“Oh, you’re looking for this kind of rap?” a cashier at aChicago record store asked me as I purchased a pile of Southern rap 12-inchesearlier this year, barely disguising his derision. He directed me to the store’sbasement, a ruins of haphazardly stacked records from Big Tymers, Dem FranchizeBoyz, YoungBloodZ Petey Pablo and the like he couldn’t wait to get rid of. Theseare not the kind of singles that record collectors seek out.
To listeners who grew up loyal to the coastal hip-hop, Southern rapnever shook the stigma of the crudely crafted, cardboard-packaged NoLimit CDs of the '90s, even as the genre proved itself last in the last decade not only acommercial force, but a creative one as well.
As part of an ongoing project to catalog the best singles of the past decade,music writer Al Shipley recently compiled a list of his top 50 Southern rapsingles from that '00s that charts the South’s artistic renaissance. Within a few shortyears at the start of the decade, the South went from producing obvious club cuts and goofynovelty tunes (particularly from rappers that buffoonishly played up theirrural ties) to some of the boldest, most left-field rapnot to mention mostgifted rappersof its time.
“Like a lot of people, I started the decade pretty staunchlybelieving nearly all hip hop worth hearing came out of the five boroughs, andslowly came around to enjoy the big national melting pop that rap's become,”Shipley writes.
Shipley’s whole list is worth a read. While some of the clubbier songs willreaffirm for some listeners why they can’t stand the Souththose with a low tolerance for Lil Jon are going to have a hard time herethe list as a wholerefutes the ridiculous misnomer that somehow OutKast was the only act in theregion making smart, soulful and daring records.
A few choice videos from the list are embedded below
