Since the birth of hip hop in the South Bronx in the late 1970s and its subsequent spread to the West Coast in the 1980s, much of what has been written about hip hop has focused on the music from these two coasts. Consequently, there is a tremendous dearth of literature on the development of hip hop music in the Southern region of the United States. This is unfortunate considering that homegrown Southern hip hop has existed since the mid-1980s, and in the 1990s began an unbroken chain of contribution to mainstream hip hop music and American culture at large. Third Coast , by Roni Sarig, is a long-overdue book that details the cultural influences and eventual commercial success of Southern hip hop music.

Sarig’s work divides the enormous subject of Southern hip hop into three major categories: (1) Regionalism and Early Cross Currents, (2) Synthesis and the New South Sensibility, and (3) What Goes Around. The first section deals with the trickle-down effect of early hip hop music from New York to various points in the South and the rise of various Southern incarnations of hip hop sub-genres, such as Miami bass music and Houston gangsta goth music. The second section deals with music of various southern cities and regions including Atlanta, Virginia Beach, and rural Kentucky, in the midst of a reverse migration of African Americans from the North back to the South. Finally, the last part of Third Coast focuses on contemporary iterations of hip hop music by examining crunk and snap music in Atlanta, bounce music in New Orleans, and chopped and screwed music in Houston.

In the introduction, Sarig grounds his argument that hip hop did not “come” to the South but rather “returned” to the South, by placing hip hop in the African American oral tradition of toasting , which originated among enslaved Blacks in the South. This assertion that the Black oratorical tradition has been practiced from enslavement until the present undergirds Sarig’s secondary point that hip hop music is not something that the North “introduced” to the South, but is rather an emergent art form that Southerners incorporated with pre-existing oratorical practices. Sarig revisits this premise when he describes the allegory and hyperbole that are rife in explicitly graphic descriptions of street life in early hip hop music in Memphis, Tennessee.

Much of hip hop scholarship subtly and overtly attempts to advocate that one geographical area or sub-genre of hip hop is better than another. With Third Coast Sarig seems to avoid that temptation by presenting the artists as they represent themselves in their music and in interviews with Sarig. Thus, it is possible that the reader can come away from Third Coast with a fairly objective impression of Southern hip hop music. With that major problem averted, Sarig sometimes allows his journalistic and music editorial background to overshadow his analysis; thus, Third Coast often becomes bogged down in tangential anecdotes about various rappers’ lives and Sarig’s opinions on obscure songs from out-of-print albums. Perhaps a better treatment of the voluminous albums that Southern hip hop artists have released would have been to include a discography in this edition.

Third Coast is arguably one of the most important contributions to hip hop scholarship because it is one of the first major works to address the development of hip hop music outside of the hegemonic East Coast versus West Coast paradigm. Further, the book was written and released in an ideal moment when the history of hip hop in the South has grown and changed enough that one can have perspective on what the music has and has not accomplished. What’s more, the addition of Third Coast helps to create a more complete history of hip hop, one that both hip hop scholars and fans can appreciate. Finally, through the addition of Third Coast to important hip hop texts, “the South got something to say.”

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[Review length: 649 words • Review posted on August 23, 2007]