Stankin' like dem Lincolns in Piedmont Park

Perry Homes to Herndon Homes, to all tha Homes

Adamsville to Pool Creek, shit just don't sleep in tha Dirty South.”

– Goodie Mob, “Dirty South” from the album Soul Food

Twelve years ago, Goodie Mob gave us the phrase “Dirty South”, giving an accurately descriptive name to this region and the hip-hop coming out of it. With the A-T-L leading, almost all of rap began to follow. The sound swept the country in a way that East Coast and West Coast hadn’t. This “Third Coast” was so different—creative without being over the heads of its audience, a modern music for the proletariat—that it bounced the other, older forms to the curb as hip-hop and pop music were becoming one in the same.

But time marches on. Things change. While hip-hop subtly wiggles free from the South, the Dirty-Dirty is beginning to sound like it might drown in itself.

The good part of getting into Macon’s scene was getting better acquainted with the music of established acts like Kadalack Boyz, Dark House and Hard Head Jacob, and finding some MCs on the rise. But it came at a steep cost: listening to an abundance of unoriginal, repetitive beats and dumbed-down, recycled themes spit forth by our city’s one thousand rappers. To say I gave local music a break for a while is an understatement.

Later on, I started checking out friend requests on Myspace, looking up profiles to make sure these were real people with a real reason to be hitting us up. One guy called himself “Doski Wo” and he was dressed like a hippie, which I thought was weird for a rapper. I hit play and soon went flush with shock. I double-checked. Yep, he was from Macon. Obviously, I hadn’t dug deep enough with the first article.

Or, maybe I hadn’t dug the right way. Initially, I’d wanted to get an idea of what the local rap scene was like, and share whatever I learned. Now it’s time to look at this differently. Who in Macon could change things?

In the city’s heyday—back when our music heritage was just the ignored local music present—alchemy was its lifeblood. Little Richard transformed train sounds into the beat of rock n roll. James Brown put rock with gospel and godfathered soul, on the way to building funk while Otis split his heart open to alter the sound forever. Each made the music evolve..

So… back to this thing with the Dirty South drowning in itself, in the club-centric crunk-juice of its own demise. Call it Snap or Chopped and Screwed, it’s all getting to sound the same. It’s all starting to spin its wheels. A change has got to come.

“In the M-A-C-O-N, my home, really ain’t ‘bout it
Get gone ‘head
Me will never earl when I’m eatin cornbread,
Hawgmawgs, collard greens and potatoes
Not every body hate us,
It ain’t really hard to catch VICK
I’m talk’n bout the vapors, they rubbin’, hate is the oven,
We spreadin’ all the luhvin
So put that aside and come and shag with us”
– Doski Wo, “Shagtagulous”

  LISTEN TO SHAGTAGULOUS Here

From Doski Wo’s page, I leapt to 3rd Kuhzin, the project he’s in with Icy Mike, and from there Da Clay, another group Doski’s in. Da Clay is the supergroup of rappers I slept on. And listening to who all they represent—their own work, the different groups—I started to feel like there was a lot more going on in Macon than I’d imagined, and it was good.

(By the way, tt isn’t like 3rd Kuhzin is totally unknown here. When Ludacris came to Macon, The Rock held a contest where the winner would open for Mr. DTP himself. Going last, out of 31 other acts, 3rd Kuhzin won.) 

Back to Da Clay. Scotch (or Prophit) and Breyz do a solo thing. Then you’ve got Fawg Dawg of Dem Southern Boyz, Ron Boogie of S.O.S., and Grant from the Kut Rite Family. It’s like listening to a family reunion with the Dungeon Family and Nappy Roots. Gritty and funky, smart and party-safe. LISTEN TO DA CLAY HERE

What it is, according to Doski Wo, is a better representation of real life. “There’s so much more to street life.” And if you want to talk about slinging dope and stacking papers then Doski says, “You gotta paint the whole picture. I done dirt but bad shit comes along with that good stuff too.”

But there’s definitely pressure to conform to what’s popular, which explains why so much of the mainstream sounds like such shit. The club and the radio demand another hit.

“You’ve got to make something for the clubs,” says Young R, a 19-year-old rapper making waves with “Dyme Pieces”. A Mercer student by day, R laments that he to hold back the songs that are closer to his lyrical ambition. Eventually, they’ll get heard. In the meantime, doing the club stuff gets people to listen. That’s half the battle. “I make music for everyone! No matter if you're rich, poor, black or white, I feel like you can relate to my music.”

Listen to "DYME PIECES" here

An even further cry from the materialistic mores of the mainstream comes from another Mercer student, B.Ware. Sounding more like he’s under Kanye’s influence than Lil Jon’s, Ware doesn’t seem interested in the commercialism at all. He says, “I want to do positive things, like build underprivileged youth male charter schools to help the poor and oppressed. None of this is for me. It’s all for the people.”

If he wasn’t MCing, he’d pursue a doctorate, hoping to “influence the youth through teaching, institution building, activism and service.” That doesn’t mean that he’d be leaving rap alone. “My foundation would still be hip-hop culture. I’d just focus my concerns, knowledge and creativity in other ways to help people cultivate the culture.”

<B Ware Rocking the Apache Cafe in Atlanta

“These ladies just can’t get enough of this country grammar

Soon as I talk they think I’m from Mississippi like Banner

I tells them, ‘Naw, shawty, come back east past Alabama’

They like, ‘Oh you a Georgia boy, I just love Atlanta’

I tells ‘em, ‘Yeah me, too, but I’m from Macon, baby.’

Money I’m makin’, baby

I’m gonna make it, baby.”

–    D. Cater, “New South”

Geography, talent and the need to say something can come together. It can bang at the clubs, represent the streets and still be about more than who’s flossin’ what. D.Cater says, “I make music for people that miss real hip-hop, when music was fun and it had a message.”

Throwing parties, making your friends and family proud—it’s better than having to scrap by, not that Pleasant Hill duo the Hillside Gees are afraid of that. “Our music is what we live for,” says Randall “Bullethead Nasty” Simmons. “It’s an honest way of making a dollar.”

Same for CMD Styles who is, the first article explained, no stranger to hustling hard to get his bills paid. But really, it’s how he pays them that matters to him. “Music and art. Nothing else will do. I work hard at it and I'm pretty good at what I do.”

With each of these guys pushing it in their own way, hard on the grind, absorbing influences and exploring new paths, they could create a Macon sound. At this point in time, if they succeeded, maybe they’d do more than just resurrect our music heritage. They could resurrect the Dirty South’s place of prominence.