“Dirty South” began at Martel Homes, the housing projects in southwest Atlanta suburb East Point where Bell stayed with his grandmother until he was ten years old. “I’m about to let you know that we’re up on our game about the politics and drug units, “ Cool Breeze says. So in the days thereafter, Cool Breeze wrote a response track with a taunting hook: “What you really know about the Dirty South?” But people also tend to think that folks from the South are either dumb or backwards, and that early criticism sounded similarly condescending. Before he shifted his focus to music at age 17, the man born Frederick Bell sold drugs during the ’80s crack epidemic, when Georgia’s Red Dog strike force was still active. “This record done went platinum, and these motherfuckers wrote articles about how these dudes are too young to be pimps and players,” Cool Breeze remembers Wade saying.Ĭool Breeze knew that logic was flawed. Rico Wade, Organized Noize’s ideas man, was devastated.

Yet critics refused to give OutKast their due respect. After rap’s center of gravity had volleyed from New York to Los Angeles and back for more than a decade, OutKast’s 1994 debut Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik became a sales breakthrough for Southern hip-hop. In 1995, before rapper Cool Breeze signed to Atlanta production trio Organized Noize’s Interscope imprint, he saw what was at stake.

Ti dime trap sales