Dungeon Family

"The South's got something to say. That's all I got to say." Outkast, of course, was nothing of the sort. Andre and partner Antwan "Big Boi" Patton had spent years honing their craft and developing ideas in the southwest Atlanta basement of their friend Rico Wade's mother's house. "The Dungeon," they called it, and in retrospect, the place is inarguably one of the most fertile incubators rap has ever known. Wade's production team, Organized Noize, was forming there at the time, as was the four-member troupe Goodie Mob. Open-mindedness was put at a premium. Musical tastes in the Dungeon ranged from Run-DMC and Ice-T to Kate Bush to Black Sabbath all steeped in the same Georgian wellsprings from which emerged the likes of Ray Charles, James Brown, and Otis Redding. The Dungeon Family, as they'd come to be collectively known, were proud of who they were and where they were from "Country as hell, can't you tell, " Goodie Mob's Cee-Lo took to announcing from concerts stages, "even if the record don't sell!" But they refused the limitation of locality. And in the years following Outkast's win at the Source Awards, while the East and West Coasts of the Hip Hop Nation were obsessed with an even nastier strain of regionalist acrimony, the Dungeon Family remained above the fray, made a string of classic albums, and quietly established LaFace Records as a national base for cream-of-the-crop artistry