By Eli Scott
This article was originally published in GPR’s Spring 2017 magazine
I’m a real young n***a from the six throwing ‘bows,” Lil Yachty repeats melodically in D.R.A.M’s Grammy-nominated hit song “Broccoli.”
To most hip-hop fans, Lil Yachty’s reference to the six, or Zone 6, is commonplace, as hip-hop artists Gucci Mane and Future both regularly reference their stomping grounds in East Atlanta. The only problem is that Lil Yachty isn’t from East Atlanta. In fact, Yachty isn’t even from the area Atlanta natives call “inside the perimeter” (ITP), “real Atlanta” inside of Interstate 285 encompassing parts of Fulton and DeKalb counties. He’s from Mableton, Georgia, a small town in suburban Cobb County known for prefabricated neighborhoods and proximity to Six Flags.
Increasingly becoming the epicenter of the hip-hop world, Atlanta emerged on the national stage with legendary rap duo OutKast, and other prominent artists such as Ludacris, Lil Jon, T.I., and Gucci Mane followed. All the major players in the Atlanta hip-hop scene came from ITP Atlanta, with OutKast from East Point , Ludacris from College Park in South Fulton County, Lil Jon and T.I. from Bankhead in Fulton County, and Gucci Mane from East Atlanta in DeKalb County. Due to changing residential patterns and the growing suburbanization of Atlanta’s African-American population, the cultural capital within Atlanta’s hip-hop music scene is increasingly found outside of the Interstate 285 Perimeter and inside the city’s sprawling suburbs.
Within the past year, rap group Migos and eccentric rapper Lil Yachty have taken the world by storm with chart-topping hits and Grammy nominations, and Donald Glover has made significant waves in depicting the suburban African-American experience in his award-winning show Atlanta. It might then be surprising to Atlanta natives and ITP hip-hop legends that Migos are from Lawrenceville, Lil Yachty is from Mableton, and Glover is from Stone Mountain, all “outside the perimeter” (OTP) suburbs located as far as an hour’s drive away from the city’s urban core.
When “Players Ball” on their breakout album Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik emerged as a Billboard Hot Rap Track in 1993, OutKast challenged the existing gatekeepers of hip-hop in New York and Los Angeles. The duo cemented their position as the foremost Southern rap group by winning Best New Rap Group at the 1995 Source Awards. During their acceptance speech, Andre 3000, amid raucous boos from primarily New York emcees, defiantly proclaimed, “The South got something to say, that’s all I got to say.” Since that time, Atlanta has come to dwarf New York and Los Angeles in its influence on hip-hop and rap music, proving that the people liked everything the South was saying.
The Atlanta hip-hop scene has shifted geographically four times in the past 20 years. Within the first wave of Atlanta hip-hop, OutKast and artists like Ludacris represented South Fulton County, the area around which hip-hop revolved in the late 1990s and early 2000s. With the emergence of Lil Jon and T.I. in 2002 with “Get Low” and 2003 with Trap Muzik, the center of Atlanta hip-hop slowly moved from the South Fulton county neighborhoods of East Point and College Park into the downtown Atlanta neighborhood of Bankhead. DeKalb County inherited the center of the Atlanta hip-hop scene when Gucci Mane’s characteristic low-effort braggadocio morphed with the notorious trap style that would consume East Atlanta. The final move of Atlanta’s hip-hop center seems to be outward in all directions toward the increasingly populous and influential suburbs, and these movements of Atlanta’s hip-hop influencers mirror the settlement patterns of the city’s African-American community over the same period.
Nationwide, the movement of African-Americans from urban cores to suburbs began in the 1970s after the 1968 Fair Housing Act prohibited housing discrimination, thereby increasing access to non-urban housing markets. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of African Americans living in suburbs of major cities increased from 37 percent to 51 percent, meaning that more African Americans now live in suburbs than urban areas. Atlanta was at the forefront of this suburbanization, as the suburban African-American population increased from 67 percent in 1990 to 87 percent in 2010. In the last ten years, Atlanta has gained more suburban African Americans than any other metropolitan area in the United States, and its suburban African-American population is currently four times as large as that of Chicago.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, over half of the metro’s African-American population was primarily located in the historically majority-black suburban counties closest to Atlanta’s core, namely South Fulton, DeKalb, and Clayton. These counties, however, have only accounted for one-fourth of the total growth in the African-American population over the past 15 years. Because these three counties house over half of the African Americans in Atlanta, all the major hip-hop artists until the mid-2000s came from these majority-black suburban areas. The slow growth of the African-American population in these historically black counties, combined with the overall African-American population decline in the city of Atlanta, necessitated a large growth in the African-American populations of bordering counties that in 2000 had tiny African-American populations between 0 and 20 percent of their populations.
The surrounding suburbs, all of which possessed negligible African-American populations prior to 2000, accounted for almost 70 percent of the African-American population growth in Atlanta. The two counties with the greatest proportion of the African-American population growth, Cobb County and Gwinnett County, accounted for 35 percent of the total growth between 2000 and 2010. It is no surprise, then, that two of the most notable artists in in Atlanta hip-hop in the past year, Lil Yachty and Migos, are from Cobb and Gwinnett counties, respectively.
As the African-American population moved from the urban core and historically black counties surrounding Atlanta to farther-flung counties such as Cobb and Gwinnett, so too did the location of the city’s hip-hop icons and the content of its cultural capital. In fact, Donald Glover’s hit series Atlanta recently won a Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series. The subject of the show captures the changing culture of Atlanta neatly, as the show chronicles an up-and-coming African-American rapper in an Atlanta suburb. The celebration surrounding Glover’s Atlanta mainly stems from its verisimilitude to the increasingly relatable suburban African-American existence.
Despite the breakout success of suburban rappers Migos and Lil Yachty, the Atlanta hip-hop scene has retained some of its urban roots with the contemporaneous emergence of 21 Savage from Zone 6 in East Atlanta. The foil to suburbanite Lil Yachty, 21 Savage represents an alternative view of Atlanta hip-hop more in line with the rappers of its past. Nevertheless, of the Atlanta counties with populations over 500,000, Gwinnett County has grown at a rate almost double that of Fulton, Cobb, and DeKalb counties in recent years and is expected to be the largest county in the state by 2040. In recent years, exurbs like Forsyth County have grown by a rapid 4 percent annually, and the county is expected to double in the next twenty years. In this way, the suburbanization of the Atlanta hip-hop scene looks to be a long-term trend, and the increasing shifts in the African-American population to the suburbs will fundamentally alter the cultural capital of the city for years to come.