It’s 8:30 p.m. at The Dive Motel, and Brian Brown just got off the stage.
Brown cuts a slight figure, swallowed up by a denim Planet Hollywood jacket that might be about as old as he is. We’re at Vibes, a monthly hip-hop and R&B showcase running throughout the summer at The Dive’s poolside stage. Tonight, a half-dozen singers and rappers will perform, including Raemi, an R&B singer and recent Nashville transplant who just brought Brown up to help close out her set.
As we move from the cabanas to a quieter place near the bar on the opposite side of the motel, Brown is stopped no fewer than seven times by friends and fans. He moves like a politician, gladhanding every step of the way through the narrow passage between the pool and the hip motel rooms nearby.
“I’m playing a punk rock show in May,” Brown says cooly to one person when they ask if he’s going up for a full set. (He’s opening for Soul Glo, a hardcore band from Philly playing May 10 at East Nashville’s Drkmttr.) Inside the Dive, at this party, Brown is a rock star. Outside, he’s one of dozens of young rappers fighting for recognition in a city that largely doesn’t know they’re there.
But Nashville hip-hop doesn’t merely exist. It’s having a renaissance.
Let’s back up for a minute. The first thing to know is that it didn’t take long for hip-hop to find its way south from its birthplace in The Bronx.
Decades ago, cassette dubs of parkside parties deejayed by pioneers like DJ Kool Herc spread through a network of cool kids — transplants from New York to Southern cities, vacationing cousins hip to the scene slinging tapes at family reunions, and record stores with secret stashes of bootlegs and mixtapes.
In Nashville, it was a Spoonie Gee record that fell into the hands of South Nashville teenager Walter D and led to the formation of The Blow Pop Crew — a trio of teenage rappers emulating the sounds and rhymes they heard on tape. Listening to The Blow Pop Crew’s 1987 single “Drop the Bass” is an exercise in rap paleontology, a look into how Southern rap would evolve into the crunchy, slow boil of chopped-and-screwed 808 drawl.
Even in ’87, local rappers were fighting their way out of the long shadow of Nashville’s country music image. On “I Devastate,” the B-side to Desire & The Ville Posse’s Music City shout-out “The Ville,” MC Desire raps: “You hear I’m from Nashville and that’s country music / Well it’s not homeboy, that’s just the beginning / There’s more to it than pickin’ and grinnin’.”
The Blow Pop Crew nearly made it big. The strength of “Drop the Bass” got them on bills with NWA and 2 Live Crew. Record deals were floated by Jive and early hip-hop label Sleeping Bag. Then things fell apart. A member of BPC ended up incarcerated after a manslaughter charge, and the scene went quiet.
In the ’90s, Pistol — a kid from the Preston-Taylor Homes with a rumbling G-funk vibe — caught the attention of Eazy-E and found himself on E’s Ruthless Records. Pistol’s debut Hittin’ Like a Bullet dropped in June 1994. Nine months later, E died, and Pistol went back to the underground.
Starlito, who came up in East Nashville and started rapping during his junior year at Hume-Fogg High School, was snapped up by Cash Money Records in 2005 while still rapping under the name All-Star. He found little support from the label, but has thrived as a local legend since going independent with his Grind Hard label.
Time and time again, local hip-hop has come tantalizingly close to breaking into the mainstream. Young Buck did it in 2004 with his record Straight Outta Cashville, but even a year later, locals were bemoaning the dismal state of the scene in this very paper, pointing to the lack of community as a key reason why local rap was stuck in the mud.
But that was nearly two decades ago. Now, in 2022, a new rap renaissance is unfolding in Music City. Dozens of rappers, constellated into groups and collectives sprawled across the Midstate, are all vying for spots on your heavy-rotation playlists and crossing over into Nashville’s pop and indie-rock scenes. Not only are they building a community, they’re expanding that community into a big tent.
Three of the groups in this ever-expanding hip-hop world — BlackCity, Six One Tribe, and ThirdEye & Co. — represent a small but strong fraction of the blazing-hot talent in Nashville.
You could make a reasonable argument that a free music festival in 2015 held the first glimmer of the new hip-hop renaissance in Nashville.
Freedom Fest was born out of a friendship between Justin Causey and Mychael Carney. Causey, who came to Nashville from Columbus, Ohio, to march in the drumline at TSU and study health sciences, had a blog called Freedom, Love And Bullsh*t (or FLAB) and was a fixture in the North Nashville scene, hosting open mics and spoken-word nights at venues on Jefferson Street.
Carney, meanwhile, was watching his younger brother Sean Smith start to get serious about rapping. Under the name The BlackSon, Smith had already dropped The BlackSon Rising, a ferocious debut that shows a surprising amount of range and depth for a 17-year-old. He and Carney worked out of the back of their aunt’s house in Antioch, cooking up BlackCity and treating it like a business — not just another music project.
“I had an after-party at my apartment,” Causey says of a hang following the festival. “Black came and was just like, ‘Causey, just say yes.’ And I was like, ‘To what?’ And he said, ‘Just say yes.’ And I was like, ‘OK, yes.’ And he said, ‘Be my manager.’ And that’s how that started.”
At that point, in 2015, BlackCity solidified into something that couldn’t help but move forward.
“I moved all my stuff out to Antioch to Black’s crib, where it was just his mom and Myke,” Causey continues. “And I just started it, every day, learning [the business]. Every day, sitting at the kitchen table on the internet, watching YouTube, endless Rap Radar, podcasts, listening to anything, just to figure out artist management and music.”
That entrepreneurial spirit and autodidacticism are key to what makes BlackCity tick — from the way they work to the way they live. These days, Causey, Black and the crew live in a house in Bellshire they’ve dubbed The Compound. Part frat house, part creative oasis, BlackCity is constantly grinding away at new music, new projects, new opportunities.
“It was just an interesting time,” The BlackSon tells the Scene. “When I think back, a lot of it goes back to 2015, us deciding, ‘We’re gonna do this for real.’ All the way up to the level of a festival, and understanding from there, what we were gonna do.”
All of that is starting to make an impact. Last year, Reaux Marquez’s No Roads blew away everyone in local media with an ear to the ground. Marquez’s album is a triumph of place and space. If it were just a showcase of Marquez’s considerable talents as a writer and a rapper, No Roads would be good. But it’s the collaboration and featured artists that make it great. Rappers like Namir Blade and Tim Gent get to shine just as much as Marquez. There’s no ego here, just art.
No Roads, Brian Brown’s 2020 album Journey and BlackSon’s aforementioned The BlackSon Rising all focus on thinking hard about what Nashville is and what it means to be a Black artist in a city that’s rapidly gentrifying. But it’s less about the constant bummer of the city you know turning into the city you don’t know — these are albums about seeking your place in a rapidly changing world, and trying to get on top of it instead of being rolled over.
Walking into the studio control room at EastSide Manor is a little like walking into the stockroom at The Great Escape. Science-fiction paperbacks tower to the ceiling, with an oversized Darth Vader sitting atop a hanging sound-dampening panel. A scramble of mismatched chairs surrounds a coffee table, where a handful of dudes are shooting the sh*t about music and video games.
The Inglewood studio, housed in an ivy-covered, bamboo-grove-obscured mansion near Riverside Village, has played host to a who’s who of Americana talent since 2011 — everyone from Caitlin Rose to Todd Snider to the late, great Justin Townes Earle. It was conceived as a musical playground for East Nashville’s music scene, a sprawling 8,700-square-foot studio and live-performance space that encourages creativity and figuring out songs in the room.
But right now, it’s Six One Tribe headquarters.
If BlackCity most closely resembles the tightly knit collective cool of Southern California rap supergroup Black Hippy, Six One Tribe is like the Wu-Tang Clan with a Southern accent. Nearly 30 rappers, singers and producers claim some affiliation with the Tribe, but the core group is more like six: Gee Slab, Corduroy Clemens, Negro Justice, Riø Tokyo, Weston and Namir Blade.
“You asked me what Nashville hip-hop sounds like,” says Aaron Dethrage, the studio manager at EastSide Manor. “For me, Six One Tribe came about from me creating a record trying to answer that question, encapsulating as much of the diversity in the scene in one place as possible.” Dethrage runs the boards for Tribe sessions, along with doing the legwork for gathering and distributing beats for the crew to write to.
One of those sessions is happening on the day the Scene visits. From 3 p.m. to 3 a.m., the studio will be a revolving door of rappers, singers, artists, dancers and producers. The thing about hip-hop is that it’s a culture — not just MCs and DJs, but many creative minds, all engaged in creating art inspired by and layering onto each others’ works. That culture is in full effect in the studio. While Slab rips a clean 16 bars in the booth, Norf Wall Fest founder Woke3 is sketching on the couch, and Justice is writing a new verse to stand up against what Slab’s laying down.
“It was definitely like a Justice League situation,” Clemens says of Six One Tribe’s formation. The goal of the Tribe is to combine those diverse talents in interesting ways without sacrificing each artist’s individual personality. And there’s a whole hell of a lot of personality in the Tribe.
Take Namir Blade. A producer and rapper, Blade has an off-kilter vibe that can catch you off guard. Like his Mello Music labelmates Open Mike Eagle and Quelle Chris, Blade’s music doesn’t shy away from diving deep into surrealist self-reflection. His breathtakingly weird and fun 2021 record Imaginary Everything, a collaboration with producer L’Orange, keeps you on the defensive, even as you’re nodding your head to the freak-funk beats.
There’s no universe where Blade doesn’t stand out. Tribe is most successful as a collaborative effort when these personalities collide to create something that never would have existed otherwise. You can hear that clearly on “Load,” a song produced by Blade for Gee Slab’s The First Afterthought EP, where Blade’s production floats effortlessly underneath Slab’s Dirty South verses. And it’s all over Negro Justice’s Chosen Family, a record that is literally about the friendships Justice has made, with the Tribe sprawled across the entire record.
“If you’re in it, it’s like being in a forest,” Slab says. “A lot of people are deep in the forest and can’t peep back to see what we’re doing. If you’re in it, you know the culture. It’s about getting people who aren’t from here, that are just going to move here, or the national media, to get the full spectrum. We’re an actual hip-hop city. Stop calling us a country music city.”
“I think we realized there’s power in numbers,” Slab continues. “We can’t do it alone.”
Like the other crews, ThirdEye & Co. started organically, with like-minded rappers forming up to build something bigger.
“I just kind of felt like a collective effort to grow together was what we needed to get ourselves going,” says Chuck Indigo from a seat at The Dive. “So I hit up $hrames and we got it going.” Among others, the crew counts Indigo, $hrames, Demo, Intro, Jordan Xx, Ron Obasi and Jody Joe among its ranks — all rappers with unique perspectives and identities, working toward the same goal.
“We’re determined to be established here, known as artists,” says Jordan Xx. “Rappers that do it, that are really pros. No small-time sh*t. The whole squad is capable of being songwriters, producers, A&R, engineers. We’re just kicking doors.”
That’s the thing that immediately stands out about ThirdEye. They’re not waiting to be discovered; they’re demanding your attention. In November, the crew threw its own showcase at The Dive Motel, going hard for whoever showed up — friends, family, journalists, photographers, people trying to get to their motel rooms.
Even before that, one of the biggest high-water marks for the scene was Indigo packing out Exit/In for a multimedia experience born out of his 2019 album iNDigo Café. That show brought together elements of theater, dance and stagecraft that hadn’t been seen in a local hip-hop show prior. Indigo knows his way around a stage and as a performer. His secret weapon comes to life when the beat drops out and he freestyles with expert precision — a trick that never gets old, no matter how many times you see him.
Performance is really what sets ThirdEye apart. These artists aren’t afraid of being onstage — they thrive there. And that hasn’t always been the case for rappers — hip-hop as a genre isn’t necessarily one that requires performance to be successful. Rappers like Rochester, N.Y.’s RXK Nephew can drop hundreds of tracks in a year and find an audience without being a live act. But it’s harder to build an audience if you aren’t actively getting in front of people.
“We’re gaining a new audience,” says Intro, whose moniker is short for “introvert.” “We don’t want to be performing in front of all of the same people all the time. That’s not going to show us anything. So yeah, if someone puts us on a bill where it’s like, ‘Who are these people?’ I’m probably gonna do it.”
“If you take risks, you’re gonna prosper,” $hrames chimes in. “We gotta take those risks and do different sh*t to get that attention, otherwise we’re just going to be doing the same thing those rappers from 1987 was doing.”
Way back in 2005, the Scene’s then-arts editor Jack Silverman wrote a story called “Cashville Underground” about the promising young talent coming out of Nashville’s hip-hop community. In that story, Silverman noted that the members of this scene — All Star, Quanie Cash, Haystak and Paper, among others — couldn’t be found in local record stores, weren’t booked at local clubs, and weren’t played on local radio. All that raised a question: “Where ... is Nashville’s hip-hop underground?”
Seventeen years later, Nashville’s hip-hop underground is everywhere.
Nashville Public Radio’s music-discovery station WNXP has made an effort to put local rappers on the air since it launched in 2020. Various shows on community radio station WXNA have also made it a point to feature local hip-hop, and MC and show promoter AL-D’s Fringe Radio Show still airs on WRFN. Record Store Day has long been the provenance of white indie-rockers and folkies, but this year, the two free RSD concerts happening in town both featured local rap, with Tim Gent and Reaux Marquez at The Groove, and Ron Obasi and Namir Blade at Vinyl Tap. Artists like Petty and Daisha McBride are headlining rooms like Mercy Lounge and Acme Feed and Seed, while Mike Floss has played Exit/In multiple times. In the summer, Nashville MCs appeared on the main stage at the Deep Tropics music festival, and in the winter, the National Museum of African American Music hosted a dynamite series with local MCs and other Black artists.
At this point, the question isn’t “Where is Nashville’s hip-hop underground?” but rather “When will Nashville’s hip-hop underground break out of Tennessee?”
“Living in L.A., I showed everyone at this table’s music to everyone [I met],” says Intro. “They didn’t know it was from Nashville. They were like, ‘Damn, where they from?’ I was like, ‘Bro, this is Nashville.’ And they were like ‘nawwwww.’ ”
Everyone in local hip-hop is fighting against the image that Nashville presents of itself. The Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp-approved visage of glossy, rhinestone-studded country music superstars doesn’t exactly square with rap music. For some, it means leaving for greener pastures. Kemosabi and Kent Osborne both left for the West Coast in the past couple of years, looking to separate themselves from a city without an easy rap shorthand.
“There hasn’t been a lot of opportunity, historically, in Nashville for hip-hop and rap, so you’d have to leave,” says Gee Slab.
When I ask Intro why he came back to Nashville after trying to find his way in Los Angeles, he gestures broadly at everything around us.
“I felt that connection from thousands of miles away,” he says. “Coming back and writing my name in the concrete before it dries, because that’s what’s happening. A sidewalk is being built every day. So we really gotta stick your hand in it to show we were here before all it happened.”
There’s a lot of truth to that. For a city that doesn’t have its own distinct hip-hop sound — unlike nearby Southern rap meccas like Memphis and Atlanta — Nashville’s scene is developing faster than ever. Much of the city’s groundwork was laid down by decades of standout rappers and institutions like hip-hop dance party The Boom Bap, which celebrates its 14th birthday later this month with support from Tim Gent and A.B. Eastwood.
D’Llisha Davis’ pioneering hip-hop blog 2 L’s on a Cloud and Eric Holt and partners’ Lovenoise booking enterprise have played key roles in making Nashville a destination for touring rappers over the past decade-and-a-half. You could make a strong argument that without them, hip-hop in Nashville would still be fighting to infiltrate local clubs and venues.
The exciting thing about Nashville hip-hop is that it doesn’t have a predefined sound. When asked “what does Nashville hip-hop sound like,” every artist responded with words like “authenticity,” “songwriting” and “musicianship.” The sound isn’t the important part — it’s the quality and thoughtfulness of the artists making that sound happen.
But beyond the quality of the music coming out of the scene, Nashville hip-hop is defined by its sense of place. Nobody we talked to is happy settling for being a “Nashville rapper,” but fingerprints of the city and its community are all over everyone’s work. Whether it’s AyyWillé playing sax across an entire spectrum of locally grown hip-hop or the fact that an incredible density of native Nashvillians can be found at rap shows, local hip-hop is arguably the most uniquely Nashville form of music happening right now.
No one should be surprised that Nashville has a hip-hop scene. The only thing to wonder is why this scene hasn’t broken wide yet. But it isn’t for lack of trying — there’s only so much the scene can do itself.
“We can’t be the ones that free us,” says Intro. “Other people have to see it. Even the showcases that are happening, the hip-hop scene is doing it. We’re putting on our own exposure shows. That is a tool, but … the big stage at Deep Tropics, we need that. Live on the Green, we need that.”
