Atlanta is defined by its rap music. But this flashy and fast-paced world is rarely seen below surface-level as a collection not of superheroes and villains, cartoons and caricatures, but of flawed and inspired individuals all trying to get a piece of what everyone else seems to have.
Both the music and the best writing about it embody the same credo: You either go hard or go home. Joe Coscarelli, a seasoned music journalist at The New York Times, has opted for the former. And the world of music criticism is better for it ... an impressive, albeit at times unwieldy, cultural history. Coscarelli meticulously tracks Atlanta rap music’s meteoric rise to commercial dominance through an ambitious mix of in-depth profiles, interviews and Billboard chart insights. His good reporting is exceeded by a commitment to the kind of social analysis that defies linear narratives. Coscarelli lingers in the complex intersections between music, artists, the streets’ illicit economies, the prison system, racism, poverty and class dynamics in Atlanta, a city that’s branded from the block to the boardroom by an ethos of Black Excellence ... Coscarelli approaches the text with a director’s sensibility. Driven more by character than plot, Rap Capital tells the story of the music primarily through the origin stories of a compelling cast of headliners, music execs, and supporting players ... Coscarelli has a knack for story. Save the few frustrating times he mires his pacing in the minutiae of charts and studios, these carefully crafted close-ups are delivered in page-turning prose. What emerges is a rap game that eschews the purist and largely regional divide between 20th-century East and West Coast rap music and disrupts the romantic mythos of rapper as poet, the diligent street griot with a rhyme book ... Coscarelli understands how to render individual characters in ways that make the reader invested in their quest for success and in their heartbreaks. He is particularly adept at capturing the kind of nuanced detail that layers and complicates his subjects without compromising the strength of his critiques of the culture around them ... Making relatively brief reference to hip-hop’s emergence in the ’70s, Coscarelli writes about Atlanta rap as if it is the messiah child that sprang from no one’s loins ... This is an unfortunate choice, and not because of some purist ethic that demands he kiss the proverbial ring. So much of the contemporary narrative about early hip-hop is rooted in a deferential nostalgia that stresses the importance of race, gender and class to the birth of this musical generation, but misses the ways in which these contexts have shifted in the digital age, transforming everything from access to creative process. Rap Capital corrects this oversight, providing an illuminating snapshot of how the game has changed; but it could have used greater context about hip-hop’s 20th-century history as a cultural and commercial force in order to bring its present landscape into greater relief ... More disappointing is the rather superficial glance given to the women in this corner of the industry, especially given the attentiveness Coscarelli devotes to both race and class, and the significant body of work that’s existed on gender and hip-hop since the ’90s ... Inclusion is not gender analysis ... It’s Coscarelli’s job to continue to ask why, as he has throughout this otherwise fresh, contemporary work.
... not really a history of Atlanta’s emergence as a hub of rap, and doesn’t try to be one. Readers hoping for a beat-by-beat account of how the city became the epicenter of 21st-century hip-hop—tracing the lineage from TLC and OutKast through Ludacris, Young Jeezy, T.I., and Gucci Mane, and culminating with Future and his contemporaries—will have to keep waiting ... The journeys of these thriving Atlanta executives and musicians, like those of successful hip-hop artists who started out on the streets of poor Black neighborhoods in other cities, are compelling ... Still, they are essentially variations on the rags-to-riches yarns that have drawn people to show business for as long as that business has existed. Far more revelatory—and more representative, though rarely written about—are odysseys like Marlo’s and Lil Reek’s ... Given that so much writing about influential pop music is, by definition, a winners’ history, Reek’s experience is especially instructive ... To read Rap Capital as Marlo and Reek veer downward is to have a sense of entering uncharted territory. More than once I felt the effects of the glaring power imbalance between the well-regarded, white New York Times reporter and the ever more desperate Marlo and Lil Reek, for whom a journalist’s attention offers hope but also means exposure of a painful sort; readers may find aspects of this dynamic uncomfortable. Yet Coscarelli brings empathetic detail to his coverage of those who continue to struggle, not just winners; he’s alert to a deeply entrenched pattern of young, frequently poor, overwhelmingly Black musicians being taken advantage of by an industry that has long seen those artists solely as fonts of talent and revenue, only to promptly turn away when one or both appear to run dry ... offers a look at a music world in a time of uncertainty, taking vivid note of new avenues for old forms of exploitation ... From a certain angle, Rap Capital tells a story that’s a lot older than rap, and maybe as old as capital.
Coscarelli beautifully describes the push-and-pull magnetic triangle that engulfs rap, Atlanta, and generational trauma. Coscarelli’s compelling and insightful book resulted from four years of research, during which he conducted more than 100 interviews and was totally immersed into Atlanta’s rap scene. Atlanta is as central a character as the artists in this narrative, but it’s also the glue that holds it all together—the backdrop against which stories of success, demise, historical wounds, pride, and legal proceedings play out. Coscarelli captures the streets of Atlanta, charts the trajectory of the city’s rappers (including established stars like Migos and Lil Baby, and lesser-known artists like Lil Reek and Marlo), and delves into the quest for a way out of the pain-feeding-pain cycle encompassing some of its neighborhoods. Some of these stories have uplifting endings, while others culminate in untimely loss (incarceration; death), restarting the traumatic loop ... Coscarelli’s book is the ideal vehicle to acknowledge Atlanta’s influence on modern-day storytelling through trap and rap music.
