An OutKast Reader: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Postmodern South

Music of the American South

by Regina N. Bradley (Editor), Fredara Hadley (Contributor), Michelle Hite (Contributor)

OutKast, the Atlanta-based hip-hop duo formed in 1992, is one of the most influential musical groups within American popular culture of the past twenty-five years. Through Grammy-winning albums, music videos, feature films, theatrical performances, and fashion, André “André 3000” Benjamin and Antwan “Big Boi” Patton have articulated a vision of postmodern, post–civil rights southern identity that combines the roots of funk, psychedelia, haute couture, R&B, faith and spirituality, and Afrofuturism into a style all its own. This postmodern southern aesthetic, largely promulgated and disseminated by OutKast and its collaborators, is now so prevalent in mainstream American culture (neither Beyoncé Knowles’s “Formation” nor Joss Whedon’s sci-fi /western mashup Firefly could exist without OutKast’s collage aesthetic) that we rarely consider how challenging and experimental it actually is to create a new southern aesthetic.

An OutKast Reader , then, takes the group’s aesthetic as a lens through which readers can understand and explore contemporary issues of Blackness, gender, urbanism, southern aesthetics, and southern studies more generally. Divided into sections on regional influences, gender, and visuality, the essays collectively offer a vision of OutKast as a key shaper of conceptions of the twenty-first-century South, expanding that vision beyond long-held archetypes and cultural signifiers. The volume includes a who’s who of hip-hop studies and African American studies scholarship, including Charlie Braxton, Susana M. Morris, Howard Ramsby II, Reynaldo Anderson, and Ruth Nicole Brown.

248 pages, Hardcover

Published October 1, 2021

About the author

Dr. Regina N. Bradley is an alumna Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow (Hutchins Center, Harvard University, Spring 2016), Assistant Professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University, and co-host of the critically acclaimed southern hip hop podcast Bottom of the Map with music journalist Christina Lee. Dr. Bradley is one of the foremost authorities on contemporary Black culture in the American South. Her expertise and research interests include post-Civil Rights African American literature, hip hop culture, race and the contemporary U.S. South, and sound studies. Dr. Bradley earned a B.A. in English from Albany State University (GA), an M.A. in African American and African Diaspora Studies from Indiana University Bloomington, and a Ph.D. in African American Literature from Florida State University.

Dr. Bradley is the author of Chronicling Stankonia: the Rise of the Hip-Hop South. Chronicling Stankonia explores how Atlanta, GA hip hop duo OutKast influences the culture of the Black American South in the long shadow of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Bradley is also the editor of a collection of essays about OutKast for the University of Georgia Press titled An OutKast Reader.

A prominent public voice and leading scholar on southern hip hop culture, Dr. Bradley's work has been featured on a range of news media outlets including Washington Post, NPR, and Atlanta Journal Constitution. Additionally, In May, 2017 Dr. Bradley delivered a TEDx talk, "The Mountaintop Ain't Flat," about the significance of hip hop in bridging the American Black South to the present and future.

As a complement to her scholarship, Dr. Bradley is also an acclaimed fiction writer. Her first short story collection, Boondock Kollage: Stories from the Hip Hop South, was published by Peter Lang press in 2017. Jesmyn Ward described the stories in Boondock Kollage as leaving her “breathless and incoherent.” Dr. Bradley’s short story “Beautiful Ones” was a 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee in short fiction. Her other stories have been featured in Obsidian, Transition, and Oxford American. Dr. Bradley’s fiction has been supported by the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and the Tin House Summer Workshop. She is currently working on her first novel, Reluctant Ancestors, about the disappearance of a teenaged black boy in Southwest Georgia.

Dr. Bradley can be reached via Twitter (@redclayscholar) or through her website, www.redclayscholar.com.

Reviews

[Schulz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I lived long enough to see the cultural touchstones of my youth critically analyzed.

[Rob Harvilla]

Not only was "B.O.B." an expansion of what hip-hop production could be, but both André 3000 and Big Boi were challenging a perceived rut in hip-hop music at the time. Big Boi noted in 2000, "Everybody's been doing music like they all have the same formula—e=mc² . . . They get a beat, an MC, somebody to sing the hook, and go platinum. Where's music going to go when everybody's trapped in this same repetitious flow?" André also noted a lag in hip-hop compared to music coming from outside the American markets and recalls, "Hip-hop beats were getting redundant . . . just listening to U.K. music, I was like, 'Man, they're killing us on the beat.' So I was like, 'We need to find a way to make it harder, but American style.'" This sentiment by André 3000 is often overlooked in reviews that stop at the song's drum-and-bass and speed metal influences. His consciousness of "American style" points to other sonic influences that many audiences outside of southern regional hip-hop frequently miss still today—southern bass music. What pop and crossover urban radio listeners often didn't hear in "B.O.B." were the implied and also overt references to early bass and southern electro-funk. In the early 1990s, these were the very first locally produced forms of hip-hop dance music played in southern clubs and skating rinks, on late-night radio shows on Black stations, and during half-time shows by Black southern high school and college marching bands. The Atlanta-born dance "rag top" is repeatedly referenced in "B.O.B." and the 1997 song that paid tribute to it, "Ragtop Don't Stop (Remix)" by the G.A. Girlz, has a tempo right around 153 bpm, just a hair slower than "B.O.B." Dré's "American style" was in fact part of Atlanta and southern underground dance clubs' style, as songs that dominated the local scene prior to the rise of Dirty South hip-hop had much more in common with "B.O.B." than later slower club anthems of crunk made famous by artists like Lil Jon and the Eastside Boyz and Ludacris by the end of the 1990s. Largely unknown outside of Atlanta and the Southern region, acts like G.A. Girlz, 12 Gauge (originally from Augusta, Georgia), Raheem the Dream, DJ Smurf, and Kilo Ali were Atlanta's answer to regional bass kings Luther Campbell and 2 Live Crew from Miami. Before the national attention brought to Atlanta by Arrested Development, Jermaine Dupri with So So Def's roster of crossover acts, and even LaFace with hip-hop via Organized Noize-produced artists, these lesser-known local favorites dominated the hometown DJ sets of the legendary Shryan's Showcase and venues like 559, the Gate, and Sparkles. In these spaces it was common for songs to range between 135 and 155 bpm and faster if put in a live dance mix to support the rich dance club environment, which eventually fed the city's (in)famous strip club culture popularized by the more successful acts of the 2000s. Thus, sonically "B.O.B." was simultaneously an expansion of hip-hop's sonic reach at the time but also a nostalgic look back at Atlanta's first generation of hip-hop. "B.O.B. stands as a revival of the roots of crunk as much as the crunk revival depicted at the end of the song's supercharged music video.

(b/w)

A Black boy who was supposed to die and survives is a foreigner as an adult.