![]() Louis rapper was actually being heard at hip-hop's power centers: His self-titled album appeared in The Source's review section alongside Houston's Scarface, Oakland's Del the Funky Homosapien and Inglewood's AMG. The nascent scene existed primarily in call-and-response freestyles on air until 1987, when two teenagers, Dangerous D and DJ Charlie Chan, went to the Vintage Vinyl to cut the first local record, "The Power of Soul." But it wasn't until Sylk Smoov, in 1991, that a St. ![]() Louis DJ Jim Gates played "Rapper's Delight" on radio before any other station in America, and hip-hop hit the Clinton-Peabody housing projects hard. That distinction seemed to fuel its local rap scene, which stood for the city from its earliest days. It's not the people, but the politics," Nelly told Ebony. Louis used it as slang a fitting qualifier for the STL would be "rigid." "St. As a rap moniker, "dirty" would stick for the South, even though people in St. ![]() The city overflows into the valleys of Illinois and lies there, writhing under its grimy cloud." Rappers have not been immune to this gloom. Louis sprawls where mighty rivers meet - as broad as Philadelphia, but three stories high instead of two, with wider streets and dirtier atmosphere, over the dull-brown of wide, calm rivers. Du Bois' description of the place invokes dingy, isolated imagery: "St. Louisans cold, smug, complacent, intolerant, stupid and provincial," the playwright Tennessee Williams once said. Louis, where he was raised, were country towns with country people, and Josephine Baker called it a city of misery and terror. Louis was not a sacred space for Black creatives. Even as he quietly innovated, even as Jay-Z acknowledged him as a peer, he was largely dismissed as a yokel and a trifle.įor much of its history, St. Louis rap - overlooked until commercialized, then rebuked for being mercenary. Nelly didn't know it yet, but he was a microcosm of St. ![]() Louis blues, hinting at its melody but also its melancholy, and even Michael Jackson could hear something special in it. everybody with that slur on their English," the rapper told MTV. "I'm basically representing for everybody Midwest, South. Nelly seemed intent to bring that grammar - of Ebonics, gin, tonic and chronic - to every city he mentioned in the song and more. īack when "pop" was among the most derogatory things you could call a rapper, the king of it called Nelly to share his admiration for "Country Grammar," the buoyant, euphonic hit that moved from "urban" radio to Top 40 in three months during 2000. As it celebrates its 50th birthday, we are mapping hip-hop's story on a local level, with more than a dozen city-specific histories of the music and culture. ![]()
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