Southern Hip Hop

Southern hip hop, also known as Southern rap, is a blanket term for a subgenre of American hip hop music that emerged in the Southern United States, including New Orleans, Louisiana; Houston, Texas; Nashville, Tennessee; Atlanta, Georgia; Memphis, Tennessee; Charlotte, North Carolina and Miami, Florida. The music was a reaction to the 1980s flow of hip hop culture from New York City and California, and can be considered a third major American hip hop genre, after East Coast hip hop and West Coast hip hop. Many early Southern rap artists released their music independently or on mixtapes after encountering difficulty securing record-label contracts in the 1990s. Atlanta, Georgia, is a prominent city in the region's hip hop scene.