Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story
by Joe Coscarelli
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"From mansions to trap houses, office buildings to strip clubs, Atlanta is defined by its rap music. But this flashy and fast-paced world is rarely seen below surface-level as a collection not of superheroes and villains, cartoons and caricatures, but of flawed and inspired individuals all trying to get a piece of what everyone else seems to have. In artistic, commercial, and human terms, Atlanta rap represents the most consequential musical ecosystem of this century so far. The lives of the show more artists driving the culture, from megastars like Lil Baby and Migos to lesser-known local strivers like Lil Reek and Marlo, represent the modern American dream but also an American nightmare, as young Black men and women wrestle generational curses, crippled school systems, incarceration, and racism on the way to an improbable destination atop art and commerce. Across Atlanta, rap dreams power countless overlapping economies, but they're also a gamble, one that could make a poor man rich or a poor man poorer, land someone in jail or keep them out of it. Drawing on years of reporting, more than a hundred interviews, dozens of hours in recording studios and on immersive ride-alongs, acclaimed New York Times reporter Joe Coscarelli weaves a cinematic tapestry of this singular American culture as it took over in the last decade, from the big names to the lesser-seen prospects, managers, grunt-workers, mothers, DJs, lawyers and dealers that are equally important to the industry." --Provided by Publisher. show lessTags
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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 show more 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. show less
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 show more 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. show less
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