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 hip-hop?

Fredara Mareva Hadley: I like to think of it as this kind of Afrofuturist technology of people still trying to engage in the kind of cultural citizenship that still we have not achieved in terms of full citizenship. I see southern hip-hop in that kind of I’m saying where I’m from, bass-heavy, rooted culture. It still connects to the body—not only in terms of the rhythm but also in terms of the movement. For me, that helps to define southern hip-hop, because we can have some people from the South but they may not carry that same tradition.

Zandria F. Robinson: For me, as a sociologist, I think geographically first. What does the census say is the South—Delaware included, Oklahoma, I’ll include all y’all. The sociologist Larry Griffin talks about a sociology that’s in the South versus of the South. Sometimes that thing might be happening in the South, but it’s not necessarily engaging in southern tradition, aesthetic, or history. For me, the blues tradition is what signals, and that’s broadly construed. 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? Are we continuing our political discussions? Again, politics broadly construed.

Taylor Crumpton: My definition of southern hip-hop is someone who works within hip-hop—that could be an artist, a musician, a creative, a scholar, a journalist, a writer—who takes pride in their southern identity and creates cultural productions to enhance, center, focus, evolve, and push southern identity and culture forward. Something that isn’t extracting from it, something that isn’t exploiting. It’s something that recognizes all its beauty and innovation, also intelligence.

RNB: That’s what you got to say?

TC: I’m trying to come after you.

RNB: One of the biggest challenges in defining the South is that there is this expectation that the South is just country and rural and backward. Zan, I want to bring you into this part because your book, This Ain’t Chicago, talks about the urban South—Memphis as a form of the urban South—but there’s definitely country elements to it. I’m just curious to hear your thoughts about what is the country in southern rap? Why are so many southern urban artists scared to be labeled as country?

ZFR: The thing is, that didn’t used to be a problem. The reason why southern hip-hop came to be on the map was because people in southern cities were remixing this blues tradition and bringing their country background into the tradition—both changing it fundamentally and also Afrofuturistically hearkening back to the rhythms and sounds that we brought with us from across the ocean. That countryness was a source of pride, but then there was also this resistance because countryness was used as a pejorative, as it had been in Black literary traditions. This is common to Black people, not just in hip-hop. It had been used as a pejorative to signal people who were apolitical, people who were weak, people who were unintelligent, people who were slow. That inter-regional class battle continues in some ways to rage.

I’m talking about southern hip-hop as we’ve kind of defined it but also people just making southern sounds. As that’s become more mainstream, I think we’re getting back into a regional distinctiveness where country needs to be signified in order for there to be some kind of authenticity. That’s also what we’re always talking about in hip-hop: the stakes around authenticity. That’s especially the case when it comes to the South. They’re internally asking, “Am I being true to my roots? Am I being true to the logics and epistemologies”—as Clyde Woods would say, “the blues epistemology that drives me.”

FMH: I’m from south Florida. I have a different kind of relationship with how we think about the South, in particular because South Florida is very Caribbean. I like what you said about regionalism coming back because I think when we ask “What is southern hip-hop?” it can’t be anything without a specific place. It can’t be, “I am just a southern rapper.” No, no, no. You need to have a specific geographical citation. Regina, in your work, you were always insistent about Field Mob being from Albany, Georgia—this own place with its own history, and the  importance of the specificity of that.

With Florida, people always kind of go back and forth. Is Florida even southern? I’m like, it absolutely is. At the same time, especially in this political climate, people are like, “We should just cut off Florida or let it sink or throw it away.” I’m always really adamant and defiant about that because I’m like, Ron DeSantis or whoever you hate doesn’t own the state of Florida. If anybody is entitled to the state of Florida, it’s the Seminole Indigenous people and Black Floridians. My dad’s family goes back to slavery in the state of Florida. When we dismiss the South in general because we’re like, “Oh, it’s a red state,” we are dismissing the everyday lived experiences and advocacy that Black folks on the ground continue to embody. Mississippi has the largest Black population by percentage, I think, in the country. When you say, “Oh, I don’t care nothing about Mississippi,” what are you saying? You’re letting this white political class have the final say on what Black people have created, endured, built, and not on my watch.

RNB: I feel that.

Aisha S. Durham: I want to say when and where I enter. I’m from the Tidewater, and that’s an important area because it’s a port. It was a port where you had Blackness becoming. You had people coming from the Caribbean, people coming from West Africa, people coming because of the military. You had all this transmission of different cultures. I mean, we had Sunday morning gospel music and then reggae-dancehall hour, then after that, you had Go-Go in that space. All of this was happening.

I’m from the land of Missy [Elliott]. We have these different kinds of sounds that sound like it’s from nowhere. Tidewater is an amalgam of those different sounds. I think when I hear work by Timbaland and Pharrell, I can see different traditions coming together that don’t look like other regions, because Tidewater is considered country compared to my DMV [Washington, DC, Maryland, Virginia] people.

RNB: Taylor, you know you going to have to jump in because you from Dallas and everybody has this big debate about whether or not Texas is southern. I always refer to the late great Pimp C. He said, “These country rap tunes.” What you got for us about Texas?

TC: Let me tell you about my home state that I love so much. We can’t talk about the South without Texas. What I hear from all of our responses is migration. We’ve been talking about the blues tradition, but the blues tradition in Texas was also migration to Mexico. A lot of Texas blues musicians interacted with Mexican folk singers. That is embedded into the cultural identity of our state, this cultural exchange between freed Black Americans and Mexican folk singers who are both using music, specifically in the churches in Texas, to really create this type of melody and sound about these two peoples of color who have been under state oppression but are using this music thing as a term of economic mobility.

To bring it to hip-hop, Dallas bass has origins in Miami bass, chopped and screwed has origins in Mexican traditions. Texas has always been a hip-hop state, where, because of the size and grandeur, we have had so many different cultural integrations and experiences in our hip-hop tunes.

Rappers from Dallas talk and rap very differently than rappers from Houston because our regions have different settlers, different colonizers. But also, when I think about Dallas hip-hop in particular, when Big Tuck is talking about all the highways and byways he used to be on to make some money, he’s telling you, “I’m going through Oklahoma, I’m going through Arkansas, I’m going to Louisiana.” You can’t talk about the Third Coast without the different rappers who, via an iteration of the Chitlin Circuit, were performing in these small venues, these HBCUs, these towns throughout the South. They were exchanging and building upon each other.

The hip-hop South is this beautiful gumbo that is Gulf Coast, but it’s also Caribbean, but it’s also the different Souths themselves. That also makes trying to define the hip-hop South difficult. We have touched so many other different countries by proxy, but also the transatlantic slave trade. So many southern cities were also port cities. When we talk about “country,” we’re not only talking about folks who grew up in the country and Jim Crow towns but people who immigrated to this country interacting with those country folks and becoming almost “country-squared.” Like, “I am country, but I’m also now a part of this country and interacting with its traditions,” but not a white country, a Black country. I always find that to be the  distinction, whether we’re talking about identity, whether we’re talking about politics, we’re thinking about who has the right to be country, who has the right to be southern. There’s often grace and leeway for white country folks, but never for Black country folks. I see that in antisouthern sentiment in hip-hop in the past twenty-five years.

I think about last year, the “Big Foot” versus “HISS” debate in the beef between Megan Thee Stallion and Nicki Minaj when Nicki said, “Do you want to be Bun B or Pimp C?” I’m like, Nicki is coming at Megan because of her southern identity, because she thinks she’s southern ass-backward. That’s why she’s calling out UGK [rap duo from Port Arthur, Texas], not in a term of endearment, not for their innovations to the genre, but to imply that they are country and backward.

I enjoy Azealia Banks. I grew up with her. I think that a broken clock is right twice a day. But also, her comments toward Megan are rooted in Megan being this illiterate country hillbilly. We see those conversations even more in hip-hop today, especially in our women and girls. Being from the South is now being used as something that’s almost a slur.

ZFR: I’m just going to say this. I will die on this hill. When you find me dead, this is the hill that I will be on. This is about collective Black people’s shame. When Fredara was talking, I’m thinking, “Yeah, all them people came from the country. Everybody came from the country.” You might come from Miami, but you might’ve been in a country town.

FMH: You was in Saint Ann’s [Parish] in Jamaica.

ZFR: You was in Saint Ann’s. You was in a town that was a plantation town. I think about the tremendous amount of shame that Black people have about enslavement and their forgetting of the tremendous amount of power that comes from proximity to the land, [the power] that comes from hoodoo, and the voodoo magic of being close to the land. But that level of shame is tired, and we are at this moment where we done had 1619, and we can debate about how we feel about the epistemology of those kinds of projects. But I think that anything that allows us to see that we are continuing to be here and to preserve aspects of our identity is so wild and magical. Why would you want to shame that? It’s because they’re missing something in their own lives and experiences. It’s being too far from the land.

ASD: The land don’t lie.

RNB: One of the things I think that makes southern hip-hop so special and significant is the role of HBCUs. In my case, at Albany State—the unsinkable Albany State—not only are we listening to what’s coming out of Atlanta, but we’re listening local, we’re listening to Field Mob, we’re listening to Cotton Pikaz, we’re listening to these other folks that we ain’t heard of because they’re in Alabama or they’re in Mississippi and students brought them over. Fredara, can you talk a little bit about the role of HBCUs as an incubator space for this particular type of southern hip-hop that we did, especially in the late ’90s and early 2000s?

FMH: The short of it is southern hip-hop would not develop the way that it did without HBCUs. HBCUs are gathering spaces of young Black people from all kinds of cities and towns, from all kinds of places, not just in the United States. I love that we keep bringing the diaspora and the global perspective into this because that’s important.

In the late ’80s, marketing departments at record labels started employing college reps. In their Black music divisions, where do they send them? To HBCUs, because they’re like, if we send our artists down to Howard, we send them to Albany State, we send them to Tennessee State, FAMU [Florida A&M University], wherever, and we get it popping on that campus, on that campus radio, folks will take it back to their towns. Obviously, that culminates with activities like homecoming concerts. I can give you a long list of artists we saw at FAMU and Gaither Gym during homecoming. And Freaknik meant that all these famous rappers had to come down to Atlanta and perform. Freaknik was started on the campus of AUC [Atlanta University Center] in the DC Metro Club and grew into this massive festival, but they had to come get off their perch in New York City or wherever and come down to Atlanta and perform in Piedmont Park in front of all of these young people.

RNB: Fredara, your comments made me think about Amiri Baraka’s Blues People and the connection to the land, and especially Kiese Laymon and his retheorization of “dirt folk” to talk about southern hip-hop people. Once again, it’s that connection to the land. I think that that’s so significant. Something else that I’m thinking about—Taylor, you actually brought this up—what’s the role of southern Black girls and women in southern hip-hop? I’m especially thinking about when [OutKast’s] Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik comes out in 1994, the very first voice that you hear is Dee Dee Hibbler-Murray, Ms. Peaches. She’s like, “This Peaches.” There’s already this setup that you’re looking through a different lens, an OutKasted perspective. Do you feel like southern Black women and girls are OutKasted in southern hip-hop, or what role do we play in making sure that the culture continues?

ASD: You don’t have an OutKast without thinking about the origins or the early forms of hip-hop, where you had girl groups like Angie Stone with Sequence, who were using both singing and rapping, putting them together in a kind of melodic form of hip-hop. Or Missy, when she was in her girl group Sista before breaking out on her own. In the very early iterations of hip-hop broadly, women and girls were already mixing genres.

The very sonic change that you see in hip-hop, you get from women and girls. This includes Mary J. Blige or even Erykah Badu, which I’m still placing within that category. You have the different ways in which we can even hear or understand hip-hop, different kinds of inflections, I would say, in terms of hip-hop from women, particularly, experimenting with sound. This innovation is very much when women and girls enter the space of hip-hop.

TC: I’m so happy you brought up Erykah, because I can’t talk about hip-hop for my hometown of Dallas, Texas, without Erykah. Before she was known as this pinnacle figure of neo soul, she was a young Black girl from South Dallas rapping outside [KNON] radio with her friends. You have these young Black girls who, before they could even know about A&R [Artists & Repertoire] or marketing, all these professional positions in the music industry, are already out there saying, “I like this rhythm. I like this beat. I like this body. I want to get on air. I want to do these things. This feels good to me. This feels good in my body and my soul, and I can talk about how this makes me and my friends feel good in my body, in my soul.”

There’s a youthfulness, a spirit that I think southern Black girls have, [maybe] it’s because we’ve been raised by our grandmothers. I just remember all of us having these moments of seeing them dance in the kitchen and feel good and be in their bodies that I feel is connected to this type of beauty that can only be experienced in the country. You need space to dance in your kitchen. You need space to go fry that chicken outside and for that wind to come through.

ASD: I was just gonna say—my grandma lived right across the street from Norfolk State University. So, I grew up going to summer camps and everything. So always Norfolk, Hampton, right within the proximity of each other. And yes, we had the local radio station playing specific kinds of hip-hop that we wouldn’t hear otherwise. And the mixtape. People who were going up north were bringing those tapes down. Those also got circulated. So, the kind of transmission of culture through HBCUs, whether it’s through the radio, the physical artifact of the tape itself, or in terms of people’s movement, like spring break was important.

There’s a youthfulness, a spirit that I think southern Black girls have, [maybe] it’s because we’ve been raised by our grandmothers.

RNB: Can we talk about the pleasure part of it? I feel like that’s so underappreciated. But it’s coming more to the forefront in these conversations about Black women and girls in the South. I’m thinking about how, for me, southern hip-hop was a space to let loose. You know what I’m saying? Like I was raised in a good, clean, Christian household. Church five days a week. But you know I had my little box of CDs under my bed that had the Missys and the Trinas, and the joys that all these folks talk about. The Khias with “my neck, my back.” Can we talk a little bit more about what pleasure politics looks like and why that’s so significant in understanding why southern hip-hop is not just a male space? It’s not just misogynistic. And it’s not just a victimized space that so many folks expect.

ZFR: One of the things I want to say is that pleasure need not always be sexual. Kind of like what Aisha was saying earlier. I’m in my body. It’s a privilege to have a body and to be able to move it and to be in communion with the body and the spirit. And I just remember being a girl. You know, “It’s time for the percolator.” Triggerman was huge. And also the ways that kind of lives throughout southern hip-hop and DJ Jimi. Three 6 Mafia allowed you to “Gangster Walk,” and the pleasure of just throwing your body in any direction, [throwing] elbows, violence, thumping. That was such a cathartic sort of thing. While it didn’t necessarily have sexual connotations, the pleasure of the release was just palpable.

Oftentimes, we are cut off from the diversity of erotic senses in the body—not necessarily in the strictly sexual sense, just erotic in the sense of feeling. I think there is a way that the South—it goes back to the land—allows, and, in fact, requires, that the body be moved in ways that are pleasurable. And so, I think that we have a premium on that, because it’s our responsibility as inhabitants of bodies but also as carriers of a culture of movement in the body. Movement is a serious spiritual activity. In the South, we take that to heart as we’re continuing to expand the ways that we can move the body, especially in the context of so much violent restriction of the body. So if I’m looking at GloRilla and Megan together, that’s just on the pulse of obviously sensual, right, the personal senses of pleasure that may be read as sexual or whatever. But it’s connected to this longer tradition of moving the body for spiritual reasons, moving the body through space, and also in sort of articulation of our humanity, in defiance of anything that would say that we are not.

TC: Growing up, the common refrain was the best workers came from the praise team. In the southern United States, we’re talking about blues but also the Bible Belt, right? The only space in which young Black women and girls could dance and be in their body was in worship to God. What’s in these halls of these churches? I’m thinking about the dance circle, and how oftentimes when you’re growing up, when you’re at the HBCU, when you’re at Greek Fest, when you’re at Freaknik, when you’re at the Kappa Beach Party, the first thing young Black girls are going to do is get in a circle with their friends—as a form of protection, but also to allow somebody to enter the space and feel so free. There was such a sense of community and sisterhood when you were holding your friend up, and you were being her support, as she’s throwing ass, or you’re with your whole entire graduating class doing the “swag surf.”

I think Black southern dance culture has a tie to these diasporic dance traditions and the continent that could only be preserved and maintained and carried through the body and through a type of music that is like, “I must get out of whatever I’m doing.” So much of the southern economy is built on agricultural labor. And I think Sunday was the only day in which we were not working in the field, so that is when I’m going to be the most free and exude that. I just think we have a different relationship to movement because of regionality, because of enslavement, because of how we were left in the post–Civil Rights South.

FMH: I just wanted to chime in really quickly and say that there are many things I mourn about the loss of club culture and dance. You don’t have clubs and you don’t have dancing anymore. When I was coming up, I was a church girl and we went to the parties. What we did was called “popping” then, which is different from twerking. Popping is more of your ability to thrust your pelvic bone back and forth in rhythm. Everybody can do it, but to do it well is actually [a skill], and I don’t think we give it credit for that.

But I’m also thinking about how it was a space where everybody could dance. Men, girls, boys, everybody could dance. Going back to Zandria’s point, it wasn’t necessarily connected to sexuality or ways of being in the world. And I think that was something really important for boys who were dancing back then. They were allowed a freedom, too, without being “stigmatized” as being queer, and there’s nothing wrong with being queer. But growing up in the nineties, there was a real freedom that everybody could come into the party. Everybody could come into the space to dance and to really get down.

I went to Florida A&M, and our dance team, the Strikers, which was all men at that point, won the Apollo amateur night like a whole bunch of weeks in a row. And what were they doing? The same popping that they originally learned from the girls down South, right? I mourn a space for us to be expressive and free in our bodies, and I think that has tremendously detrimental effects on us.

If you think about incubating southern hip-hop, I feel like there were more spaces for young people to be together and to make the music but also develop the culture and develop the dances. And now a lot of that happens in a mediated way on TikTok and social media. I hate to sound like that old woman, but I think there was something special.

ZFR: I am that old woman.

FMH: Congrats!

ZFR: Please, please. Like, where is the punishment?

RNB: You know, when you talk about mourning those spaces, that is a particular type of intimacy and I’m joining you on the porch. Can we talk more about these incubator spaces? I’m thinking skating rinks, I’m thinking strip clubs, I’m thinking cookouts, you know what I mean? I’m just curious if anybody has any thoughts about the role that those spaces play, or the memory of those places and how we understand southern hip-hop.

ASD: I don’t know if I would be the same person today because of this notion of surveillance culture. I was at some house parties, and I came back with, you know, my pants torn because I was grinding so much. I’m not even sure whether I could exist in the same space to figure out who I was. In terms of club culture, I was going on military bases—I mean, not so good—when I was thirteen, fourteen years old. That’s something that’s telling in terms of my interaction in different kinds of clubs. But even in that space, I learned how to cultivate a kind of speaking back to even, you know, sexist lyrics or patriarchy. I don’t know if I could have that in terms of these virtual mediated spaces. I think that comes in terms of community.

TC: I’m twenty-nine years old. We don’t own houses anymore. The past two summers I have been begging friends. I’m like, I need a grill, I need to cook out. My daddy taught me how to grill. I got my shoes. I will go and wake up at 3 a.m. and put the brisket on. Get a little Crown, play the music. We don’t have access to that anymore—a whole entire generation. We are unable to buy homes, right? Who’s going to host the cookout? Unless that home is going to be passed down in the family. We also have to think about the ways in which we are limited in economic mobility and home ownership, and even predominantly Black neighborhoods. Our neighborhoods are being taken away from us.

Non-Black neighbors are calling the police. Gentrification is using sound laws to push out Caribbean families in New York City, but also Black families throughout the South. You have a lot of nonsouthern folks moving to southern cities and being like, “Please stop playing that music.” We’re losing the ability to own land, to have cookouts, to bury our dead, to have your granny, your aunt, and everybody over to come and cook. We can’t host people in our apartments. Our apartments aren’t built to host people anymore. And I think that’s one of the things that southern Black culture is losing. We don’t have the spaces to host these things to continue these traditions, and I’m kind of hearing it a little bit in the music as well. Like there is kind of this irritation, this anger. 

We talk so much about land. But land is being taken away from us, and where are we supposed to go from that? It’s either like this beautiful Afrofuturist reimagining of a South in which we can all live and breathe and have our forty acres, or like this iteration of Southern Gothic horror, of just violence and erasure, that I feel in my generation.

ASD: I mean, I didn’t have a house. We didn’t have a house. We still had rent parties though. My mom, with three other Black women, rented spaces and they actually hosted basically a club one time. But also in our house we had rent parties. We were selling Yok [noodles] out the window and playing music all night, and they were playing Spades for money. So even that was a form of gathering. I hear you when you are saying, “Yeah, the land.” But Black folks, even in times of dispossession, have always had this ability to carve different spaces of belonging.

There’s a generational disconnect with me and younger folks who didn’t know what hip-hop was when it was emerging. I didn’t have to listen to a radio to hear it. It was just all around me. But for me, because I’m on the outside of how we may understand contemporary hip-hop, I don’t see the kind of imaginative construction of spaces we saw before.

ZFR: I will pick up on that and say we often are asked, in periods of contraction, to be closer to each other, to be communal with each other. I have a twenty-one-year-old daughter. She wants her own apartment. I’m like, “In what economy?” and also, “You need closeness.” She don’t want a roommate, I’m like, okay. I don’t want to get off into the “bowling alone” thesis, but there’s something about our contemporary moment that’s even happening for young Black people. There is sort of an alienation from the body, and alienation from other people’s bodies.

We haven’t collectively remembered that we are supposed to be collectively together. So, what does it look like to pool your resources and get a four-level thing in Baltimore? Yes, land is being taken, but one nigga should not have four hundred acres, you know? I’m thinking about this both as a mother of a Gen Z person and also as a daughter of aging Boomers. And I have a disabled sister. What are going to be our communal ways of living together?

We have to remember how to be together. And we have to enact systems that allow for us—intergenerationally, and also just within generations—to be together. And to do that, we have to remember how to get along. It’s challenging to be in community because there’s conflict, because we’re hurting, because we’re alienated from our bodies. So it’s a circle, and you know, for me, I don’t know what I would be, who would I be without the Crystal Palace skating rink! The skates might have had nails, and they were sticky on your foot. But the way that you could hear all of the music, learn all of the dances, do all, and then be in close proximity with other people’s bodies was so essential. We need to make spaces where we can be close to each other and then use that as a model for how we’re going to communally enact closeness that is not focused on a nuclear family. Because that is, you know, fundamentally southern, fundamentally Caribbean, fundamentally African.

We have to remember how to be together. And we have to enact systems that allow for us—intergenerationally, and also just within generations—to be together.

RNB: I have one last question I’d like to ask. In August, it’s the thirtieth anniversary of André Benjamin saying, “The South got something to say.” Clearly, I believe that the South still got something to say. I’m curious to hear your thoughts about what that means for how we understand southern hip-hop, and also who’s doing the saying. Taylor, you want to start us off?

TC: Oh, God! Is it because I turn thirty this year as well?

RNB: Yeah, I’m taking advantage.

TC: Me and southern hip-hop are going through our Saturn return. I was eight years old when southern hip-hop started to go out of the borders. And now I get to be a part of it as a journalist and a writer all these decades later as it’s become the hottest commodity, the hottest export out of the United States to the world, and Black women being the worldwide ambassadors of southern hip-hop and culture. I think, for me, it kind of feels more like Solange’s “Where do we go from here?” Because so many southern Black people, who care about this culture, can no longer live in the South. And it’s kind of puzzling to want to defend the region, want to archive the region, want to help push and evolve it, but no longer be able to live there.

I do think the South will always “got something to say.” But it is weird, because for a long time I really wanted to write about my region and my culture, and live in my region, in my culture. And I cannot do that, so it feels almost as if I’m living and breathing a part of it, but also mourning it, because every time I go back home more people who aren’t southerners keep moving in, and they’re erasing the culture in front of my very eyes. I see that every time I go back home to Dallas. And I start to understand why Beyoncé no longer goes to Houston, because I think there is some type of pain and trauma for my generation. And so many of these pandemic and economic conditions have made our identity and connection to the South a little bit different.

ASD: I think what the South is saying is, come home, and I mean that in terms of come home to your body. That’s what I think the South is saying to us. We are disconnected. And I think for the MCs and aesthetically, in terms of hip-hop, it’s reminding us of ourselves. And that’s why I opened with talking about hip-hop, and southern hip-hop in particular, being connected to blues, rooted and embodied.

FMH: We mentioned Doechii earlier, and she resonates deeply with me for a lot of different reasons. She’s from my mama’s hometown of Tampa, right? And when I saw the album cover for Alligator Bites Never Heal, it made me emotional because she’s a little dark-skinned lady holding an albino alligator. I have a massive tattoo of an alligator on my forearm because I lived on a canal, and we had alligators in our backyard and such—a specifically Floridian thing. As I have been a Floridian in exile, I’ve thought a lot about that and what it meant to have such an ancient and powerful and serene creature literally swimming behind your house every day.

To the second part of your question, I think part of what’s driving the resurgence of anti-southern sentiment is our current political climate. I think people see it as the South’s fault. When people hear that I’m from Florida, they’re like, “Oh, I’m sorry.” I’m like no, no, no, I’m good. I love being from Florida.

Covid is a part of what’s also driving our current reality. What happened specifically in Florida during Covid is that there was a population boom. You talk about people migrating to Texas. And so, you know, all of these people migrated to Florida, and two-thirds of them registered as Republican. That shifts the politics of your state. That shifts what is possible in your state. So, if I think about what André 3000 said thirty years ago, I think, how do we get out of this?

How we move forward is by listening to the recipes, listening to the land, listening to the stories, listening to the music that comes from the South. You gotta get back to the root of that. And if we’re talking about the root of the Black American experience and all of this diversity, even grafting in the relationship with people of African descent from other places, the South is still the root of all of that. You don’t get anywhere else in this country without coming through the South first. So the extent to which we can lose our shame. And I’m from a town where the president now lives, and so I’ve had to reclaim even my hometown from him right? To the extent that we can do, that is the extent to which we’ll be free.

How we move forward is by listening to the recipes, listening to the land, listening to the stories, listening to the music that comes from the South.

RNB: Come on with this benediction, Zan. 

ZFR: A couple of things keep coming up. One, Taylor’s expansive definition of southern hip-hop is, I think, a beautiful one, because it makes me think of the writers at Scalawag magazine that are doing this tremendous justice-based eco-critical work. And I think that kind of work is also hip-hop, and I think that that’s what the South is saying today. You know, continuing the work that OutKast and other artists were doing trying to remind us of our origins and our beginning. I also want to say that we just have to really, really, really remember that we are Black, that we have this powerful ancient legacy of resistance. I’m deeply sympathetic to what’s happening all over the country in terms of how the pandemic shifted the economic and realty landscapes. You know, as a person in exile from my hometown [Memphis], unable to live in my hometown in certain kinds of ways, I deeply understand this. But we always moved.

This is our work as people. We get diffuse, and we figure out how to come together. This is like our history as a diasporic people, and one thing that we know from André 3000 and these past thirty years is that we will always find our way home. I think we just have to remember whether home is in the body. Outer space is too! We got to really get into the surreal. We need to be looking to the eco-critical. So it’s happening where the South is saying things now, especially because of the way the discourse is on the lower frequencies. Shoutout to Ralph Ellison in the Black fantastic margins, peace to Richard Iton, you know, in the edges of the marvelous, peace to Robin D. G. Kelley. It’s all these places where we are. The Blue Note is where we need to meet up. That’s where the party is. That’s where the club is, and I know, looking around, it seems like it’s not there, but we have to remember the blueprints.

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Regina N. Bradley, an award-winning writer and researcher of the Black American South, is an alumna Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow (Hutchins Center, Harvard University, Spring 2016), associate professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University, a faculty editor for Southern Cultures journal, and cohost of the southern hip hop podcast Bottom of the Map with music journalist Christina Lee. A leading scholar on contemporary southern Black life and hip hop culture, Bradley has discussed her work on a range of media outlets, including NPR, Netflix’s hip hop docuseries Hip-Hop Evolution, Washington Post, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In May 2017, Bradley delivered a TEDx talk, “The Mountaintop Ain’t Flat,” about hip hop in the American Black South. She is the author of Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South, the editor of An OutKast Reader, and coeditor of the third edition of That’s the Joint!: The Hip Hop Studies Reader, with Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal.

Taylor Crumpton is a pop culture, music, and politics writer from Dallas, Texas. Crumpton writes about a range of topics from Black queer advocacy to the underrepresented hip-hop scenes of her home state. Her forthcoming book projects are “Girl, Please: A Love Letter to Black Women on Reality TV” and “Coronation of the Queen,” an illustrated retrospective of Beyoncé’s career.

Aisha S. Durham is a professor of com munication and a Fulbright-Hays Fellow at the University of South Florida, where she explores the relationship between media representations and everyday life in the “post” era using critical autoethnography, performance writing, and intersectional approaches. Durham has served as a cultural advisory board member for the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap multimedia collection.

Fredara Mareva Hadley is a professor of ethnomusicology in the Music History Department at The Juilliard School, where she teaches courses on ethnomusicology and African American music. Hadley’s forthcoming book, I’ll Make Me a World, centers on the musical culture of historically Black colleges and universities and its impact on Black music and beyond.

Zandria F. Robinson is a native Mem phian, an associate professor of Black Studies at Georgetown University, and an ethnographer, cultural critic, and memoirist whose work explores race, gender, sound, and spirit in the US South. Robinson is the author of This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South, an ethnography of Black cultures and identities in post–Civil Rights Memphis.