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Those of you who are up on your blog reading know that recently Bol (Byron Crawford) has taken on the extremely vocal minority of Southern rap fans. It started with Bol's statement that Southern rap fans are the most annoying hip hop fans and things went downhill from there. In his own way he made a lot of good points, though as usual he wasn't particularly diplomatic about it. This eventually led to UGK's Bun B (or more likely, someone just posting under the name Bun B) responding to Bol's comments by name-dropping, and then Bol got in the last shot -- unless Bun or his P.R. rep responds again.
I can't cosign everything that was said about Southern rap, but I do agree with some of it. While there are some solid acts coming from down south (Outkast, Lil' Wayne, Slim Thug and the Clipse if Virginia is counted as "down south"), there are also a ton of below-average groups that are somehow selling a lot of records and getting a lot of play on tv and the radio. Now I know not to expect B.E.T. to actually play good music, but on their Top 10 Videos show yesterday which is allegedly based on viewer voting, there were songs from D4L and Dem Franchise Boys. Nothing from D4L or DFB should be on a "Top 10" list of any kind.
So what is the cause of this surge in popularity for subpar Southern rap? I think Bol gets it more or less right when he says, "Southern rap fans, meanwhile, make it a point to draw no distinction between the best and the worst their particular segment of the hip-hop community has to offer." I don't really have a problem with the regionalism shown by Southern rap fans -- I'm guilty of it myself, in that I am more willing to give a pass to a New York or New Jersey rapper than someone from the West or the South. The problem with what's going on now, though, is it is lowering the bar for all hip hop acts. The state of things is so bad right now that even Bow Wow has felt confident enough to make the claim that he is one of the top 3 rappers in the game right now.
Ghostface spoke about this at a concert recently. He made the point that hip hop (or specifically rapping in this case) used to be a lot more competitive, seeing who could come up with the best or most intricate lyrics. Now groups come out with simplified raps and simplified beats just to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. When one group finds success this way, then more acts follow it, and as I said, the bar gets lowered for what type of hip hop sells. Southern rappers aren't the only ones guilty of this, but their fans are a lot more willing to buy the music, if only as an act of supporting "The South."
As for Bun B, I'm not a big fan of his work, but I don't hate it either. I don't think he's a good enough rapper lyrically to be the face of an entire movement, as he seems to have become the Godfather of southern rap, but I'm not sure who else in the South could fill that role. As part of UGK he's put out some songs that I did like, but nothing I liked enough to convince me to buy an entire album of him rapping. I would say that the best work he's done was with Jay-Z on Big Pimpin'. Doing a track with Jay-Z forced him to step up his lyrical game, something he doesn't necessarily have to worry about when doing posse cuts with a lot of the rappers down south.
To summarize: I'm not hating on Southern rap in its entirety or the fans of Southern rap, just the garbage that's getting mainstream support. If anyone out there wants to hit me up with something good from down south, I will put it up here on this site.
Just to keep this in the usual style of my posts, I'm putting up the instrumental for Big Pimpin':
Download Big Pimpin' Instrumental (mp3)
4/6/2006 11:59:34 AM posted by Fresh