With country and rap, geography is supreme. Rock, pop and jazz performers often exist in amorphous universes a rock band might be from somewhere (say Motley Crue and the Sunset Strip), but they exist everywhere. Right next to De Niro, but I'll be 'hood forever.Ĭountry singers and hip-hoppers know where they're from and won't let you forget it. I'm out that Brooklyn, now I'm down in Tribeca In the summer of 1989, Chuck D, the incendiary mouthpiece for New York City rap group Public Enemy, unleashed a thunderous rhyme in the song Fight the Power: 'Elvis was a hero to most / But he never meant s- to me you see.' That takedown didn't rankle folks as much as Chuck's followup kablammo: a profane snubbing of national cowboy John Wayne. These are people talking about their feelings, how they live.' In country music, when they talk about the truck and the bottle of Jack and the girl, it's the same as in hip-hop, when they talk about the block and the cars and the party. The rap icon paused, weighed it over and said: 'Absolutely. Petersburg and tossed out my you-dudes-are-the-same theory. I had a chance to talk to LL Cool J before his recent gig in St. They also excel at constant self-referential defenses of their genre (Gretchen Wilson's Redneck Woman and Blake Shelton's Kiss My Country Ass, Lupe Fiasco's Hip-Hop Saved My Life and Kanye West and Jay-Z's N-s in Paris). In their redneck-vs.-'hood aesthetics, country stars and rappers mine similar themes: a strong sense of pride, the benevolent badass holding court an even stronger sense of place, country folk and city dwellers and a penchant for smoke-and-booze shindigs, the party vibe in full effect. Weird and unlikely as it sounds, they share the same template. Rappers and country stars are actually a lot alike when it comes to their particular art forms.

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