Coscarelli is a pop-music reporter for The New York Times, and his book reflects nearly a decade of reporting on the city’s hip-hop scene. Joe Coscarelli’s Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story is an unusual distillation of this moment, one that Atlanta and its music continue to define. To use a word of our moment, Atlanta hip-hop is about vibes. These rappers function as curators of atmosphere more than as ornate wordsmiths, and the entrancing and elliptical musical effects have a way of stirring distinctive, and new, emotional responses. It also largely departs from using samples in favor of deploying immense libraries of keyboard sounds.

Atlanta trap typically feels more oriented toward song than speech, a notable swerve for a genre that was often characterized (and disparaged) in its early decades as spoken music. The music’s essence is incantatory, rather than marked by the quasi-cinematic storytelling that largely defined rap of the 1980s and ’90s. Much of the hip-hop that has emerged from Atlanta in the past decade-plus has charted fresh directions for the genre. It’s used, for example, in music as disparate as the spacey avant-gardism of Young Thug and the earworm Top 40 smashes of Lil Nas X. Auto-Tune itself is a tool that’s been prevalent within hip-hop for about 15 years, key to the experimentations of Lil Wayne (New Orleans) and Kanye West (Chicago), and one that has been voraciously adopted by many Atlanta rappers besides Future. View Moreįuture’s music also showcases the current hallmarks of the southern-born, Atlanta-dominated subgenre of hip-hop known as trap, which now permeate nearly every corner of popular music: rattling digitized hi-hats booming sub-bass keyboards forging lush, woozily surreal harmonic backdrops and melodic lines. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

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