Sounding soul (food): The discursive interconnection of sound, food, and place in Southern hip-hop

摘要

This essay will interrogate how hip-hop-a form whose sound is not only connected to but defined by ideas of place-uses food and place as discursive objects to construct notions Southern urban particularity. Reading soul food as both a national cuisine symbolizing Black resilience in the face of institutional racial violence and a local cuisine that can symbolize the particularity of place, I argue that Southern hip-hop melds sound, taste, and place to construct Southern urban identity. I argue that this tension is maintained on a discursive plane in which each representational object-music, place, or food-articulates locally specific identity while resonating within a broader diasporic identifications. Looking specifically at Goodie Mob's Soul Food (Atlanta), Bun B's Instagram series "#TrillMealz" (Houston), and Lil' Wayne's Tha Carter Ⅱ (New Orleans) this essay explores how place, food, and hip-hop function as representational objects of identity that are dependent on one another to articulate the place-specific urban identities of Southern cities.