Guest 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 collection of essays that embodies the complex and complicated ways Hip-Hop shows up in the South. I had to listen to familiar songs from ears that were connected to bodies that had different needs than mine.
Just like the special issue, the individual pieces of the playlist encapsulate particularities of the sonic South, allowing for the collection to move back and forth through struggle and artful living, while continuously waving at the Blues. If you want to see Black people talk at and over each other, sit them at a table and ask them to create a list of songs that best represents a genre or region. If you listen close enough, what you will hear between the songs that are mentioned is the architecture of a place. The songs themselves are the choir tasked to embody the tapestry of our living. The “how’s” and “why’s” that allowed the song a seat at the table is where we find the South. The argument on behalf of a song is only persuasive if it is in harmony with the promises that were made about how a place will be remembered.
Each song on the playlist sounds like a specific essay in the issue. Let the playlist run and listen to the transitions because that is where we hear the conversation about who and where the Hip-Hop South is.
—Corey J. Miles, June 2025
Track List:
Outkast – Peaches (Intro)
Big K.R.I.T – Live from the Underground
Scarface – Hand of the Dead Body
C Murder – Feel My Pain
Doechii – NISSAN ALTIMA
Outkast – Aquemini
Ghetto Twiinz – Mamma’s Hurting
Future – March Madness
Missy Elliott – Work It
Goodie Mob – Dirty South ft. Big Boi
J. Cole – Window Pain (Outro)
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: On the set of DJ Unk’s “Walk It Out” video, July 21, 2006, Bankhead Highway, by Zach Wolfe.
