Modern US rap shares many sensibilities with dance music. The history of regional sub-genres often intertwines with that of nearby dance scenes—just look at the careers of Detroit's Amp Fiddler, Moodymann and J Dilla. Along similar lines, Memphis crunk and Atlanta trap and snap are directly related to techno, New Orleans bounce, Jersey club, electro and Miami bass. For one, they all contain the Roland TR-808 at their core.

In the same vein, the relationship of dance to the development of the music—and its rise to popularity—is equally important. In the same way that jacking and vogue define certain styles of house, gangsta walking, krumping, snapping, twerking and the dance routines of songs like "Crank That" and "Swag Surfin" are inextricable from their rap sub-genres.

Modern rap and dance music also share the use of swing, funk-inspired basslines and self-referential lyrics with Afrofuturist tendencies. Responding to the pressures of the 21st century, Southern rap challenges us to consider a new groove: a new way of mingling and an alternative means towards Black prosperity.

Afrofuturism—a school of thought that views the African diaspora through a technological lens—has a popular canon that usually includes Sun Ra, Herbie Hancock, Parliament-Funkadelic and Detroit techno. The aesthetic landscape of Afrofuturism is often fantastical, exploring tales of time travel and intergalactic meetings while incorporating Blaxploitation aesthetics and lingo: think movies like Shaft (1971) or, more recently, Netflix's They Cloned Tyrone (2023). In Mark Dery's definition of Afrofuturism in his 1994 essay Black To The Future, it's defined as "speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of the 20th-century technoculture." Early Afrofuturism and its internal politics are inseparable from the state of technology and the sociocultural context of its time.

Sun Ra's 1974 album Space Is the Place, an Afrofuturist classic that combines social commentary with themes of Blaxploitation, science fiction and concert performance.

Legacy Afrofuturist works and the artists involved—like Sun Ra and Space Is the Place—are a world away from today's world of tech-fuelled surveillance and globalised extraction of Black culture. As machine-learning services and AI-generated media become more widely used and easier to produce, Black music has become fodder for ever-hungry content generation services, while the Black visage is exploited for marketing. The surveillance state, cultural commodification and imperial exploitation aren't new, but they've all become accelerated by rapidly increasing technological development.

How do Black musicians respond to this different context? The American artist Martine Syms offers an alternative framework in her 2013 essay The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto. She suggests we avoid the trappings of legacy Afrofuturist works in favour of critically engaging with less fantastical ideas. Syms' declaration stands in humble opposition to traditional Afrofuturism, directly challenging the Egyptian iconography, jive talking, time travel and alien ephemera involved in the works of Sun Ra, Wu-Tang Clan, Drexciya and George Clinton. Considering rap as dance music allows us to observe the most pertinent of her observations—"the [possibility] of a new focus on Black humanity: our science, technology, culture, politics, religions, individuality, needs, dreams, hopes and failings."

Southern rap music addresses these politics, possibilities and alternative futures in a way often overlooked by music journalism. Beyond obvious touchstones like Missy Elliott and Outkast, Southern rap artists are generally ignored as purveyors of Afrofuturism in favour of those who satisfy Northern ideas of lyrical skill or Eurocentric notions of composition. The Black denizens of the South suffer from a running stereotype as illiterate and unskilled: think of how the Southern drawl has been used routinely in popular media to connote idiocy, or the dismissal of mumble rap—a derogatory term used to describe the vocal stylings of artists such as Playboi Carti, Lil Baby and Future—as unpoetic and unworthy of treatment as literary work. Young Thug, whose lyrics, despite being derided as "[rapping] like his mouth is full of peanut butter-coated marbles," have been used as evidence of alleged wrongdoing in court.

These stereotypes erase Southern rap's cultural ingenuity, its novel relationship with technology and the slice-of-life lyricism that is simultaneously speculative and mundane. To bring it back to Syms' manifesto, the music asks us to consider alternative views of Black humanity. Despite this, old-school conscious rap purists like KRS-One make complaints that echo laments about the popularity of Southern rap. "What people call rap or hip-hop today is a disgrace to our culture," he said.

Written off as trivial and degenerate, Southern rap sub-genres wield a sharp insight into the plight and triumphs of the Black Southern everyman. Some of the most popular rap of the modern day has come from artists like Future and Lil Baby. These sub-genres engage with the banalities of real life, an insight as equally valuable as whatever conscious rap has to offer in materialising Black futures or defining a current mode of existence.

DeAndre Way, AKA Soulja Boy, is a perfect case study for Afrofuturism in Southern rap. Only three months after YouTube's launch in December 2005, Way posted his first video on the platform. It was the catalyst for a career that would culminate in immeasurable influence, alongside the strategy of constantly uploading videos set a precedent for the following generation of internet music stars. He predated both Vine and TikTok with his penchant for short, intimate videos used to expand the world of his music.

Complemented by increasingly popular snap hits, fertile internet grounds and an audience hungry for dance tunes, the success of 2007's "Crank That (Soulja Boy)" came as no surprise. The titular dance and its easy-to-follow instructions were a key part of the song's success. This method of audience engagement would come to be a defining feature of some of his catchiest songs, whether it be their memorable hooks or their accompanying dance moves—just watch "Donk" or "Bird Walk."

It's also important to acknowledge the room for growth in the failings of Southern rap, in line with Syms' manifesto. While Soulja Boy's music builds towards alternative Black futures, his lyricism and interpersonal behaviour still employ the misogyny that remains rampant in the rap community at large. Black women such as Three 6 Mafia member Gangsta Boo have contributed to the larger Afrofuturist rap canon in pivotal ways, rejecting this misogyny and challenging the canon to evolve beyond its boy's club tendencies. While artists like Missy Elliott and Octavia Butler use ambitious and more overtly fictitious elements at will, Gangsta Boo adds a horror-flick flair to the banalities of Southern persistence in the face of plight. Her album Both Worlds *69 embraces horrorcore in the Memphis rap tradition, using local euphemisms and violent, transgressive lyricism to put family, community, loyalty and "making do" amid socioeconomic struggle at the forefront.

Mastery of the mundane is instrumental to Southern rap's explosive popularity, and it's where Southern rappers really shine. It's part of the cultural difference between the South and the rest of the US. We have a reputation as porch-sitting ponderers and talk-about-nothingers for a reason. The slow pace and concern with everyday goings-on are built into the fabric of our society. Southern rap in general specialises in a specific form of romanticisation or dramatisation of mundane content (e.g. going to the club, dancing, baby daddy or mama issues), turning it into both club-ready bangers and emotional ballads. This practice is embedded in the artists' sociocultural context, and we can glean insight into Black Southern values and speculative desires as contextualised by tech accelerationism and violently anti-Black global politics. What are these rappers talking about, and why is dealing with mundanity a priority in their lyricism? Under Syms' framework, we can begin to understand the importance of this practice in complicating the aesthetics of Black futurism.

Southern rap artists are celebrated as rap stars but less as purveyors of rap as dance music. Ying Yang Twins, Fast Life Yungstaz, Travis Porter and Soulja Boy all have several hit songs that were underscored by related Black social dance movements (like swag surfing, krumping or twerking). Soulja Boy and Fast Life Yungstaz are celebrated in the Black community for creating their respective dance routines. And yet the music itself isn't considered dance music in media discourse or even by its own audience. Despite this, these dances mobilise a community around the music, and their use in the club scene turns nightlife into a communal preservation effort: Black social dance is gleeful catharsis as resistance. Atlanta strip clubs like Magic City and Follies have been instrumental to the rise of crunk and snap music, and cement the nexus of dance and rap as interconnected cultural activities.

More recent artists like Duke Deuce and Tisakorean continue this legacy, highlighting the importance of Black music genealogy and the dances that strengthen these genres. Likewise, New York festival dweller's multimedia programming—and juxtaposition of artists and genres once thought disparate—highlight the interconnectedness of dance and rap music, as well as the position of the nightclub as a hotspot of potential resistance energy. The music contains a multitude of purposes beyond literal interpretations. It also functions as a vehicle towards alternative Black futures by engaging with the mundane, the tragic, the violent and the passionate in a way that only rap music can, while getting listeners moving in a way central to traditional dance music.

By treating what is normally (and accurately) described as rap music with the values and agenda usually ascribed to dance music, we do the music justice. We celebrate its genealogy and its functions that aren't acknowledged when relegated to discussions more concerned with lyricism. Reading rap as dance music is not a post-genre argument. It's an effort to acknowledge the artistic efforts of Black Southerners in preserving dance as an aspect of hip-hop culture, and the South as a place where dance music thrives.