By Mike Templeton

Regular readers of the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition blog may remember our profile of Brandon Shields, an urban Appalachian from right here in Cincinnati who works as a riverboat captain and is also a rap artist. Hip-hop and rap have been around for a long time now, and the arts and music of hip-hop have taken hold of Appalachian life and culture as surely as it has the rest of the world. A new recording compilation called No Options: Hip-Hop in Appalachia reveals the scope, depth, and power of hip-hop culture in the Appalachian region. It also shows the ways hip-hop not only found its way from the big cities to the hollers, hip-hop has turned right back around to speak from the hollers back out to the big cities. It is a forceful project, and one that will likely put more than a few new artists on the radar for bigger things.

Hip-hop is a musical form and set of cultural phenomena that many people will immediately associate with the urban world. Going back to some early days, we can all hear the sounds of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five or Afrika Baambaataa (I can go back as far as the Sugar Hill Gang, I am loathe to admit), and these artists were deeply rooted in urban street culture. Over the decades, hip-hop has grown and expanded, like any art form, to include voices from all over the country and the world.

Still, hip-hop in Appalachia may come as a surprise to some. In a recent interview for West Virginia Public Broadcasting, Eric Jordan, one of the artists and producers of the recording who is known professionally as Monstalung, talked about what was happening when he and others began creating an Appalachian hip-hop culture and sound: “When I moved back here in 1999 to do hip-hop with my brother, we made a conscious effort to like, ‘Let’s put it into music. Let’s give these kids something they can call their own.’ We called our group 304 Recons. 304 is the area code of West Virginia back then, and we just made sure we talked about Appalachian living. We talked about trailer parks, hollers, you know. Things that’s going on in our world to give these kids something to be proud of.” From the beginning, artists like Monstalung, and a great many others it turns out, were carving out a unique form of hip-hop that is distinctly Appalachian.

Another dimension of hip-hop that seemed to lend itself to Appalachian life is the do-it-yourself ethic that this type of music and culture fosters. Hip-hop is a music and a culture of expressing that springs directly from the body. The styles of dance, the rhythms of beat-boxing, the spontaneous energy of rap—all of this comes out of forms of expression that are made from the ground up. Other than a sound system, hip-hop requires nothing more than energy and heart. Monstalung spoke to this as he described the Appalachian approach to hip-hop as coming out of the same D.I.Y. ethos in which many artists from the region felt there was an “us-against–the-world mentality. Everybody’s counting us out, or do they even know we exist? It’s finding your voice and repping for yours.” Hip-hop artists from Appalachia and who speak about and for Appalachia seemed to intuitively understand that they had to build something that was distinctly their own.

The executive producer of the recording is JK Turner, who it turns out is the son of the Appalachian scholar, Dr. William Turner, who was profiled on this blog by Core member Pauletta Hansel. Dr. Turner had worked with Appalshop and the record label, June Appal Recordings, for many years but chose to put the more hands-on work of developing the project to his son, JK Turner. Dr. Turner held the central role of initiating the behind the scenes work with Dr. Ted Olson. This involved getting funding and setting up the working relationships with June Appal Recordings, but JK Turner explained that “they asked me to lead the way as to how to connect with people [on] social media, and what to even be listening for as we’re curating the songs, what’s right for this introductory project we’re putting together.” No Options is in many ways a crucial document of Appalachian culture, one that will take its place among things such as the early recordings of Alan Lomax and other key features of the long Appalachian cultural history.

No Options: Hip-Hop in Appalachia is currently offering copies of the recording to anyone who donates to a fund they have set up for assisting victims of the floods from Hurricane Helene. For every $100 donated to a fund set up to provide flood relief and assistance, June Appal Recordings will send you a copy of the album Hip-Hop in Appalachia. This is just one of the ways the producers of the record and the artists who contributed are stepping up to show how Appalachian people come to the aid of Appalachian people. To offer your donation and receive a copy of the record, click on this link: https://givebutter.com/NoOptions.

The energy we get from a project such as No Options: Hip-Hop in Appalachia is the kind of thing that fires the work of the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition. These kinds of projects that help us see Appalachia and Appalachian culture in new and surprising ways are the reason Appalachia, the place and the culture, will always offer something to be discovered. There is always something new in those mountains and hollers, and finding these things are an endless source of inspiration. There is more to be revealed in Appalachian hip-hop.

You can order a copy of the record here: No Options: Hip-Hop in Appalachia.

You can also listen on the Appalshop website at this link: https://appalshop.my.canva.site/nooptionsfyc.

Monstalung has his own project. You can explore that on BandCamp at this link: https://monstalung.bandcamp.com/album/an-appalachian-hip-hop-story-pt-1.

Michael Templeton is a writer, and independent scholar. He is the author of The Chief of Birds: A Memoir published with Erratum Press and Impossible to Believe, forthcoming from Iff Books. He is also the author of Collected Apoems, forthcoming from LJMcD Communications and the awaiting of awaiting: a novella, with Nut Hole Publishing. Check out his profile in UACC’s Cultural Directory. He has published numerous articles and essays on contemporary culture and works of creative non-fiction as well as experimental works and poetry. He lives in West Milton, Ohio with his wife who is an artist.