Most time we tend to focus on booming music artists with little thought about where they come from. Sure, we keep track of who comes from where, but do we ever stop and think about the city itself?
Before 1994, Atlanta was barely represented at all in Hip Hop, other than by pop-rap duo Kris Kross. The catalysts that exploded the hip hop scene were none other than Big Boi and Andre 3000, together forming the seminal duo Outkast. With their release of 1994’s Southernplayalisticcadilacmuzik, the duo grabbed the ears of everyone throughout the south, and brought a funky, fresh, raw, new sound to Hip Hop. Atlanta Hip Hop continued to be dominated by Outkast up until about 2000, and during that time, the duo released three more landmark albums. They were sure to influence somebody along the way with albums of such a high caliber, and they did, as Ludacris stepped onto the scene in 2000.
When Ludacris exploded in the early 2000s, with the release of his first two albums, the floodgates had been opened – Atlanta was quickly churning out more commercially influential rappers per city than anything other than what happened in New York in the 1990s. By the middle 2000s, artists like Young Jeezy, T.I., Lil’ John, Gucci Mane, and many others were making their names known. T.I. was one of the more commercially successful artists, and was one of the south’s most lyrical MCs. The influence of those rappers gave Atlanta even more clout, and by the end of the 2000s, it was being dubbed “the New York of the south”
Today we see a completely new style of southern hip hop with emerging artists such as Lil’ Baby, Young Thug, Travis Porter, and Rich Homie Quan.