In this AMS/Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Lecture to be held 15 October 2026 at 7:00 p.m. ET, Alex Blue V and Kyle DeCoste reveal the inner and outer workings of the genre, making a case for country rap’s centrality in understanding the politics of race and place in the United States.

Country rap, also known as “hick-hop,” is a genre performed primarily by white people in the Southern US. It encapsulates many seeming discrepancies, offering images and sounds associated with rural, white working-class identity while also drawing from a sonic vocabulary derivative of–and associated with–Black urban experience in the US Country rap crafts a self-contained aesthetic world. As opposed to simply being a blending of rap and country genres, country rap is a distinct generic formation shaped by mutually enforcing and contested notions of the rural and urban, Blackness and whiteness, the authentic and the inauthentic. Within the highly racialized discourses that hold country music and hip-hop in opposition, country rap is frequently heard as an unwelcome outlier.

RSVP