Southern hip hop, also called Southern rap, is a genre of American hip hop that emerged from a late-1980s club-oriented vibe in southern U.S. cities, including New Orleans, Houston, Nashville, Atlanta, Memphis, Charlotte and Miami. 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. [source: wikipedia]
