother. It was settled. Grandma was coming home. Norfolk, Virginia. »
Music
Black Skin, Mask Off
Future, Aesthetic Nihilism, and the Radical Possibilities of Trap
by Dallas Donnell“Future’s work offers a necessary reckoning with the limits of hope, the permanence of loss, and the urgent need to imagine new paradigms for Black liberation.” In April 2017, Future released “Mask Off,” the hypnotic, menacing anthem that would become one of his biggest hits and the centerpiece of his self-titled album, Future. Built around a »
Photo Essay
Songs of Sorrow
Collective Grieving in Southern Hip-Hop
by Natrice Miller“Southern hip-hop has always straddled the line between the struggle and the party, and the culture takes the same approach to how it mourns as a collective.” If I hadn’t known better, I would have assumed that the crowd of Black people walking toward State Farm Arena on November 11, 2022, were headed to a »
Essay
Murmurs to Mumbles
The Sounds of a Quotidian Southern Black Politic
by Claire B. Crawford“Through their hums, murmurs, and moans, southern Black folk are doing critical political work.” While the lyrics of Waka Flocka Flame’s debut classic, “O Let’s Do It,” read “Yeah! O let’s do it, hey!” my ear catches something more activating: “Oledoit, ey!” The lived experience of a sonic mumble, an intracultural invitation of revival and »
Essay
It’s Him and I, Aquemini
Reimagining OutKast in Kiese Laymon's Long Division
by Kenneth L. Johnson II“Though OutKast isn’t bound by the white gaze, they fall prey to the established hip-hop landscape; thus, their mode of disruption, like City’s and LaVander’s, is their voices.” Kiese Laymon’s 2021 novel Long Division, set in post–Civil Rights Mis sissippi, narrativizes the experiences of Black southern youth navigating the US South’s social, political, and cultural »
Music
“We Live in the Blue Note”
A Conversation About the Hip-Hop South
by Regina N. Bradley, Taylor Crumpton, Aisha S. Durham, Fredara Mareva Hadley, Zandria F. Robinson“The blues tradition is what makes something southern hip-hop, and that can be aesthetically, but mostly it’s about substantive articulations. What is the substance of the thing?” Regina N. Bradley: This is a milestone year for us in the Souf. I want to start off with an underappreciated question. What is your definition of southern »
Essay
Cadillactica, by Way of the Underground
Big K.R.I.T.’s Transformative Southern Waters
by Justin D Burton“As K.R.I.T. works to survive the mainstream, he marks what buoys him, leaving a record for viewers and listeners to consult when they, too, might need to survive a flooded zone.” The unknown underground artist. The Afrofuturist who transcends place and time. The brief skit at the end of the eponymous second track on Big »
Music
Down in the Hip-Hop South
by Corey J. MilesShh . . . I hear a siren sound. I’m walking down Long Street in Cape Town with two Black South African women I met while visiting the local university. I’m in my work clothes on a Friday night more than eight thousand miles away from anything that looks familiar. The last thing I expect »
Hip-Hop Playlist
by Corey J. MilesGuest editing a special issue on the Hip-Hop South required falling in love with the sound of my home in a new way. When Regina Bradley asked me to come on to the project, I know now that when I said “yes” I didn’t fully understand how long you must sit still to pull together a »
Essay
Dear Sisters
Wanda and Brenda Henson and the Legacy of Camp Sister Spirit
by Julie R. EnszerIn July 1993, Wanda and Brenda Henson bought a “defunct pig and grape farm” in Ovett, Mississippi. Brenda described the land as “right outside Hattiesburg, 77 miles from the Gulf Coast,” where they’d been living in Gulfport. Located on Bogue Homa Creek, the 120-acre property had “five barns and one house to be renovated” and »
