It’s a rough life down here, under this premature hunchback
and pair of eardrum-battering headphones. Unlike my romantic and old-fashioned
high-school self, who satiated her sonic appetite with frequent trips to Amoeba
Music — or even (gasp!) by participating
in the occasional law-defying swap — most of my musical discovery now takes
place in the dark, as the moon rolls over, staring into a window-cluttered
laptop screen.

Yet now more than ever, I feel like a part of it all —
grounded to my day by a phenomenon nostalgically known as the mixtape. In fact,
with these fancy new mixtapes in queue, I can even begin to tap a scene that
rages thousands of miles across the country, where a movement in accessibility
is going down that has reshaped my cultural identity and swallowed my hard
drive whole. And I don’t even have to show my white-girl mug on an Atlanta
street corner to cop ’em — just sift through worlds of clutter-free (though
sadly not popup-free) stacks, all stored on a glorious metro-map of Internet stops,
while never once leaving my very own couch dent — and sans dark-alley rapists.

There are other locales with similar mixtape customs, like
the rising UK garage/grime scene and waning Bay Area hyphy cult, but they all
got nothing on the Dirty South (including the Southeast, up to the Carolinas),
whose hip-hop soldiers are unbeatable in output. DJ Chuck T, Charleston
producer with a side-penchant for raunchy neo-soul — his series Sexxxplicit
R&B is currently on its 21st volume — highlights rowdy lesser-knowns on The
New South Rides With Me and competitive bigtimers on the now 44-volume Down
South Slangin’. And then, of course, there’s DJ Drama, basking in the aftermath
of his notorious RIAA arrest (copyright infringement? More like free
publicity), who hosts the South’s entire royal court on his ridiculous mass of
stately, now-classic beats, borrowing from an untraceable amount of
sample-sources with only one thing in common: no consent required.

Drama’s latest mixtape previews his first official studio
album, due in December. Gangsta Grillz 17 makes it hard to believe this much
precious material could be slipping through the cracks, on all the comps we
didn’t hear — though much of it is seized from elsewhere. Even top hip-hop
innovators like André 3000 begin to throw around been-dones like “Foreman
grill” and “study a broad,” their verses more relaxed in this unregulated
creative mecca, free from the looming shadows of nonblogger critique, the
copyright symbol and official label stamp.

That’s what the whole mixtape concept is about: keeping shit
alive, throwing it around a few times before it sticks just right. Everyone
tributes everyone else — and while sometimes this backfires or chases its tail,
it eventually gives way to a natural evolution. Hip-hop, now the most advanced
form of collage to date (unlike mixtape cover-art, a hilarious Photoshop
layerfest of ghetto Word Art and up-tilted chins) is achieving in its Internet
revolution what so many literary and visual movements wish they could.