Writer Ryan Cocca, a longtime contributor to the INDY, re-launched the online magazine/newsletter project Super Empty earlier this year. What began years ago as a scrappy personal music blog has evolved into something more ambitious: A sleek, smart place to platform writing on North Carolina rap and in doing so, enrich, energize, and help sustain one of the most vibrant and underrated hip-hop scenes in the country.

Every Friday, with some exceptions (like today), the INDY co-publishes a Super Empty “Song of the Week”—you can explore the archive here. As the platform and vision grow, the INDY emailed Cocca a few questions to learn more about how the project came to be, dreaming big for regional publications, how consumers and fans can help the scene thrive,

Can you describe your relationship with North Carolina rap music? 

I always listened to rap growing up, including some acts that I knew had North Carolina roots—I specifically remember driving to and from my high school job at Harris-Teeter bumping Murray’s Revenge from Murs & 9th Wonder—but my real immersion into the NC hip-hop scene started with the clothing store I had in Chapel Hill from 2013 to 2015 called Thrill City. Because of the natural overlap between hip-hop culture and streetwear, I got to know a lot of artists and other creatives in the area, especially with a series of freestyle videos we did at the store called Thrill City Sessions.

After closing the store, I started Super Empty as a personal music blog, which led to writing about hip-hop on and off for the INDY for the past eight years. Through all of it, my hope has always been to be just one more connector and community-builder among many—from promoters and curators I met long ago like Chubbz and Miriam Tolbert (of On The Radar and K97.5/Carolina Waves, respectively), to the next generation like the InThaFest crew that’s organizing shows all around the state.

There are so many other people who’ve held it down for a long time, and I just want to play my part through writing and criticism, which in my opinion are necessary to any healthy music scene.

Where does Super Empty come into play? How do you see it relating to the NC hip-hop scene and the greater media ecosystem? 

Back in its first iteration, and even this reboot now, Super Empty has been my form of doing that community-building—pulling together my interests in writing, illustration/branding, and photography to, even at a very small scale, try to give the area something that resembles or aspires to be like a national publication despite being fully based on just our region.

A not-insignificant part of the idea behind SE was basically: “How cool would it be if there was an outlet that felt like Pitchfork or Rolling Stone but was solely focused on NC?” With the major caveat that I’m a hopelessly naive person, I believe that when you treat underappreciated or less-popular things (like local/regional hip-hop) with the reverence and consideration of things that are, you can somewhat will attention, interest, and shared community into existence.

Longer form, written journalism isn’t the most economically viable of propositions, so you can understand why we don’t see more of it. But for the music scene here that I care about, as well as journalism at large, I want to be part of efforts (like INDY partner The Assembly) to push back against those realities and see how it could still be possible to do prestige-quality journalism in 2024 at an outlet not owned by Conde Nast or Laurene Powell Jobs.

Through a certain caliber of writing, of photography, of branding and presentation, can we make people feel something that they can’t get from playlists or social media? Enough that they’re willing to pay and support the project long-term? That stuff is obviously still unanswered, but my hope is that things like Super Empty are a tiny part of cracking the code.

What do you hope for Super Empty? 

I want to see Super Empty take on that mantle that I’ve always hoped for but never gotten it to, of being a central, authoritative pillar of North Carolina hip-hop that artists and fans alike can gather around and trust for a deeper, more human understanding of the scene around them. A resource that doesn’t just convey knowledge or tell stories, but also promotes conversations and stirs healthy debates—“Did you see what they said about the new so-and-so record?” “How did they leave such-and-such off the end-of-year Best Albums list?!”—that I don’t think happen enough right now.

Super empty: song of the week

All of that, in my opinion, only brings more people into the community, and ultimately, makes living in the places we live in richer. Increasingly in the Internet age, an artist’s hometown is the last place to really champion them—it’s often not until someone has fans across the country or the world that their neighbors and friends truly get excited. That’s a pretty ingrained behavior, and a hard one to dislodge.

But I hope Super Empty can be a part of challenging it—making North Carolina a state where great acts really do feel the love at home before they’re big anywhere else, because there’s a credible, respected platform on which their work is already being discussed, dissected and celebrated along the way. I also hope music writers come to see it as a place to get reps in and take risks, and be paid fairly for doing so, but that’s an entirely different answer that’s too long for this Q&A.

What is one thing you wish that hip-hop and music fans would do more of to support the scene?

My wish would be less for hip-hop fans or music fans specifically, and more to all of us as consumers who want to see creative work continue to flourish. And that would be, as we all become increasingly aware of the detrimental effects of having social media and algorithmic curation as our default sources of information, that we consciously consider what actions we’re taking in response. Beyond re-sharing the occasional Instagram post about self-care, slowness, “rest is resistance,” etc., what actual changes are we making in our lives to subvert the massive web of interests bent on making us binge more and critically think less? How do we unplug from the Matrix?

We’ve been trained to always want the best, the most entertaining, most dopamine-generating thing—and sometimes, indie, local things in one’s area will actually be that. But I think when it comes to spending our time, and with regards to media specifically, we’re more often going to be presented with choices between the slicker, arguably “better”-produced thing owned by a hedge fund and/or created with AI, and something else that’s rougher around the edges, maybe less convenient to use or a bit harder to find, but more human, real, and actually grounded in a place on Earth.

The daunting task ahead for non-megacorp entities from Super Empty to INDY will be to sand down those edges and get as close to parity with mainstream entertainment/news options as they can—but I think consumers are also going to have to meet them halfway, and intentionally seek out things beyond what’s being served to them by the algorithm. In doing so, we’ll end up supporting all kinds of important scenes, not just NC hip-hop.

Any favorite pieces from Super Empty since starting it back up this year?

I’m proud of a number of things from the past four months, but five pieces in particular come to mind: the Q&A with Raleigh-raised cinematographer Ayinde Anderson (credits: Drake, Adidas, Netflix) that we put out earlier this week; the two album reviews we’ve done so far this year: Eric Tullis on Sonny Miles and Dash Lewis on Rapsody; and two pieces about J. Cole: my opinion piece about the recent trajectory of Dreamville Festival, and Yoh Phillips’ take on how Cole’s recent song “Grippy” spoke to the challenges of aging gracefully in a creative field. We’ve put out 28 pieces so far this year, but I think just reading those five paints a pretty accurate picture of what Super Empty is, and what it aspires to be.

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Sarah Edwards is culture editor of the INDY, covering cultural institutions and the arts in the Triangle. She joined the staff in 2019 and assumed her current role in 2020.