2000: Hick-Hop Wave 1
Eminem’s real coup wasn’t being a white guy who rapped well, it was successfully navigating the world’s most popular black art form to express white rural angst. That’s a nuanced way of saying he rhymed about shit that’s usually in country songs: being a gas-station clerk, visiting the pawn shop, being so hungry he would throw fits, Kim’s cheatin’ heart, and basically being “tired of being white trash, broke, and always poor.” Of course, the record industry doesn’t have a great track record with nuance, and the years following his 1999 breakthrough saw no shortage of shit-kicking cracker-rap cash-ins in hopes that trailers were the new Impalas and poverty was the new bling.
Most prominent, obviously, was Georgia slow-flower Bubba Sparxxx, who somehow tumbled into Timbland’s broken-bhangra phase to tell the world he calls his girlfriends “Betties” and his shits “grumpies.” “I hate country music,” he told SPIN in 2001, “but I really am a country dude.” It was apparent in lines like, “Bubba like chicken gizzards, fried in Southern pride / Man go on and drink that beer, but you know I’mma funnel mine,” even if Timbaland was intent on sending Bubba’s Tractor puttering through space. Beating Bubba to the racks — and maybe the first white rapper to get the post-Em push — was Lebanon, Tennessee heavyweight Haystak, who rapped with a similarly lazy back-porch drawl, but preferred beats more of the trunk-caving, Memphis-bred Suave House variety. His 2000 album, Car Fulla White Boys, was led by a title track that’s basically Bizzare Ride II The Waffle House, but songs like “The Bottom” and “Dollar” dug deep into the struggle of this self-proclaimed “poor white trash from the wrong side of the tracks.”
Less severe was Southern Discomfort, the 2000 Epic debut from Georgia’s Rehab, a half-rapped/half-sung country-rock two-man Bloodhound Gangbang. Like Sublime if they were into Merle Haggard instead of Bob Marley, they made feel-good, feel-bad derelict rock where they name-checked drugs as often as Too $hort mentions women’s names — and actually scored a legit Modern Rock hit with “It Don’t Matter,” a depression anthem that somehow mentions both huffing glue and Othello. The label dropped the band years ago, but when their “Sittin’ at a Bar” (“She stole my heart in the trailer park / So I jacked the keys to her fuckin’ car”) found a new life in jukeboxes many years later — the label reissued the record once it became apparent that this misstep was just ahead of its time. The same will not be said for Houston’s Po’ White Trash and the Trailer Park Symphony, whose 2001 album Po’ Like Dis was pure poverty porn — complete with Pen and Pixel album cover — produced in part by Organized Noize and Lil Jon. In a voice that’s a dead-ringer for the dude from Mindless Self Indulgence, PWT offers “honky malt liquor” in addition to grass, moonpies, RC Colas, and moonshine. Obviously it takes a little more savvy to be the Rap Game Mojo Nixon, and it would take another decade for the formula to properly coalesce around Colt Ford’s mud-caked boots. C.W.
2000: Tow Down ft. H.A.W.K. and Big Pokey – “Country Rap Tune”
“I’m into everything from Run-D.M.C. to Led Zeppelin to George Strait,” Houston white boy Tow Down boasted to Billboard in 2001… and it shows. On this track from his 2000 album By Prescription Only, CMT-ready, shiny-boots country music — pedal steel, plucked acoustic guitars, and a twangy melodic hook — gets mixed with UGK-indebted grit, as Tow Down teams with two members of DJ Screw’s Screwed Up Click, Houston hard-spitters H.A.W.K. and Big Pokey. Sure, there’s some nutty novelty here (which the video certainly doesn’t shy away from), but “Country Rap Tunes” is an organic blurring of borders from a guy who comfortably mixes Americana images with Screwston signifiers: “Chrome wagon wheels with candy paint / From the tumblin’ weed, we been blowin’ dank.” Later, the genre name “country rap” would be affixed to songs by fellow Southerners Big K.R.I.T. and G-Side: melodic, slow-rollin’ beats full of soul samples, hard funk chops, and the church-raised instrumentation of UGK producer Pimp C. But in 2000, Tow Down was making the phrase wildly literal. B.S.
2001: Toby Keith – “I Wanna Talk About Me”/”Getcha Some”
Before 2002, when he first-responded to 9-11 with his belligerent “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (the Angry American),” only country fans cared who Toby Keith was. But by that time he’d already scored eight chart-topping country singles, and by the late ’90s, he was defining a certain burly, amiable brand of domesticity. Didn’t hurt that no other male in Nashville could match his singing voice — at times hinting at R&B, and in two songs hinting at rap without making a fuss about it. Which is to say, they’re both talked not sung, sweet and corny, rhymed but relaxed. “Getcha Some” concerns getting a girl, then money, then babies (“You know…curtain climbers, rugrats, tricycle motors” — very ’90s suburban family sitcom). In “I Wanna Talk About Me,” Keith’s a husband trying to get a word in edgewise when his wife won’t stop blabbing about her “Nana up in Muncie, Indiana” and “your medical chart and when…you…start.” (Maybe the most menstrual moment in country history.) Some of the song’s more stuttering sections, chorus included, are almost cringe-worthily cutesy, but Keith pulls them off. And a decade later, in 2011’s “Red Solo Cup,” he was still rapping about decomposables, forecloseables, receptacles, and testicles. C.E.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=HxUuDPNbkJk%3Flist%3DPLCA2C7F672FC9BC43
2001: Wyclef Jean – “Kenny Rogers – Pharoahe Monch Dub Plate”
Clef is a huge Kenny Rogers fan: He produced the Rogers-interpolating “Ghetto Supastar,” discussed collaborating with Rogers on record in 2010, and eventually became pals with “The Coward of the County.” His most shining accomplishment, though, was probably getting the bearded cornball to actually rap on this track, which sampled Rogers’ biggest hit “The Gambler.” “Yo, this is Kenny Rogers chillin’ on the country side” — did those words actually come out of his mouth? Whatever, Kenny’s big in the Caribbean. “[Wyclef is] a very big guy in Haiti — that’s where he’s from — and I have a really good following down there,” Rogers told AOL country site The Boot. While we’re still waiting for that tour to happen, we can at least watch ABC’s excellent soap-opera series Nashville, where Clef’s experience with Rogers no doubt schooled him for his role as a nefarious country producer. J.E.S.
2002: Devin the Dude – “R&B (Reefer and Beer)”
In which Devin the Dude assumes his redneck alter ego to show that the greatest uniting cultural forces are weed and a six-pack. Scarily convincing as a white man from Arkansas (or the farther-flung parts of Houston), he uses his extreme drawl to sing the chorus and shout out Steve Miller, another force for unity (all those song samples!). “We can ride through the ghettos and trailer parks!” sings Devin the Redneck. So, we’re all the same? Well, except for the n-word breakdown at the end in which Devin’s redneck persona attempts to use the offending term in a friendly manner, but pronounces it with the “-er” intact. It’s a way more nuanced racial commentary than your boy LL could muster for his Brad Paisley jam. J.E.S.
2002: Eminem – “Square Dance”
Before settling in Detroit as a teenager, Eminem spent his life bouncing around America’s heartland, in the southern and western parts of Missouri. If he picked up any country as a kid he didn’t really show it — save maybe the “Buffalo Gals” nod in “Without Me” — until 2002’s “Square Dance,” a track off The Eminem Show in which Em affects a bug-eyed, cartoonish Hee Haw voice for the chorus while banjos pluck in the distance. Despite the goofy veneer, the song is actually a foreboding antiwar treatise (though a lazy one — he rhymes “Bush” with “push” twice) and a brutal diss of Canibus, with Em flipping the concept of a square dance into something far more sinister. JORDAN SARGENT
2002: Nappy Roots – “Po’ Folks”
In the early 2000s, before Lil Jon permanently made the club the center of the Southern rap universe, there was plenty of livestock and bales of hay on Rap City coming from videos shot south of the Mason-Dixon. Some artists, like Field Mob, flirted with that imagery before opting for a more urban, contemporary look, but Bowling Green, Kentucky’s Nappy Roots have always embraced their rural roots, most notably on their biggest hit, “Po’ Folks.” Produced by the TrackBoyz, who would soon become better known for thundering club tracks by Nelly and J-Kwon, “Po’ Folks” is melodic and bittersweet, full of pulsating truck-bed acoustic guitars, and a hook from future R&B star Anthony Hamilton. A.S.
2003: Britney Spears ft. Ying Yang Twinz – “(I Got That) Boom Boom”
What makes this song rap, obviously, is the hooting and hollering and “hanh!”-ing (sounds like somebody blowing his nose through a bassoon) and the “she naked, she soakin’ wet” observations of Atlanta electro-crunk goofballs the Ying Yang Twins, recording here at the height of their powers: 2003 was also the year they put out Me & My Brother, easily their best album and one of the most irresistibly ridiculous rap collections of the decade. What makes “Boom Boom” country are the three brief banjo breaks, credited to one Roy Gartrel, initially dedicated by Britney to “all the Southern boys,” and occurring at approximately 0:50, 1:50, and 3:50, timewise. Britney comes from southern Mississippi herself; in another time, she could’ve been a country diva. C.E.
2003: Bubba Sparxxx – Deliverance
“What you know about balin’ hay in that South Georgia heat?” Raised on the outskirts of a small town west of Atlanta, at a time when rap was so centralized that even Hempstead, New York felt like the middle of nowhere, Warren “Bubba Sparxxx” Mathis made for an unlikely hero. Two years after his stuttering Timbaland-produced “Ugly” set off clubs in towns of all population densities, Sparxxx returned with a sophomore album, Deliverance, which was more ambitious, less commercial, and far less flashy than having Missy ride a tractor on MTV — in the wake of the O Brother soundtrack, one bluegrass hook was sampled from the Yonder Mountain String Band and another from Alison Krauss & Union Station. While Timbaland crooned about moonshine and fishing poles, Sparxxx repped the “New South” by rapping about heartbreak and singing the blues. “I wanted people to understand that a lot of the same things go on in rural areas and urban areas in every walk of life,” he said of the album. “It’s just a different type of place, but the same struggle is going on everywhere.” N.M.
2003: Buck 65 – Talkin’ Honky Blues
Buck 65, the white rapper from rural Nova Scotia who rose to prominence alongside avant-backpacker collective Anticon, got in touch with his country side on the 2003 album Talkin’ Honky Blues, which was recorded after some research into the southern tradition of talking blues, an early precedent for hip-hop. In his gruff, Waits-ian delivery, the Buckster can be found documenting the minutiae of the North American road hog — hotel notepads, Johnny Cash in the tape deck, dead flies in the light fixture — when he’s not invoking a rustic “nostalgia” for “beat-up contraptions that smoke when they heat up” or documenting the proper way to shine a shoe. His unique use of dusty acoustic strums (“Tired Out”), sprightly banjos (“Wicked and Weird”), mournful pedal steel (“Riverbed 1”), and shockingly tasteful jaw harp (“Exes”) helped catapult the album to a Juno Award — not in the Hip-Hop category, but for Alternative Album of the Year, and helped make Buck a favorite musical choice on Canadian TV’s redneck comedy hit Trailer Park Boys. A.S.
2003: David Banner – “Cadillacs on 22’s”
After “Like a Pimp” made David Banner one of the hottest new rappers in the summer of 2003, the Mississippi MC/producer decided to repent with the follow-up single “Cadillacs on 22’s,” a letter to his maker that opens, “God, I know that we pimp / God, I know that we wrong.” In the video, he raps those lines while attending a little girl’s funeral at a small country church, accompanied by an acoustic guitar player who strums the folksy loop, which sounds even countrier when chopped up over Banner’s crunk drums. The guitar actually comes from the downhome-disco title track of the Jacksons’ 1978 album Destiny (which opines, “I’ve tasted city life and it’s not for me”). The lyrics reference two victims of hate crimes, Andre Jones and Raynard Johnson, and in the video Banner walks by two nooses hanging from a tree and also wears a shirt bearing the name of Emmett Till, informing the hip-hop generation about the Civil Rights martyr a decade before Lil Wayne used him as fodder for a horrendous punch line. All in all, it’s country rap at its most blazingly plainspoken. A.S.
2004: Big & Rich ft. Cowboy Troy – “Rollin’ (The Ballad of Big & Rich)”
Almost a decade on, with rapping so commonplace on country records that even Kenny Chesney tries it now, it’s hard to remember just how mind-boggling it felt to be side-swiped by this hard-swinging, hard-rocking track over a car radio in early 2004 – especially the minute-long rap from Cowboy Troy, a six-foot African-American whose perfectly energetic, if stylistically dated, part-Spanish cameo lassos grocery items from barbecue brisket to potato salad to crunk and trance. The song begins like the Hombres’ 1967 proto-rap garage-rock hit “Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out),” with a downhome preacher exhorting about “country music without prejudice”; B&R make a case for country bands playing rock just like Funkadelic did for funk bands in 1978; by the end, hamster voices are letting in some electro. In other songs, Big & Rich rapped for themselves, if not as overtly. “This town ain’t never gonna be the same,” Big Kenny promised in the wonderful “Save A Horse (Ride A Cowboy).” And it wasn’t. C.E.
2004: Gretchen Wilson – “Chariot”
Gretchen Wilson’s 2004 debut Here for the Party went quintuple platinum and produced four Top 10 country hits, stats she’s never come close to matching since. By now, she might be best remembered as a transitional figure readying Nashville for subsequent rootin’-tootin redneck women of Miranda Lambert’s stripe. She deserves better, and the way her rhythm channels Teena Marie during this biblical track’s 23-second rap interlude is one good reason. Not many female country artists have rapped since — Laura Bell Bundy in “Boyfriend?” in 2010; that’s about it. In most of “Chariot,” Wilson is in Janis Joplin mode, wailing hard blues over funk guitar and rent-party piano, and getting right apocalyptic about it: “When it’s all over but the shoutin’ / When God the father’s done his final accounting / And I find out that I made the cut / I’m gonna get me a chariot.” Once through the gates, she’s gonna hunt down “my great great Grandaddy, that peace pipe-smokin’ Cherokee.” She confesses transgressions that she hope won’t damn her; says Mama will kill her if she learns the choir kicked her out; then slides in and out of her surreal rap dream about Ezekiel and his golden Cadillac — swings down, stops, and lets us ride. C.E.
2004: Nelly ft. Tim McGraw – “Over and Over”
By 2004, Nelly was a pop titan: three No. 1 hits, three more songs gracing the Top 10, and an ‘N Sync collabo that cemented him as the Bubblegum King of the Midwest. So, he began to take more risks — teaming with the Lincoln University Choir; sampling Spandau Ballet; releasing two full albums, Use Your Illusion-style, on the same day — his third and fourth full lengths Sweat and Suit. Though little was bolder than a duet with Tim McGraw, a combo that on paper looks like the “Accidental Racist” blueprint scrawled in calligraphy on a barn wall. But Nelly was nothing if not a rapper with a devotion to melodicism — smashes like “Ride Wit’ Me” and “Hot in Herre” are the work of a true songwriter — and he was the product of a heartland upbringing with no shortage of country-music listening in his past. So, it’s no shock that “Over and Over” is simply a tender, brokenhearted ballad that deploys McGraw for some backing vocals and a yearning bridge. It appealed to Nelly’s fanbase — much of which was in states with strong country-music followings, and wasn’t too hip-hop for McGraw. Plus, the two had chemistry, meeting at a basketball game and Nelly reportedly telling McGraw’s manager afterwards that he liked the singer because, “He’s a badass, he’s got game, and he’s got a fine bitch.” Faith Hill, we hope, was flattered? J.S.
2005: Trace Adkins – “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk”
Trace Adkins’ baritone is capable of real gravity, and he is not an especially frivolous artist: His single preceding this one was a morose homage to war dead buried in Arlington Cemetery. So when he does lower himself to silliness, one wonders whether his heart’s in it. Also, for a song celebrating butts via backdated African-American slang, this is not even one of his most butt-rockin’ numbers. But none of that kept it off boot-scoot dance-floors, obviously, or kept toddlers with questionably competent parents from reciting all the words while watching the video on YouTube in their car seats. The song was partly written by Jamey Johnson and Randy Houser (both so serious they make Adkins seem like Cledus T. Judd in comparison), and it was hardly the first country hit about female hindquarters (Mel McDaniels’ “Baby Got Her Blue Jeans On” went No. 1 country in 1985), but between its stoopid riff and stoopider words about goin’ on like Donkey Kong and slappin’ Grandma, plus cheeky left-right-left commands, it gets by. The “video mix” actually speeds up the tempo, adds turntable scratching and incidental technocratic percussion doo-dads, turns screwy and choppy, then finishes going almost full-on Saturday Night Fever. Whatever works, y’all. C.E.
2008: The Snoop Dogg/Willie Nelson partnership
Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson are like two peas in a very green, very sticky pod. “You know, me and Snoop smoke a lot,” Nelson told CNN, surprising no one. “I was in Amsterdam one time and Snoop called me and wanted me to sing on his record. And I said, ‘OK.’ He said, ‘Where are you?’ And I said, ‘I’m in Amsterdam.’ So he caught the next plane and came over. And we recorded a song together.” And on 4/20 2008 in Amsterdam, the pair bonded after reaching for a piece of that traditional southern staple, KFC. “We grab the piece [at the same time] and I’m just like, you know that’s Willie motherfuckin’ Nelson. So I let him have it and took the next one,” Snoop said at SXSW in 2012. “I just had my hand in the same box of chicken as Willie motherfuckin’ Nelson!” They made their friendship official when the Lonesome Stranger saddled up for Cowboy Snoop’s “My Medicine,” a brushes-heavy, midnight rambler that featured a beat by Everlast and a video shot at the Grand Ole Opry. Four years later, Willie also participated in Snoop’s critically maligned album Doggumentary, singing on “Superman,” a beatless moment of reflection about how all that hard-partying might be doing a number on their bodies. And finally (for now), Snoop returned the favor, appearing on Nelson’s “Roll Me Up” (alongside Jamey Johnson and Kris Kristofferson), crooning in his typically laidback fashion. Says Snoop, after meeting Nelson, “I was getting heavy into it and finding country music is a form of hip-hop music. It’s the same thing. We’re the same people. Don’t let the rhythm fool you. It’s the same game.” This can only end in an animated TV show. C.W.
2008: Brad Paisley ft. Snoop Dogg – “Kentucky Jelly”
Before Snoop Lion, there was Snoop Ryman. The year prior to traveling to Nashville to shoot the video for his Willie Nelson-featuring, Opry-referencing “My Medicine,” Snoop earned himself the dubious distinction of being the first rapper to appear on a Brad Paisley album. His contribution was limited — he simply spoke the words “Goodness gracious, Kentucky Jelly!” as an introduction to the singer-guitarist’s well-lubricated instrumental jam — but after seeing what happened when LL Cool J tried to extend himself further, perhaps we can agree that it was better off this way. N.M.
2009: Taylor Swift: Hip-Hop Junkie
As a novelty YouTube where an out-of place performer raps about their white and nerdy-ness, Taylor Swift and T-Pain’s collaborative “Thug Story” hardly broke new ground. Still, her engagement with rap music isn’t nearly so ironic (“I’m so gangster you can find me baking cookies at night”), as the clip would suggest. In 2007, she was opening shows with a cover of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” and in 2011, Taylor’s ringing endorsement of Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass” — expertly rapping a few rapidfire lines on a radio show — contributed to making it the song of the summer. Meanwhile, her “Speak Now” tour featured surprise performances not only from Alan Jackson and Tim McGraw, but T.I., Nelly, Usher, and Flo Rida. The secret? Those collabos and cameos are a red herring: T-Swizzle has been hip-hop since day one, or at least since 2007’s “Our Song,” when the then-16-year-old saw the world as an instrument and brought boom-bap-inflected rhythm to the top of the country charts. N.M.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6mFFBFYQYSs
