Vibe: The Sound and Feeling of Black Life in the American South

In this impassioned debut, Miles, an assistant professor of sociology at Tulane, examines Blackness in the American South through the prism of “trap music,” a “southern hip-hop tradition... popularized in Atlanta and whose content centers on dealing drugs.” Beneath its “trendy, catchy, and violent” exterior, trap music allows Black artists to negotiate “where the South is and where they are located in it” and give voice to the tangled “grief, anger, and pain” of racism, according to Miles. Zooming in on northeast North Carolina’s 252 area code, where he grew up, Miles investigates how such artists as Streetz, Drop, and Mone use their music to wrestle with heavily policed neighborhoods, wrongful arrests, and gun violence (“Long live Amp thought you were coming back/My grandma pray on every homicide/When I’m out here it’s time to ride,” goes the chorus of Mone and Lul Zacc’s “Bring Em All Back”). Miles threads his own story into the proceedings, often in small yet striking ways, as when he muses about how his mother planted a garden in the projects, exemplifying other Black Southern women who have used beauty as an act of resistance to the ugliness of the carceral state. Precise cultural commentary and the author’s deep personal connection to his subject lend power to this revealing study. (Dec.)