Poetry
That 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
Southern 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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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 »
Music
I was seven in 1995 when I first heard “Space Age Pimpin’.” The bassline and raw rhymes of 8Ball & MJG had me and you, yo mama and yo cousin too all wanting to seduce a beautiful woman like Adina Howard, and drive her around on gold Daytons through my hometown of Clarksville, Tennessee. Day in and »
Photo Essay
“I didn’t fully realize that I was creating a visual archive of a time when hip-hop was deeply rooted in localized lived experiences.” I began my career in photography in Houston, a city where hip-hop was steadily emerging onto the national stage in the 1990s. What started as an underground movement gradually gained momentum, and »
Essay
“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
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 »