Shh . . . 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 to hear is a Black man from Atlanta, Georgia, singing runs of wee-ooh-wee-ooh-wee mimicking police sirens. “Mrs. Officer” is a fire song, but it never sounded like home until it did. We go into the dark bar where red neon lights color the walls and order drinks before Lil Wayne’s last verse is done. By the time the second round of drinks gets to the table, we have rapped lyrics to Future and Jeezy, waving our arms and pointing at whoever knew the verse best.
The DJ plays mostly trap songs and mixes it up with bops like “Swag Surfin'” and “Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It.” Who knew this subgenre of southern hip-hop that blends hi-hats, 808 drums, and drug life would vibe so well in a place where the grief that weighs Black people down is shaped so differently than in the US South. It feels like Georgia in 2009. A familiarity I didn’t anticipate fills the space between the three of us. Even though they didn’t hug their vowels as long as I did, both their mamas had lived through apartheid South Africa and mine had endured the Jim Crow South. We all had known the worst of some version of a South, and southern hip-hop was flexible enough to hold us together.
“We love Black American music,” one of the women says.
I give a side-eye. My mouth gets heavy with all the ways I want to explain why it is not quite right to call what we have been hearing simply Black American music. The slipperiness of not putting southern in front. How that can lead to understandings of the United States that fumble around the textured, fleshly lives of Black southerners, reducing their experiences to placeless cultural expressions.
I wondered. How could places love the songs that raised me, while divorcing them from the soil that cradled the genius within them? It’s not that I expected South Africans to have a critical reading of regional distinctions in the United States, but that moment echoed a familiar-sounding feeling. Something I felt when I wasn’t eight thousand miles away from anything that looked familiar. When I see events marketed as trap-yoga, trap-karaoke, or trap-bingo and ain’t nothing trap or southern about them. “Trap” simply serves as a catch-all for “upbeat hip-hop.” When I’m seeing my niece watch Tik-Tok videos and notice that the rhetorical patterns Black kids, and, by extension, white kids, use are rooted in southern Black linguistic practices, yet these practices are ideologically reduced to “Tik-Tok slang.”
Once southern culture is popular it is no longer understood as southern. The controversy around whether Kendrick Lamar or Lil Wayne should perform the 2025 Superbowl in New Orleans is a case in point. As ahistorical claims reduce the South to monolithic and “slow” and offer a limited vocabulary to understand its complexities and, importantly, its specificities, the Lil Wayne that exists in the collective (even global) imagination is viewed as transcending southern hip-hop, and Kendrick prevails because he is read and coded as a West Coast artist with national appeal. Folks can’t understand that the intimacies of Wayne’s appeal are rooted in a southern politic in the same way they can appreciate how Kendrick’s charm is lodged in a West Coast one. Wayne’s southern identity is as a New Orleans baby, while his southern politic is embodied in how he represents both the exceptional and problematic potentialities of living in the geographical wake of the Civil Rights Movement.
This is an invitation into the long histories of a Black listening tradition where the speaker trusts the audience to be part of the song.
What I am getting at seems like erasure, but that doesn’t feel heavy enough to describe what I mean. Twenty-five years ago, when OutKast won Best New Artist at the Source Awards, Dré addressed the boos of the New York audience with “The South got something to say. That’s all I got to say.” I loved the way those words made my insides move, even though I was too young to have anything to say at the time. I came of age in the early 2000s during what I refer to as the trap music generation. When my britches started to get a little tighter and I felt I had something to say, southern hip-hop was already the epicenter of American music. Something was happening, though. The trunk-rattling songs about grief and unfilled dreams had captured the country’s imagination, but the public refused to listen to why we needed a sound that knocked so hard in the first place.
They want our bass but not our grief. I believe that this country knows the South has something to say. I do not believe that this country knows how to hear southern Black folks. This is how it can elevate the status of southern Black music and be oblivious to the porches and cornmeal dishes that sustained the lives of the young folks responsible for the sound. If we turn the stereo volume down. Gently peel back the melodious beats. Read beyond the tender lyrics. What would be there? This is where I want to place us. Listening for the interior. To the quiet. The seemingly unintelligible. The complicated possibilities that our breath holds.1
Keep the volume low. When you follow Claire B. Crawford from “Murmurs to Mumbles,” you will need to listen precisely to catch what’s being spoken but should not be overheard. We move South, below sociability, to hear mumbles as acts of refusal that are storied by Black southern sound-making practices. They offer alternative methods to echo liberation, the naming of a freedom that’s been called for in the past based on the longings of today. Can you start to hear it? The hushed speech in southern hip-hop.
Let’s remain this low, below the sound, so that we can stumble upon “Cadillactica, by Way of the Underground,” alongside Justin D Burton. We will be asked to get in the passenger seat with Big K.R.I.T. as he drives through Mississippi. All that is asked of us is to notice what we see out the window. To the left, it’s the underground, to the right, the mainstream, and in the rearview, outer space. If we trust K.R.I.T. long enough to wade us through southern waters, we will find out how the hip-hop South allows us to map ourselves in more than one time and place in a single moment.
We must get up-South, to Norfolk, Virginia, and sit with Grandma Marion Walston to hear “Wisdom Beats.” Pyar J. Seth will take us there. Ms. Walston will open her purse how grandmas often do, likely give us something sweet to settle us after our travel. Grandmas seem to have everything in their pocketbooks. We know their purses are finite, but what we mean by “everything” is their constant vigilance of the future. Their ability to anticipate the small things we may need and plan for it prior to the arrival of that need. It is this type of anticipation that has sounded the hip-hop South. What Grandma Walston will ask of us is to Stay long enough to notice and name the little things. Anticipate what being Black may demand of us. Sound the beauty in how we live and Die.
The maxim “stay black, and die” is complicated if a little unnerving. When you get to Dallas Donnell’s “Black Skin, Mask Off,” you should start to get your footing. You will feel the nihilistic capacity of trap music. See how it has provided a space where Black liberation doesn’t rely on gradualism or optimism. We can sit in the wound. Trap allows us to run toward deathliness and see what is possible when we come out on the other side.
Now we have developed a foundation to attend to southern hip-hop, not just to be enchanted by it but to commit to a radical reconfiguring of the emotional work it takes to listen. We may now face those truths that respectability protects us from—the complicated stories we disavow in front of company but are ours nonetheless.
When we listen to the “Anthem of Perseverance,” we can better understand how Chris Young’s insides felt being sentenced to life in prison. Southern hip-hop allowed him to describe the emptiness produced when the criminal justice system weighs down on you. But more importantly, it gave texture to the curved vowels in freedom, when Young’s sentence was commuted. Kenneth L. Johnson II gives us an alternative entry point into the erasure and imposed illegibility of southern Black boys in “It’s Him and I, Aquemini.” He refracts the Can You Use That Word in a Sentence contest in Kiese Laymon’s novel Long Division off of André Benjamin’s disturbance at the Source Awards to shine an ingenious light on the ways racism, classism, and geographic biases compromise how we love on Black southern boys. John-son’s essay is a love letter to young Black boys for holding tight to the southern aura in their rhetorical and creative practices.
In southern Black feminist fashion, “‘We Live in the Blue Note’: A Conversation About the Hip-Hop South” is a communal gathering about the state of culture. When southern Black women sit around the table, it is ceremonial. Regina N. Bradley, Taylor Crumpton, Aisha S. Durham, Fredara Mareva Hadley, and Zandria F. Robinson have given us an opportunity to overhear the type of life that is breathed through these exchanges—an intimate coming together that reminds us that hip-hop is lived in relation to one another and that southern Black women have been central to producing, holding, carrying, and passing on the culture.
Read this issue slowly. Sink deep down into a sofa that has memorized your curves. Rap the lyrics in the essays out loud. Let out an mm hmm when a line feels right to you. To be moved to radically listen differently to the hip-hop South, you must experience each essay as a reciprocal sounding practice. You must speak to the essay, then listen to what it says back. It is within this call and response that the Black South will be sounded. This is an invitation into the long histories of a Black listening tradition where the speaker trusts the audience to be part of the song. Remembering and imagining together is how we get down to the hip-hop South.
Corey J. Miles is an ethnographer of the Black South and an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Africana Studies Program at Tulane University. He is the author of Vibe: The Sound and Feeling of Black Life in the American South.
Header image: Back a Da Bus, by Fahamu Pecou, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 48 × 60 in.
