What you really know about the Dirty South?

The Dirty South is raw – like an open wound it pusses with the inflammatory lyrics of crunk, the black body’s immune response to the violence of (white) history.

Growing up in Washington, DC, I heard that the biggest mistake we ever made was not letting the South secede. Although this was meant as a statement of liberal frustration with white Southern bigots in solidarity with African Americans, it was also part of a cultural representation that reduced black Southerners to merely a group of the oppressed.

Now, after two years of living in the South, my y’alls are mocked back home as part of a lesser vernacular, even as I use the academic discourse of my women’s studies courses to explain why I prefer its gender neutrality over “you guys.”

So for me, the Dirty South is simultaneously a fucked up place I’m glad not to have to claim and a space I badly want to enter. OutKast’s song “Rosa Parks” illustrates this dichotomy perfectly:


Ah ha, hush that fuss
Everybody move to the back of the bus
Do you wanna bump and slump with us
We the type of people make the club get crunk


We all know the nasty history of that moment, the degradation so many African Americans faced as a result of that injustice and the many other daily oppressions of segregation. But, on the other hand, I wanna be in the back of that bus. I mean, it seems like that’s where all the fun is happening, at least in this particular representation.

OutKast and other crunk artists are in many ways firmly rooted in the “Jim-Crow” car of DuBois’ railroad journey – they consciously create in the context of historical and current marginalization. But they are also generating a metamorphosis of that space through the collective energy of a music so powerful that it has left its mark in train stations around the country and across the globe.

In his testimony to Congress during the Imus hearings, David Banner said, “Hip Hop is sick because America is sick.” He also might’ve said, “Crunk is dirty because the South is dirty.”