Jackson's Hip-Hop Scene Claims Its Own Lineage
A new wave of rappers and producers in the capital is drawing a straight line from the blues to the beats they make today.
The young producers working out of home studios in Jackson do not see themselves as a break from Mississippi's musical past. They see themselves as its continuation. The blues was the sound of hard lives turned into art, they argue, and so is this.
The city's hip-hop scene has grown steadily, built on cheap software, shared equipment, and a network of artists who record for and with one another. The sound leans Southern and unhurried, with a low, humid heaviness that its makers link explicitly to the region.
"People act like this music came from nowhere," one producer said. "It came from here. Same place the blues came from. Same feeling, different machine." That sense of lineage has become a point of pride, and a rebuttal to anyone who treats the state's musical greatness as strictly a matter of history.
The scene faces the usual obstacles: limited local infrastructure, the pull of bigger cities, the difficulty of turning streams into a living. But its participants are unbothered by predictions of where they should be. They are making the music where they are, and insisting, correctly, that it belongs to the same long story.
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