CEE DOG
Well-Known Member
This is a great article to read. Its long, but it takes you back to old school Atlanta before the Olympics and this Hollywood stuff came about.
http://clatl.com/atlanta/why-goodie...ta-rap-album-of-all-time/Content?oid=16430550
The money. The power. The trap. The New South. The War on Drugs. The Red Dogs.
The Dixie flags. The Million Man March. The Atlanta Child Murders. The black mecca.
The 20th anniversary of ‘Soul Food.’ The South Had Something to Say.
by Rodney Carmichael
Three weeks before the release of Goodie Mob's debut album, Robert "T-Mo" Barnett, Willie "Khujo" Knighton, Jr., Cameron "Big Gipp" Gipp, and Thomas DeCarlo "CeeLo" Callaway boarded a bus. With Soul Food mixed, mastered, and submitted to LaFace Records, it was time for the group to take a trip. Joining them for the ride was the entire Dungeon Family. But this was not a typical promotional tour. Far from it, in fact. The destination was Washington, D.C., where the up-and-coming First Family of Southern hip-hop would join a crowd of like-minded black men conservatively estimated to number nearly one million.
The Million Man March climaxed on the afternoon of Oct. 16, 1995 with Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan issuing a call for atonement, reconciliation, and personal responsibility after a decade of decimation in the black community from crack, crime, and the War on Drugs.
Just two months prior, Andre 3000 of OutKast had issued another cultural challenge of sorts at the second annual Source Awards. In the bosom of hip-hop, at the Paramount Theater in New York City's Madison Square Garden, he and Big Boi collected their Best New Artist honors to audible boos from the crowd. With OutKast quite literally cast aside as bicoastal tension brewed between East Coast label Bad Boy and West Coast stronghold Death Row, Andre dropped a prophetic bomb: "I'm tired of folks, youknowhatimsayin, them closed-minded folks. It's like we got a demo tape but don't nobody want to hear it. But it's like this: The South got something to say and that's all I got to say."
When Soul Food hit shelves on Nov. 7, it presented a resounding response to both Farrakhan's plea for spiritual rebirth and Andre's premonition of Southern redemption. The members of Goodie Mob had the audacity to speak in their own Southern dialect about their own Southern reality from their own Southern point of view. The result was an album so hyperlocal in content that those who lived outside of I-285 missed half the context.
Ironic, ain't it, how times have shifted. Now Atlanta is the center of the hip-hop universe. Our biggest musical exports rap in drug-addled drawls so thick even we can't understand them. But before there was Dirty Sprite, there was the Dirty South. In 1995, Atlanta was a city on the make, full of Olympic hopes and Miami dope, scheming politicians and connected businessmen, Red Dogs and Dixie flags. Goodie Mob aired it all out over a narrative of death and reawakening.
The album may not have reached the platinum success of OutKast's debut, but it was more meaningful. Soul Food became the first hip-hop album to canonize "the Dirty South." It trumpeted issues of social justice alongside the trials of the streets. It chastised Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton in one verse, and corrupt former city councilman Douglas "Buddy" Fowlkes and Governor Zell Miller in another. It was spiritual and Southern gothic; an album of mourning, equal parts haunting and healing.
In a genre full of bluster, Soul Food stripped away all pretense to reveal the souls of young black men coming of age in the hood. It took intellect, passion, poetry, madness, and a political awareness that often bordered on paranoia.
"It was our version of gangsta music, with some sense though," says producer Rico Wade, one-third of Organized Noize and Dungeon Family co-founder. "We took a stand with Goodie Mob. We needed to show that we are conscious. And the backdrop of it was dark because it was street. Niggas had come up in some pain."
Plenty of rap has come out of Atlanta over the last two decades — the entire discography of the most popular hip-hop duo of all time included. But no album has reflected and dissected the city of Atlanta with more honesty than Soul Food. It upholds the tradition of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. while simultaneously ripping apart the mountaintop mythology of Atlanta as the proud black mecca. Without the record's soul-searching introspection, OutKast might never have made the leap from post-pubescent players to out-of-this-world ATLiens. And Southern hip-hop might still be questing for the depths of its soul.
Soul Food gets its just due as a classic, but it's also one of the most important social documents of the late-20th century. Equally inspired by personal trauma and political strife, the album made a conscious effort to wake the world up to Southern hip-hop while waking the South up to the dire state of the world.
"I felt like we were more activists than artists," CeeLo told Complex in a 2013 look back at the album. "At that time, we were fighting for the civil rights of Southern hip-hop to be counted."
At once past, present, and prescient, this is the album that went beyond merely putting Atlanta on the map. It grappled with the identity of the city in ways we're still too busy to appreciate.
http://clatl.com/atlanta/why-goodie...ta-rap-album-of-all-time/Content?oid=16430550
The money. The power. The trap. The New South. The War on Drugs. The Red Dogs.
The Dixie flags. The Million Man March. The Atlanta Child Murders. The black mecca.
The 20th anniversary of ‘Soul Food.’ The South Had Something to Say.
by Rodney Carmichael
Three weeks before the release of Goodie Mob's debut album, Robert "T-Mo" Barnett, Willie "Khujo" Knighton, Jr., Cameron "Big Gipp" Gipp, and Thomas DeCarlo "CeeLo" Callaway boarded a bus. With Soul Food mixed, mastered, and submitted to LaFace Records, it was time for the group to take a trip. Joining them for the ride was the entire Dungeon Family. But this was not a typical promotional tour. Far from it, in fact. The destination was Washington, D.C., where the up-and-coming First Family of Southern hip-hop would join a crowd of like-minded black men conservatively estimated to number nearly one million.
The Million Man March climaxed on the afternoon of Oct. 16, 1995 with Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan issuing a call for atonement, reconciliation, and personal responsibility after a decade of decimation in the black community from crack, crime, and the War on Drugs.
Just two months prior, Andre 3000 of OutKast had issued another cultural challenge of sorts at the second annual Source Awards. In the bosom of hip-hop, at the Paramount Theater in New York City's Madison Square Garden, he and Big Boi collected their Best New Artist honors to audible boos from the crowd. With OutKast quite literally cast aside as bicoastal tension brewed between East Coast label Bad Boy and West Coast stronghold Death Row, Andre dropped a prophetic bomb: "I'm tired of folks, youknowhatimsayin, them closed-minded folks. It's like we got a demo tape but don't nobody want to hear it. But it's like this: The South got something to say and that's all I got to say."
When Soul Food hit shelves on Nov. 7, it presented a resounding response to both Farrakhan's plea for spiritual rebirth and Andre's premonition of Southern redemption. The members of Goodie Mob had the audacity to speak in their own Southern dialect about their own Southern reality from their own Southern point of view. The result was an album so hyperlocal in content that those who lived outside of I-285 missed half the context.
Ironic, ain't it, how times have shifted. Now Atlanta is the center of the hip-hop universe. Our biggest musical exports rap in drug-addled drawls so thick even we can't understand them. But before there was Dirty Sprite, there was the Dirty South. In 1995, Atlanta was a city on the make, full of Olympic hopes and Miami dope, scheming politicians and connected businessmen, Red Dogs and Dixie flags. Goodie Mob aired it all out over a narrative of death and reawakening.
The album may not have reached the platinum success of OutKast's debut, but it was more meaningful. Soul Food became the first hip-hop album to canonize "the Dirty South." It trumpeted issues of social justice alongside the trials of the streets. It chastised Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton in one verse, and corrupt former city councilman Douglas "Buddy" Fowlkes and Governor Zell Miller in another. It was spiritual and Southern gothic; an album of mourning, equal parts haunting and healing.
In a genre full of bluster, Soul Food stripped away all pretense to reveal the souls of young black men coming of age in the hood. It took intellect, passion, poetry, madness, and a political awareness that often bordered on paranoia.
"It was our version of gangsta music, with some sense though," says producer Rico Wade, one-third of Organized Noize and Dungeon Family co-founder. "We took a stand with Goodie Mob. We needed to show that we are conscious. And the backdrop of it was dark because it was street. Niggas had come up in some pain."
Plenty of rap has come out of Atlanta over the last two decades — the entire discography of the most popular hip-hop duo of all time included. But no album has reflected and dissected the city of Atlanta with more honesty than Soul Food. It upholds the tradition of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. while simultaneously ripping apart the mountaintop mythology of Atlanta as the proud black mecca. Without the record's soul-searching introspection, OutKast might never have made the leap from post-pubescent players to out-of-this-world ATLiens. And Southern hip-hop might still be questing for the depths of its soul.
Soul Food gets its just due as a classic, but it's also one of the most important social documents of the late-20th century. Equally inspired by personal trauma and political strife, the album made a conscious effort to wake the world up to Southern hip-hop while waking the South up to the dire state of the world.
"I felt like we were more activists than artists," CeeLo told Complex in a 2013 look back at the album. "At that time, we were fighting for the civil rights of Southern hip-hop to be counted."
At once past, present, and prescient, this is the album that went beyond merely putting Atlanta on the map. It grappled with the identity of the city in ways we're still too busy to appreciate.
