Vibe

Where exactly does the South begin and end? Current maps are too rigid to account for the ways Black people have built the South while being simultaneously excluded from it. Drawing from the different ways Black artists in the 2-5-2 area code in North Carolina use vibe as a mode of knowing and communication author Corey J. Miles illustrates how Black feeling and unfeeling offer entry points into the contemporary South that challenge static and monolithic notions of the region. Placing the local artists in conversation with other southern cultural creators such as 2 Chainz Rod Wave and Rapsody these ethnographic narratives demonstrate that there are multiple Souths with overlapping and distinct commitments to working through pain sound and belonging. <p/> In <i>Vibe</i>: <i>The Sound and Feeling of Black Life in the American South</i> Miles narrates how southern Black sound feeling and being is constantly policed surveilled and criminalized. In doing so he re-narrates the region as the carceral South to capture the ways people in the South and beyond can feel the emotional weight of the criminalization of Blackness. Pain music a subgenre of trap music is used to take the listener to moments of violence to allow them to hear the desires anger and silences that bind Black life in community. Through conceptions of ratchet hood and ghetto Black artists turn away from respectable images and unmap the South. In trap music they move the South to a space where multiple modes of being find respect and care.