Joe Coscarelli

Reader,

I was prepared to absolutely hate this. A lot of writing about the South is extremely extractive and baldly lazy – a tired metaphor here, exhausting statistic there – and there are more than enough of those in this. This book also focuses on a strip of time when I was HYPER present on the atlanta rap scene - not just aware of it but actually in it. But the prose is relatively tight, and keeps things moving. The author does acknowledge that he's just another white dude doing this all over again (and continues to thank more white dudes in the acknowledgements – can someone tell me why the fuck we need to ask Will Welch, a man who hasn't lived in the south for over 20 years, what he thinks about anything?) which is appreciated but useless. There are no femme rappers that get more than a paragraph or two, and the woman who gets the most airtime is Lil Baby's mother. Definitely a good intro for beginners, good to add to the local miasma of books written by white people who don't live here.… (more)