Regina N. Bradley and Christopher Massenburg started talking about their vision for a Southern hip-hop festival in 2016 when they were both Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellows at Harvard. But while what became the Hip Hop South Festival was born in an academic setting, it wasn’t originally intended for one. As a result, Carolina Performing Arts’ (CPA’s) rare foray into rap has a distinctly authentic terroir, from its local roots to its splashy headliner.
“The joke I give is that I’m an academic nine to five, but I’m 24/7 in the culture,” Bradley says via video chat.
An associate professor of English and African diaspora studies at Kennesaw State University—“30 minutes north of Atlanta on a good day”—Bradley cohosts Bottom of the Map, a Southern hip-hop podcast from PRX, and wrote the acclaimed fiction collection Boondock Kollage: Stories from the Hip Hop South. Last year, UNC Press published her scholarly book Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South. Its focus on Outkast might have something to do with Big Boi signing on to rattle the stately columns of Memorial Hall.
The festival took root in Chapel Hill through Massenburg, a fellow at CPA who is widely known in the Triangle as Dasan Ahanu: Raleigh native, Bull City Slam Team founder, performer, educator, and community organizer. The festival began in a conversation with Amy Russell, CPA’s director of programming, about the campus-wide Southern Futures initiative, which fosters creative collaborations between the university and local communities, with a focus on racial equity and social justice in the South.
“We started to talk about hip-hop because of its role in providing a response to some of the conditions of the South, especially for Black and brown youth, and how that needed to be part of the conversation,” Massenburg says. “I was like, ‘Well, I know who I want to work with.’”
Most of the performers are deeply connected to Massenburg’s home ground, as Big Boi is to Bradley’s. The festival opens at Cat’s Cradle on Friday (though at the distinctly un-Cradle-like hour of six p.m.) with bookings as Raleigh as Rapsody, as Durham as Shirlette Ammons, and as statewide as Miriam Tolbert’s Carolina Waves platform, which will present a showcase.
“We wanted to move away from essential ideas about what hip-hop culture is: it’s hypermasculine; it sounds a particular way,” Bradley says. “Highlighting women’s contributions to the culture and showing that it’s much bigger than a male gaze is something we were very intentional about.”
“Also, it was just the feel,” Massenburg adds. “Both Shirlette and Rapsody get busy. Rapsody’s very vocal that she’s not a female emcee; she’s an emcee. At the Cradle, it’s going to give you that real energy of being at a hip-hop show, where folks are just getting after it.”
The feel should be very different on Saturday night, when Washington, DC’s Sa-Roc—one of the only women signed to the storied Rhymesayers label—takes the proscenium stage of Memorial Hall to open for Big Boi, who has enjoyed a robust solo career after Outkast.
“The show he’s been traveling with lately is really dynamic,” Massenburg says. “He has a band with [Outkast producer] Sleepy Brown, and the energy is ridiculous. We wanted to have that big moment. That was one of the first thumbs-up responses we got, and we were like, ‘OK, we’re rocking now.’”
Each night, the main event will be followed by a looser session at CURRENT ArtSpace at 10:00 p.m., with The Raleigh Rockers’ B-boy jam on Friday and a beat battle featuring members of 9th Wonder’s Soul Council on Saturday. Here, the commercial predominance of the emcee gives way to hip-hop’s varied lived traditions, exemplifying the universally local aesthetic that kept the Bronx-born form intact as it splintered into thousands of microdocumentaries around the world.
“A low-key foundation of hip-hop is hyper localism: How do we represent where we’re from?” Bradley says. “When it took root in the South, it borrowed the cultural signifiers of Southern Black life—gospel, the church, funk—and utilized that to its advantage.”
But Southern hip-hop is as diverse as the Southern accent, even if neither is always perceived that way by outsiders.
“In the same way that Southern isn’t cookie-cutter, neither are the cultural expressions that come out of it,” Bradley says. “Houston sounds different than Atlanta or Memphis or the Florida Panhandle. But I think what most distinguishes Southern hip-hop is that it is in constant conversation with the South’s past. Ideas of racism, white supremacy, class, and literacy that continuously show up—we’re consistently revisiting the past to gain an understanding of not only the present but the future.”
CPA’s embryonic relationship with hip-hop is far from unusual among academic presenters, which typically focus on classical, jazz, modern dance, and certain refined strains of experimental music and pop. And in fact, CPA is already ahead of some, having brought Tierra Whack to Memorial Hall in 2019 and presented local hip-hop and spoken word in a virtual festival, the Digital Commons, last year. The latter, naturally, was a Dasan Ahanu production.
“What we’re able to do with the hip-hop festival is made easier by the work we did with the Commons, where we were really thinking about our relationship with the local artistic ecosystem,” he says. There is still much work to do, but there’s no doubt that Southern hip-hop is ready for the academy. If there is any question, it runs the other way.
“Hip-hop is a form of cultural resistance,” Massenburg acknowledges. “If you give that to the South, where else would there be so much to push back at? I think that will be reflected throughout the festival, pushing back against constrictions and characterizations. When you think about an institution that sometimes seems inaccessible, it’s important to say that there is room, and we deserve to be a part of this.”
“It’s like, if y’all rock with us, y’all rock with us,” Bradley adds, “but if you don’t, it’s not gonna stop the show.”
Regina Bradley says that Southern hip-hop is still underrepresented in scholarship, and she wanted to change that. She’s done so with a distinctly fresh point of view.
“I’m interested in what the American South looks like outside of the shadow of the civil rights movement, which, unfortunately, for a lot of folks, is the be-all-end-all of Southern Black modernity,” she says, recapping the central argument of her book Chronicling Stankonia, which casts Outkast as the avatars of a new Black South. “As somebody who was raised in the South in the nineties and early 2000s, I don’t fit into that conversation.”
Of course, her research is built on the work of the scribes who came before, sometimes toiling in relative obscurity. “There would be no Southern hip-hop scholarship without Southern hip-hop journalists,” she says. “One of the things we’re trying to do with this festival is give folks their flowers while they can smell them.”
To that end, Bradley organized Dirty South Scribes, a free art exhibit on view at CURRENT during the Hip Hop South Festival. It features painted portraits of five pioneering Southern hip-hop chroniclers by five different Southern artists, including locals like Claire Alexandre and Darius Quarles, with pull-out quotes and oral histories accessed via QR code.
“Their artistic styles are so unique and speak to different things,” Bradley says. “It shows how Southern hip-hop is not one-size-fits-all, and it’s not just emceeing. Everybody listens when André [3000] says, ‘The South got something to say,’ but Dirty South Scribes is honoring the folks who showed us exactly what was being said.”
As for who they are, Bradley isn’t saying, though she enjoys everyone asking. “I’m holding it tight,” she says, laughing. “It feels good to have power.” Find out for yourself at CURRENT during the daytime on Friday or late-night on Saturday.
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