How André 3000’s ‘the South got something to say’ speech changed hip-hop
[ad_1]
The industry hadn’t yet realized how much money it could make off Southern artists such as Missy Elliot, Lil Wayne, Megan Thee Stallion, Ludacris, Rick Ross, 2 Chainz, J. Cole.
Anything that wasn’t from New York, where hip-hop was born, was attacked like an immune system suppressing a foreign body.
“It was so difficult for us to break into New York. Hip-hop-wise there was no way,” Scarface of the Geto Boys told The Washington Post from his Houston home earlier this year. “You could get your album played all over the f------ country, but New York was not letting you in.”
By 1995, the cultural and artistic hub that is the South was tired of being put down. It was during that year’s Source Awards that André 3000 of Outkast gave Southern hip-hop its battle cry: “The South got something to say.”
Regina Bradley is a Georgia native and professor who wrote the book “Chronicling Stankonia,” about how Outkast helped Black Southerners find their way after the civil rights movement. And writing a book about Outkast’s André 3000 and Big Boi means writing about that Source Awards moment.
But let’s pause, because the context is important.
The 1995 Source Awards show, which was held in New York, is known to be one of the most important nights in hip-hop history not only because of André's moment. The explosion of the drama between the East Coast and the West Coast factions of hip-hop that would later lead to bloodshed happened that night.
So it makes sense why everyone at the show was already tense, Bradley said. Amid that tension, Outkast beat hometown duo Smif-N-Wessun for best new artist. The New York crowd immediately started booing the Georgia natives. The northerners didn’t care what the South had going on. And the West Coasters were just annoyed, so they also booed.
Imagine you had just won best new artist at the most definitive award show that your genre has, and the crowd hates you.
Big Boi speaks first. He politely thanks the booing crowd for having him and André in their city, which does nothing to quell the dissent.
“You have Big Boi, who is trying to show his home training, which is Southern 101: You don’t want to embarrass your people when you go out,” Bradley said.
Then he passes the mic to André. “But it’s like this, though,” André begins, which Bradley says is the Southern version of telling people to pay attention to his words.
A clearly frustrated André tells it like this: “I’m tired of folks, you know what I’m saying, close-minded folks, you know what I’m saying. We got a demo tape and don’t nobody want to hear it, but it’s like the South got something to say. That’s all I’m gonna say.”
André sounded the clarion call.
“For those of us who are Southern,” Bradley said, “that was the rallying cry because it gave us the green light to go ahead and just do what we want to do. It doesn’t matter if it’s approved, it doesn’t matter if folks are checking for us. We have this creative space that is free from expectation, free from bias of folks who don’t know how we do when we get é down here.”
Bradley makes this point: André didn’t say he has something to say. He didn’t say Atlanta, or Georgia itself, has something to say. He said the South. And other artists heard him.
It’s a simplification, but that’s what the industry did to Southern hip-hop before realizing its potential profitability.
“Does the South have something to say? We do now. Everybody else sounding like it. Right?” said Scarface, who also remembered being booed by New York crowds.
Phonte, of the group Little Brother, is from North Carolina and recalled to The Post that Willie D, Scarface’s fellow Geto Boy, rapped about all this in title track of the 1991 album, “We Can’t Be Stopped”: “Now what was this [BS] about? That we had to be from Cali or New York. Anybody can make it that got heart.”
Phonte recalled how influences in Greensboro could be New York mixtapes, Go-Go music from D.C. or artists from further south. That made people there students of all styles. He compared it to British actors awkwardly playing Americans because they didn’t have proximity to their culture. But, sometimes, people can study themselves into becoming experts. That, he said, is part of what makes Southern rappers so good.
“It doesn’t surprise me at all that the South can continue its stronghold on music because, above all else, we had to be students because [people just thought] we was country and dumb and all this [stuff]. And we really had to prove that we deserved that seat at the table in hip-hop,” Phonte said.
Dear Silas, a trumpeter and rapper from Mississippi, is also not from one of those Southern rap power centers such as Atlanta or Memphis or Houston.
He’s floored how few people actually know he’s from the South. Though he’s in his 30s, younger than Scarface, Silas says he still deals with backhanded asides about being Southern.
“I get [dismayed] because it’s so astonishing that something they enjoy can come from this place,” he said.
Even nearly three decades after André's declaration, Silas still feels people are late to respecting Southern hip-hop.
“This already existed. You’re behind. You’re not hip to all that’s going on, and you should have already known about this. But allow me to introduce you to myself and, in the midst of that, show you all the foundation that has already been laid,” he said before later adding, “The things that you actually enjoy, a lot of it is tied to here actually.”
In the five years since people heard that the South had something to say, Outkast put out some of the greatest hip-hop albums ever made.
Rolling Stone put Outkast’s 1998 masterpiece “Aquemini” as the 27th best hip-hop album of all time in their list of 200. Outkast’s 2000 classic “Stankonia” earned the second spot on the list.
So, at least someone listened.
Keith McMillan contributed to this report.
Comments
Post a Comment