Backspin: Juvenile — 400 Degreez (1998)
The Nolia’s old soul solidified hip-hop’s southern invasion. (84/100)
By 1998, the dust had settled on the voracious East Coast/West Coast feud that both invigorated and contaminated hip-hop’s greatest decade, revealing the battle’s singular winner: the Dirty South.
The West floundered, 1997’s murders of 2Pac and Biggie rendering their trademark gangsta style a little too real for comfort. The East became a coast divided, with backpack revivalists assailing the celebratory excesses of the mainstream’s shiny suited indulgences.
True to the region’s rich tradition, the South won by focusing on the music. By turns innovative and immediate, soulful and ethereal, the music of the late ’90s southern invasion stormed the culture from all sides at an unrelenting clip.
New Orleans’ Cash Money Records didn’t launch the incursion; the opening salvos came from their crosstown contemporaries, Master P’s No Limit Soldiers. Nor did they garner the fawning critical acclaim showered upon the ’98 releases of Atlanta’s Dungeon Family affiliates, Goodie Mob and Outkast. But it was the emergence of the Cash Money Millionaires in the back half of the year that catapulted the South onto airwaves, dance floors, and boomin’ car systems from Atlantic to Pacific, Mexican border to…
