Memphis rap is my only truly seasonal musical interest. There are the obvious Halloween tie-ins, but it’s more than that - the music is bleak, cold, and nihilistic, balancing the difficulty of a dire situation with the certainty that it will only get worse. It’s music for when you first notice the days getting shorter, for when winter is imminent and suddenly it’s a little hard to remember summer. It’s no coincidence that the city’s musical history, well-established long before rap, is rooted in the blues. While remarkably exclusive to Memphis during the scene’s heyday (approximately 1992-1998), the sound has lived on through entire country’s rap scene, proving as influential as anything but early 2000’s Atlanta in shaping modern production and flows.

I don’t know nearly enough to really claim Memphis, but I used to know even less. In late 2015, fresh off my second annual head-first dive into the genre, I took a spur-of-the-moment trip to the city with a couple friends (shouts out Sam and Jimmy). With no specific agenda, we wandered around for a long weekend, trying to get a sense of the bizarre horrorscape laid out by the city's rap legacy.

What we found was something entirely different. Rocked by white flight throughout the 1970’s and sucker-punched immediately thereafter by an over-reliance on manufacturing jobs, from the outside Memphis fits the profile of late-20th century American industrial decline to a T. Among those that stayed, however, lives the strongest sense of community that I’ve ever seen (this itself is a characteristic of the country's post-industrial cities; just try talking sweet about Detroit to anyone that lives there). We went to a Grizzlies game that was liver than most college basketball, and Beale Street (the city’s open-container zone, my favorite feature of southern cities of a certain size) was a giant outdoor party even in the middle of December. Just outside of the alcoholic slushie bar (always the high point of the aforementioned streets) was a massive electric slide turned hitting of the Quan. There wasn’t a word to be heard against the city; everyone there had been there forever, and things are better now than they were then.

South Memphis
Memphis, much like Phoenix or Detroit, is actually several distinct cities tied together by a single geographic boundary. For our purposes, South Memphis might as well be the city center. From the music alone, you can get a sense of the place’s geography - Memphis rap is defined by neighborhood cliques, and I was well aware of places like Orange Mound and Castalia Heights well before setting foot in the city. It’s also where Young Dolph is from, if you haven’t heard. A few weeks ago, I spent almost the entirety of a 2 Chainz show, which I was supposed to be covering, in the green room/dungeon of Denver’s Ogden Theatre with Young Dolph, his entourage, and five or so seriously sketchy white dudes with dreads (a Denver specialty). Dolph had a politician’s manner - he circled the room shaking hands and making small talk, ensuring that everybody had their party favor - a gallon bag of weed - that I must have missed at the door (knowing better than to partake, I was nevertheless disoriented well into the next day from contact alone), and offering up the massive spread of food from the nearby Bourbon Grill (Denver’s only Delta restaurant), which Dolph was immensely proud of having found. Ten minutes in, it was neither obvious nor relevant whether Dolph knew any of these people, if they knew him, or for how long they had been in this room or riding along on the tour - except, of course, for his remarkably fly grandfather, who said he still comes to every show to get myself into trouble and keep Adolph out of it.

South Memphis
North Memphis is the home of Juicy J (and Yo Gotti, and Project Pat, and Kingpin Skinny Pimp, and...), including neighborhoods (and their associated cliques) like Ridgecrest, Frayser, and Binghampton. The name fits into hooks even better than South Memphis, a fact not lost on the area’s songwriters (1, 2, 3). You may notice common genetic material between these songs - one of the treats of the Memphis scene is the tendency to remake a hot line as a hook for a new track. Time is never a flatter circle than when you're listening through the Three 6 discography; snippets of their earliest tracks are liable to pop back up just as fresh a decade later.

While the sounds of the North and South were effectively identical, the de facto dividing line of I-40 was scarcely crossed until Juicy J and DJ Paul, kings of their respective scenes, linked up in 1994 to found the Triple 6 Mafia. Unfortunately, crosstown relations are no longer what they once were; not only has Juicy J been absent from recent Three Six reunions (as Da Mafia 6ix), Yo Gotti and Young Dolph have spent years engaged in a beef that’s at once a rap voyeur’s delight and a constant threat to cross over into very real violence.

East Memphis
There is nothing in East Memphis (ok, ok, there’s a nice breakfast spot). It’s a sort of catch-all for gentrifiers overflowing from Nashville, a grid of modest homes and oddly-shaped buildings converted into coffee shops and record stores. It’s a lot like the eastern part of Portland, i.e. where people move to pretend that there isn’t a downtown just across the river, and I’m sure it would have been very nice if we hadn’t just spent days reveling in the richness of the city proper.

West Memphis
Less sprawling than the rest, West Memphis is essentially just the downtown area - skyscrapers, the basketball arena (the FedEx Forum), and a couple of streets for partying. It’s all that most visitors see of Memphis, I suspect, and explains the reputation a bit: on our first night in town, a Saturday, the city center was utterly deserted - eerily windy and far less well-lit than one would expect for a city of hundreds of thousands. Right across from the National Civil Rights Museum (built into the hotel at which Dr. King was shot) we found a bar, previously a brothel, and played pool until a bunch of good old boys in suits and Santa hats came in and took the place over.

West Memphis is also where we met Al Kapone for an interview. It was maybe my favorite interview I’ve done, not least because it was conducted over dinner at Charlie Vergos’ Rendezvous, a legendary rib joint apparently staffed exclusively by Al’s close friends (it was on the itinerary in part because of a Wall Street Journal article, sadly now offline, that correctly identified Rendezvous and Jinx’s, late of Charlottesville, as the nation’s best ribs and pulled pork, respectively). For over an hour, Al welcomed any and all questions, re-telling a one-man oral history of rap in the south - selling tapes out of the school cafeteria, touring the chitlin’ circuit (the network of southern regional capitals that served as a proving ground for prospective national acts), and reflecting on the various ways that he and his contemporaries went once the Memphis era ended. Shortly before we parted, I realized that I’d forgotten to turn on my recorder.

I don't want to talk about this anymore.

The Hip Replacement Guide to Memphis Rap
01. G-Style, Gangsta
02. Koopsta Knicca, Crucifix (ft. DJ Paul)
03. Lowdown Da Sinista, Going Thru A Thing
04. The Legend Lady J, Find A Hoe
05. Lil Sko, I Want My Tone
06. Tommy Wright III, Thuggish Ruggish Bustaz
07. Lil Glock & S.O.G., Mask & Da Glock
08. Lil Ramsey, Bitch It's A Hold Up (ft. Tommy Wright III)
09. Blackout, Dim Da Lights
10. Lil Yo, Wicked Hearted
11. La Chat, Don't Sang It
12. 196 Clique, Fuck A Bitch Part III

I could seriously go on for hours about this city and its music, to the point that this piece, already unwieldy, feels woefully inadequate. For a little more, see my interview with DJ Paul here (sorry it's illegible), and for a lot more call me up sometime.