Very few, if any, of those sales were reported to the RIAA or SoundScan.Breaking beyond those local customs, ’s and ’s, among others, handily earned RIAA platinum status in 1998, with some going on to do even greater such certifications. Often excluded from airwaves and other means exposure outside of select regions in previous years, Southern rappers had long adapted to their situation by selling records in unconventional ways: neighborhood mom-and-pop shops and out of car trunks.

The toxic narrative that pitted rappers against one another by geography for so long had assuredly contributed to the tragic loss of two of the genre’s most beloved titans.Ī reckoning was inevitable.Almost simultaneously with this grim moment in rap history, New Orleans-based imprints and were proving they could push album units in significant numbers, thanks in no small part to the deals they’d signed with major label groups. The respective murders of and in 19 inadvertently broadened the conversation beyond the east and west. Flare ups outside of Los Angeles and New York like the Miami bass boom that spawned or the Houston rap breakthrough of weren’t granted the necessary oxygen to bring the heat of those cities into the national conversation.Though absurd in Internet-age retrospect - which since revealed the full extent of what actually was happening in these vibrant yet overlooked scenes - the legitimacy of hip-hop cities below the Mason-Dixon line in particular was once in question, a product of media-supported fixation.

While today we celebrate its myriad forms everywhere from Atlanta to Seoul, for much of the time after its unruly birth in The Bronx this music seemed the sacred property of two very specific urban locales. By Gary SuarezThroughout its first two decades, people mistook hip-hop for a coastal phenomenon.

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