I don't think I will finish this book without an audiobook😞 Really fascinating details and storytelling, but when you don't recognize the characters the book is talking about — and i assume that might happen even for rap fans who aren't as acquainted to the scene as the author — it can be hard to get through.

Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story
Joe Coscarelli
Simon & Schuster 448 pages

Almost a natural resource now - sync to wi-fi and the tap is primed to start flowing - it’s far too easy to take music for granted. That goes double for rap, which stylistically and otherwise has dominated the pop marketplace since most teenagers have been alive. Sanctioned, illicit, overpromoted, or defiantly underground, so much hip-hop exists (while the monocultural outlets that chronicle the genre wink out of existence like dying stars) that it can be conceived not as the product of labor and experience but as an ever-replenishing current of interchangeable ad-libs, adjectives, boasts, and beats burbling up from an ever-expanding pool of playlists. A data-rich cousin once removed from Roni Sarig’s Third Coast: OutKast, Timbaland, and How Hip-Hop Became a Southern Thing from 2007, the remarkable Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story takes pains to remind us that hip-hop is gestated, funded, nurtured, promoted, and made not by algorithms but by actual people with thoughts, dreams, and fears.

Joe Coscarelli, a New York Times culture journalist, paints stark portraits of Atlanta, Georgia and the modern rap ecosystem. As he relates the city’s brutal history, demographic cruelty, hard-won status as America’s “Black Mecca”, cultural royalty and mainstream pop progenitors, and uniquely sprawling geography, the author slowly but surely threads in the origin stories of protagonists whose fates will (mostly) intersect. We meet diminutive striver Lil Reek, doomed to a career that crashes before it can get off the ground; workmanlike MC Marlo, perpetually on the come-up cusp; yin-and-yang Quality Control Music founders Kevin “Coach K” Lee and Pierre “P” Thomas; absurdist onomatopoeic trio Migos and crossover weirdo Lil Yachty; and Lil Baby, a convict and hustler who didn’t leave the streets behind until he was nearing the top of the rap game.

Rap Capital is at its best as the middle approaches, as Coscarelli’s intensive reporting coalesces into isolated moments, scenes so vivid that the writer becomes a videographer. Marlo FaceTimes with his girlfriend and son for hours while struggling, futilely, to mint a new song for a Starz network show. Migos blows off their handlers and a Culture listening party, insolently commandeers a studio, and, in painstakingly piecemeal fashion, crafts a Zaytoven-produced banger they never bother to release: “it was just a moment in time, and there would be plenty more.” A triumphant Lil Baby finally finds his live footing in NYC after the release of Harder Than Ever. A post-label contract Lil Reek praises and cares for the grandmother who helped raise him, while serving as a carpool driver for his younger siblings. Other scenes underscore the performative banality of Instagram-era celebrity: “Every half hour or so, the club’s staff dropped off more banded stacks of dollar bills, which then sat somewhat pathetically at everyone’s feet until someone with authority decided to let them flutter atop the heads of the bottle-service squad in an approximation of a strip club celebration.”

The scourges of death, crushing poverty, misogyny, drug trafficking, and narcotic overindulgence hover over Rap Capital like dark storm clouds: the bleak realities that midwife so much mainstream modern hip-hop. That the genre is in large part a reaction to and result of persisting American slavery and Jim Crow policies, and that a feedback loop remains in play – the initial exploitation and then demonizing of black bodies begat a culture today demonized for profit, mass-cultural vampirism, and political wedge-issuing – infuriates anew, even as a fortunate few ascend to wealth and wide influence.

Raymond Cummings

Very interesting read about the birth of hip hop in Atlanta,Ga. Interesting to read about the movers and shakers, and learn things along the way. If you want a good read and insight on this subject, this is the book for you. Would make a great gift for any true hip hop fan. Thanks to Netgalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for my honest review. Receiving the book in this manner had no bearing on this review.