Blog Entry #4

               Zandria F. Robinson started “Post-Soul Blues,” the second chapter of her book This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South, with a quote from the Memphis Grizzlies player Zach Randolph. Randolph claimed the reason why Memphis loved him so much was because “it’s a blue-collar town; I’m a blue-collar player… ain’t nothin’ been given easy to me, and ain’t nothin’ been given easy to this town.” “Post-Soul Blues” discussed the ways in which the city of Memphis, Tennessee became “the geographical and epistemological center of a post-soul blues” (62). According to Robinson, “aesthetically and culturally, post-soul blues is the musical and bodily lexicon of black southern life in the post-civil rights era, while “politically, post-soul blues is a set of performative narratives utilized to navigate the contemporary contradictions of the South and racial progress” (62). Post-soul blues introduced the tensions between cosmopolitan and country conceptions of regional and racial identity within cotemporary black life throughout the South. Recently, the intersection of urban and rural cultures has characterized most southern cities.

Robinson credited the 2005 album, “901 Area Code,” of the Iron Mic Coalition, for the rise in the production of the post-soul music scene in Memphis. The lyrical introduction to Memphis given by rapper Daralik showed the dichotomy in the South by “articulating its simultaneously urban and cosmopolitan (“gangland feuds and throwaway twenty-twos”) and rural and southern (“fly girls raised on cornbread and butter”) existence” (65). The contemporary hip-hop and soul scenes in Memphis, which are inspired by the surrounding legacy of soul music and civil rights history, reflected the intersection of urban and rural cultures. By addressing both the cosmopolitan and country cultures, Daralik complicated the native black identity within the city of Memphis and the entire South. His lyrics accomplished a distinct black and southern urban identity because the intersection of urban and rural cultures showed “the country cosmopolitanism of Memphians and other southerers in urban contexts working to reconcile a southern, and therefore rural inspired, and urban existence” (65).

The South is a site of both oppression and success for African Americans, and ultimately the racial history of Memphis still affects how African Americans experience the city at the contemporary moment. Post-soul blues is a way for artists to highlight the burdens of history and “through hip-hop, black southerners have fashioned a post-soul blues that blends the country, rural, and folk knowledge passed down through generations with the cosmopolitan critical analyses of the realities of race and class in the city” (91).