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Hip-Hop

vol. 31, no. 2  //  summer 2025

It’s been thirty years since André “3000” Benjamin declared “the South got something to say,” and for the decades since this pivotal moment the region has spoken.

Table of Contents
Music

Down in the Hip-Hop South

by Corey J. Miles
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 … Continue reading Hip-Hop
Essay

Cadillactica, by Way of the Underground

Big K.R.I.T.’s Transformative Southern Waters

by Justin D Burton
“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 … Continue reading Hip-Hop
Photo Essay

Southern Hip-Hop as Memory

by Sheila Pree Bright
“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 … Continue reading Hip-Hop
Music

Anthem of Perseverance

How Southern Rap Sustains Me

by Chris Young
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 … Continue reading Hip-Hop
Music

“We Live in the Blue Note”

A Conversation About the Hip-Hop South

by Regina N. Bradley, Taylor Crumpton, Aisha S. Durham, Fredara Mareva Hadley, Zandria F. Robinson
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 … Continue reading Hip-Hop
Essay

It’s Him and I, Aquemini

Reimagining OutKast in Kiese Laymon's Long Division

by Kenneth L. Johnson II
“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 … Continue reading Hip-Hop
Essay

Murmurs to Mumbles

The Sounds of a Quotidian Southern Black Politic

by Claire B. Crawford
“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 … Continue reading Hip-Hop
Photo Essay

Songs of Sorrow

Collective Grieving in Southern Hip-Hop

by Natrice Miller
“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 … Continue reading Hip-Hop
Music

Black Skin, Mask Off

Future, Aesthetic Nihilism, and the Radical Possibilities of Trap

by Dallas Donnell
“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 … Continue reading Hip-Hop
Memoir

Wisdom Beats

To Stay Black in the South

by Pyar J. Seth
“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. … Continue reading Hip-Hop
Poetry

What the 808 Tried to Told Y’all

by Dasan Ahanu
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 … Continue reading Hip-Hop

Hip-Hop Playlist

by Corey J. Miles
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 … Continue reading Hip-Hop
Other Issues