Country rap, also known as “hick-hop,” has a passionate fanbase on the ground and a
massive online following. Performed primarily by white people in the Southern U.S.,
country rap encapsulates many seeming discrepancies. It offers images and sounds
associated with rural, white working-class identity while also drawing from a sonic
vocabulary derivative of–and associated with–Black urban experience in the U.S.
Country rap crafts a self-contained aesthetic world wherein, according to the logics of
the genre, a white woman twerking in a confederate flag bikini carries with it no
contradictions. Many practitioners of the genre offer no clear genre history; numerous
artists within country rap speak of its aesthetics and stylistic conventions as if the
genre’s provenance was spontaneous, and in a vacuum, like a backwoods big bang.
With a focus on sound and image, our research into the genre explores issues of race,
gender, place, and nation. This group panel considers the (un)fashionable aesthetics of
country rap, in particular the use of mud and the Confederate flag as signifiers of
defiance.

Rebellious Style: Country Rap and Confederate (Un)Fashion
(Alex Blue V and Kyle DeCoste)

One of the most prominent recurring visual signifiers in country rap music videos is the
Confederate flag. As many bearers and wearers of the Confederate flag would note, to
them, it’s about “heritage, not hate.” However, this obscures the very real histories sewn
into the fabric of the symbol, namely the true reason behind the Civil War: the South’s
resistance to ending chattel slavery. Rather, it contorts and refashions it into a hollow
symbol of rebellion. We argue that similar to this ahistorical recontextualization of the
Confederate flag, country rap attempts to vacate hip-hop of its history and attachment to
Black cultural production, instead remixing the music genre itself into a rebel yell.

Mud It Up: The Filthy Aesthetics of Country Rap
(Kyle DeCoste and Alex Blue V)

Out of all of country rap's recurring themes, mud is one of the most prominent strategies
for authenticating artists and making territorial claims on the country. It’s seen covering
trucks, as the central thematic of mudding (the practice of driving vehicles through mud
bogs); covering bodies as a visual signifier of class difference and deviance; and
referenced in lyrics meant to represent place, identity, and class. Mud is so strongly
caked onto the genre that it appears in numerous song and album titles – it conveys
authenticity as a rural counterpoint to rhetorical uses of “the streets” in mainstream hip-
hop. We claim that mud serves the slippery purpose of collapsing categories of race,
genre, and space into a portable, general idea of “countryness” that can be worn at will.