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
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 »
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 »
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 »
Essay
In 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 »
Interview
The following is an excerpt from Country Queers: A Love Letter (Haymarket Books, 2024) and has been lightly edited to appear on Southern Cultures in collaboration with the Queer South issue. Early in the spring of 2014, I borrowed a neighbor’s video camera and recorded myself, with my ducks hanging out in the background, rambling »
Essay
By almost any account, North Carolina has undergone dramatic changes in the past half-century. What was once a slow-growing, largely rural state is now a fast-growing, increasingly urban one. While the state used to be known for textiles and tobacco, it is now a center for banking, technology, and medicine. This transformation was not accidental. »
Memoir
I come from a long line of people whose lives seemed straight out of a Walker Evans photograph. Landless whites, rootless, disposable—“white trash.” It’s hard to create home from contingency, or a feeling of belonging from worthlessness. They say southerners are people defined by place, but I never believed it. At least it wasn’t true »