[music]

Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Early Tuesday morning, the rapper, Takeoff, as many of you know, was shot and killed in Houston, Texas. He began topping the charts as one of the members of the platinum-selling rap trio, Migos who Rolling Stone recently called arguably the biggest rap group in the world. The day before he died, he had released the video for the new single, Messy, with one other Migos member, Quavo, their first, as a rap duo. He was just 28 years old.

In celebration of his life, we wanted to take a closer look at his work with Migos and put it into the context of the rise of Southern rap music. That's a genre within rap for those of you who don't know. Particularly its current iteration called trap, which has grown over the last three decades to become an incredibly popular genre. Joining me now to discuss all these and more is Briana Younger, freelance music writer, and editor, in addition to bylines in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and other places.

In 2020, she led a team of music critics and scholars in creating a canon of Southern rap music called The South Got Something To Say: A Celebration of Southern Rap. We're going to hear some music clips. We're going to talk. Briana, welcome to WNYC. Thank you so much for coming on to this.

Briana: Hi, there. Thank you for having me.

Brian: Before we get into the history of the genre, let's introduce listeners who might not be familiar with Takeoff and Migos. According to Rolling Stone, Takeoff began rapping with Quavo and Offset, the third member, who those two are his uncle and cousin respectively in 2008, releasing a debut mixtape in 2011. Let's take a listen to one of their earliest hits off of that mixtape called Versace. This part is Takeoff's verse.

[music]

In an article titled The South is Rap's Past, Present, and Future, you write, "The flow that launched a thousand debates," Migos' signature triplets dadada, dadada, as we've just heard, have become the de facto default mode in the year since they first burst through the ether of the internet. That combined with their ad-libs is what makes the music really unique. How would you characterize the sound the Migos created?

Briana: The Migos sound, as we just heard, it made use of this triplet flow, which they didn't necessarily invent, but the way they did it just sounded so explosive, almost like a cascade of syllables that bounce off the beat. As we heard, it's contagious. It makes you want to imitate it a little bit, nod your head. It was just something that was one-on-one and the three of them would do it and bounce off each other. It was just truly electric.

Brian: Triplets, just very simple, for those of you not trained in music, really fast sets of three, dadada, dadada, dadada, 123, 123, 123. You were hinting at some debate there. How was the mixtape initially received? What was being debated?

Briana: Well, they didn't really start to catch national steam until YRN, which came out in 2013 and the origins of their flow became this grand topic of debate because people were so enamored and credited them with inventing it, but it had pre-dated them by several years. Three 6 Mafia in Memphis, Tennessee, did it. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony in Cleveland, Ohio, were doing it. This was in the '90s. The Migos kind of was just sucking all of the oxygen out of the room at the time.

Then there was this whole Migos are greater than the Beatles thing, which was definitely a troll, but it also just spoke to how impactful and beloved they were when they were coming out.

Brian: We'll listen to more clips as we go. We can take some phone calls here too. Fans of the Migos or Takeoff or Southern rap, in general, what do you think belongs in the canon, if we can call it that, of Southern rap? 212-433 WNYC. What did Takeoff mean to you? 212-433-9692. The NPR Project was inspired, I see, by something that Andre 3000 said at the 1995 Source Awards, "The South got something to say."

Southern rap according to the canon you organized has been around since the late 1980s. At the risk of severely oversimplifying, how has the genre found its own roots? Can the evolution be pinpointed to specific moments? Is there something about the geographic South of the United States that you hear?

Briana: Yes, I wouldn't say moment so much as eras and places. Miami bass was extremely important in the '80s to laying the foundation for a lot of what Southern rap would eventually sound like, and, actually, is a sound that's coming back today through the City Girls and Usher song. Houston in rap lore had a very important role in helping to establish the South as well as Memphis before Atlanta emerged as the hub that it remains today.

Southern rap, I would say compared to its counterpart West Coast or on the East Coast, it's more laid back. It's having a lot of fun. Well, fun in the more, I guess, easily legible sense. All of hip-hop is, obviously, having fun no matter where it is. Southern rap, in general, I would say, it's more accessible, and a lot of people have taken that to mean not as complicated or as sophisticated, but it's anything but. It's so beautiful and manifold just like the South.

The South as a region is gigantic. Every place, within hip-hop, has its own flavor. Southern rap, as a whole, becomes this melting pot of Houston, Memphis, Miami, even smaller cities like Mississippi or Alabama, all converging to make this sound and culture, and flavor that can't even be defined as trap music, which is what most people know it as today but has been so many things and currently is so many things.

Brian: One moment that many writers, I think, have said stands out in the canon was the assent of the Atlanta rapper T.I. who proclaimed himself the king of the South. In 2003, way back then, he released the album called Trap Muzik, putting the term into the zeitgeist. Let's take a listen to a bit of the song, Rubberband Man, off of that album.

[music]

Writer Maurice Garland wrote for the project, "Obviously, music about trapping and the word trap itself existed long before this 2003 release, but no one, even in Atlanta, was rooting their entire musical identities in the idea so deep, that they would go so far as to name their album after it, the album Trap Muzik." Can you talk about T.I. a little bit, and how dedicated he was to the genre, and how he advanced it?

Briana: Yes, of course. Up until now, we've been talking about trap music as a sound, which is those 808s, the high hertz, that sort of thing. Back when T.I. released Trap Muzik, it was also very much about the subject matter, which the trap is, of course, a place where people are selling drugs and making their living that way. It spawned this music that was specifically about and based on the experiences of people trying to survive through trapping, so that became central to trap music.

You get rappers like Young Jeezy, Gucci Mane. A whole sub-genre within a sub-genre almost around the mid-2000s that just became an ecosystem within its own rights. People lurched onto the sound that you also heard from T.I. and DJ Toomp at that time, and just extracted the sound away from the subject matter, so now, we have the trap sound. Back then, it was very much the sound and the subject matter paired up in a way that people just weren't accustomed to hearing.

Brian: It went by real fast. In that clip, we played for people who hadn't heard it before, but in that clip, T.I. was shouting out not only fans in New York, in L.A., but fans in the A, meaning Atlanta, Duval County in Florida, Cackalacky. Did you pick up the word, Cackalacky folks, which is slang for North and South Carolina? Now, rappers in L.A., or New York will shout out neighborhoods, but Southern rappers were shouting out entire regions of the country. There's a little bit of that. Let's take a phone call. Max in Flatbush, you're on WNYC. Hi, Max.

Max: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I was just calling in because I remember watching this Migos interview from two years ago back when the Migos flow was everything that everyone was talking about and they had said that they found the Migos flow at the bottom of Africa. They were like, "We found it. We found the Migos flow." That somebody found it at the bottom of Africa, and it was a little bit of a joke, but also, I'm a drum teacher. I'm not of African descent, but I know that I've seen African drummers on the internet and in person remark that a lot of what they were doing was pulling from a lot of West African drumming traditions that are probably centuries old, at least.

For example, I know you have mentioned the triplet flow where they would go one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. Something that you would see would be a lot more playing with that or emphasizing words instead of it being like one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, it would be like one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three.

Emphasizing in groups of 2 or emphasizing in groups of 4 and also switching between the triplets and the duplets like having the triplets and the regular 8th note, 16th note [unintelligible 00:11:05] flow coexisting at the same time, which isn't really something that the previous iterations of the so-called triplet flow had been doing. It is interesting. It's very new, but I think that there's also elements that are very, very old in what they were doing.

Brian: Right, so a rhythm in three juxtaposed with a rhythm in two, little Migos music theory there from Max in Flatbush. Kiana in White Plains, you're on WNYC. Hi Kiana.

Kiana: Hey Brian. First of all, this segment is one of the reasons why this show is my favorite. Just the transition into Takeoff is the best, but out of the Migo, he was always my favorite because his flow was just a bit more unique in the way that he carried himself. He was just calm, real humble, laid back, but would spit amazingly. It's just really sad to see someone who just wasn't about nonsense be tragically taken away before he got any time to shine with his new album coming out with his uncle and stuff. It was really heartbreaking.

Brian: Thank you for your call and that short tribute. Briana, we were talking about how much of a defining characteristic Southern pride is in trap music, and it's something that comes up in so many of the more recent Migos songs that have hit the mainstream. Let's take a listen to a little bit of the song T-Shirt from 2017's breakthrough album, Culture.

Takeoff: I'mma feed my family, ain't no way around it (family)

Ain't gon' never let up, God said show my talent (show it)

Young with the Anna, walkin' with the hammer

Talking country grammar

Straight out North Atlanta (north side)

Brian: Straight out North Atlanta. He means North side of Atlanta, obviously. That's Takeoff referencing country grammar here. The debut studio album by Saint Louis rapper Nelly was one of those references, and that goes back to the year 2000. How much do you think Southern rap is seen as a monolith in popular culture, and what argument would you make against that?

Briana: Yes, I think with how popular trap music has become people have begun to believe that Southern rap is only trap music when that's never been the case. It just so happens to be the South's greatest export in terms of rap contributions, but the South is not at all a monolith. As I mentioned earlier, it's a gigantic region with several, several major cities that make it up. All of those cities, even the smaller ones, have their own cultures and flavors and things that they do.

I think the biggest misconception is that there's not, what we would call, more traditional lyricists in the South that you would associate with the West or the East Coast, and that's simply not true. There's all kinds of music coming out of the South, all kinds of hip hop coming out of the South. It might just require you to dig a little deeper, but for sure, Southern rap could never be a monolith any more than Southern people could be a monolith.

Brian: You write about how Southern rappers, while feeling all that pride, have been maligned by rappers from the East and West Coast, historically. You wrote, "For decades, the East Coast cultural hegemony, which delineates Southern rap as inferior, has been upheld and largely uninterrogated most quantifiably by the media." Why has the genre been seen as inferior even by other rappers?

Briana: I think just because of the way it sounds. Southern people tend to not be super self-serious, but that doesn't mean that they aren't thinking about things or intellectual. It's just a mode of expression. Typically, even in general, people hear Southern accents and assume a level of ignorance. None of that is true, and so the music reflects accordingly. There are obviously an abundance of Southern accents, but even just the approach to Southern rap in terms of the instrumentation. The beats that are selected tend to have a little more swing, a little more bounce. The subject matter can-

Brian: Go ahead. Subject matter. No, I was just going to say something about the beat since you raised that because Migos have popularized dances, so it has something to do with that. The dab gesture that looks like you're sneezing into your elbow with one arm and saluting with the other for people who know that move. That's part of the beat, right?

Briana: Yes, no, absolutely. Dancing has been a huge part of hip-hop since the beginning, but there was certainly an era in the 2000s of Soulja Boy and Crank That and The Poole Palace and Walk It Out and Swag Surfin', The Dougie, and all these things that were just coming out of the South that were-- basically just people trying to have a good time and not trying to take life so seriously. I think after that era, people just decided that all Southern rappers are unserious, all Southern rappers are anti-intellectual, and it's just simply not the case. It was just what really people outside of the South have latched onto from the South.

Brian: You're right about how Soulja Boy, who you just mentioned, revolutionized the way the Southern rap genre could exist on the internet. Way back in 2007, he released the song Crank That with an accompanying dance that went viral on the internet. Let's take a listen to a bit of that song, a few seconds, and maybe jog some people's memories and make them remember their jogs.

Soulja Boy: Haters wanna be me

Soulja boy, I'm the man

They be lookin' at my neck

Sayin' it's the rubberband man (Man)

Watch me do it (Watch me do it)

Dance (Dance)

Let get to it (Let get to it)

Brian: In our last minute, Briana, there are so many more moments that you've helped to organize for The South Got Something To Say that we won't have time to get into, but as we reflect on the life of Takeoff, who again, for listeners who don't know him, don't know what happened this week. He was tragically shot and killed on Tuesday in Houston at the age of 28. What do you think his legacy will be musically in the genre? We have about 30 seconds.

Briana: Takeoff will be remembered as an incredible rapper, stylist. He along with Migos revolutionized the genre. They revolutionized how rap could sound, how people could flow and that's forever. Rap has been changed. Even in the course of his life, hopefully, he saw his legacy and saw how he influenced and inspired entire generations of rap, and he will continue to do that even and especially since he is gone.

Brian: Going out with a little Missy Elliot in the background. We leave it there with Briana Younger, freelance music writer, and editor. In addition to bylines in The New Yorker, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, in 2020, she led a team of music critics and scholars in creating a canon of Southern rap called The South Got Something to Say, a celebration of Southern rap. Thank you so much for coming on this week.

Briana: Thank you for having me.

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.