Dirty South Classics tells a classic hip-hop horror story – a rap group creates a monster that eventually destroys its master. It all began in 1995, when the Atlanta-based group Goodie Mob released its debut album Soul Food. The gritty, powerful record included a standout track called “Dirty South.” The song’s stark commentary on the emotional degradation of Southern life struck a deep chord with listeners across the country. For the first time ever, rap fans were getting their fixes below the Mason-Dixon line. Goodie Mob, along with its friends and collaborators Outkast, had put the South on the hip-hop map. The term “Dirty South” began to catch on, eventually becoming an actual rap genre, which is when things started to go sour.
Dirty South Classics contains the major highlights of Goodie Mob’s three albums. It’s a pretty accurate representation of the group at its peak: a bubbling stewpot of raw East Coast rhymes, thumping L.A. beats, thick Miami bass and a bizarre sense of humor. The song selections lean heavily towards Soul Food and its follow-up, 1998’s Still Standing, which is wise, because Goodie Mob’s 1999 swan song World Party suffered from an unnatural focus on club anthems. The Dirty South monster had taken over by then.
It’s been almost a decade since Soul Food, and Goodie Mob has met its demise, crumbling under the iron foot of commercial expectations and the rise of empty, derivative artists like Juvenile, Nelly and Ludacris (who all wear the Dirty South badge like it was their own). When revisiting such classic, stripped-down lyrical assaults like “They Don’t Dance No Mo’,” “Black Ice” and “I.C.U.,” it’s sad to think about what would have happened if this group of mad scientists had survived.
Appeared in the February 26, 2004, issue of Artvoice.