Mixtape - Out the Trunk #3
Category: Music & Recording Created on Saturday - 04.16.11 @ 9:54 PM Written by Tom Breihan - Pitchfork.com
At this point, Atlanta has been the originator of so many rap trends, movements, and ideas that many of us almost take its dominance for granted. The city's hip-hop scene is the subject of Atlanta, a pretty new coffee-table book from the photographer Michael Schmelling. It also includes a few short essays from Kelefa Sanneh, the great former New York Times pop critic and current New Yorker staff writer who doesn't write about music nearly often enough anymore.
One of those short pieces is about how Atlanta is a city with no central, unifying sound, which makes it a city without a whole lot of emotional baggage when it comes to its own rap history. Instead, it's a site of multiple tiny scenes, radar-blips that bubble and rise and die while the rap world keeps churning. The same place that gives us a groudbreaking, emotive masterpiece like Goodie Mob's Soul Food also gives us fun inanity like the Ying Yang Twins or snap music; the city seems to judge all this stuff on an equal playing field, without the neurotic devotion to past glories that has come to define New York's place in the rap universe.