For the last decade, the 808 drum and triplet flow, two musical aspects popularized by the Atlanta “trap” genre, became a global phenomenon, getting mimicked and integrated into previously unlikely genres like pop, EDM and country. Even though trap currently dominates the Atlanta sound, as well as that of the country's popular music, Atlanta rap encompasses a much wider soundscape and history. Both Atlanta rap and the city it's made in, have evolved and changed over time, greatly shaping and impacting each other over the years.

Atlanta-bred graphic designer Joe Veazey recently created the ATL Rap Map to document the changing city and artform, as well as pay homage to the rappers and locations that make up its diverse sonic and geographical quilt. Many of the places on the map no longer exist, including all of the city’s the public housing projects, which Atlanta finished demolishing in 2011. Veazy listened to thousands of Atlanta rap songs to create the map, detailing the artists and producers that have impacted the scene, along with phrases and points of interest mentioned in hit tracks.

As Veazey explains, the story of Atlanta rap begins back in the '80s—a decade before OutKast was formed—when its sound was borrowed from New York. As Miami bass popped off in the mid-'80s, Atlanta made their own brand of booty shake music. One of the first Atlanta rappers to go big was Bronx-born, Atlanta-raised MC Shy D, who had party-ready hits like "Shake It" on Miami bass purveyor, Luke Records.

The '90s was when Atlanta rap really began to craft its own sound, with legendary producers like Jermaine Dupri, Dallas Austin and Organized Noize (Rico Wade, Pat "Sleepy" Brown and Ray Murray) crafting futuristic soundscapes and creative breeding grounds at So So Def Records and LaFace Records, respectively, for young artists to stretch out and shake things up. Organized Noize began in the basement of Wade's mother's small house in Lakewood Heights, which the young producers called The Dungeon, setting the groundwork for the revolutionary Dungeon Family artist collective.

"The first act or group that I credit with creating an Atlanta sound has to be Organized Noize, which obviously is the camp OutKast comes out of, Goodie Mob, Witchdoctor, Backbone, so many more acts," Atlanta music journalist Rodney Carmichael tells us.

"There was no other region or anything you could attribute that sound to, that Organized Noize came up with. Out of necessity, it was not as sample-based as a lot of hip-hop was at the time, because they were coming out of LaFace and L.A. Reid was not trying to pay for a lot of sample clearances. So, they use a lot of live instrumentation. And because of that and their love for funk and soul, just steeped in that red clay of Georgia, they created something that sounded authentically like Atlanta."

The next phase in ATL rap was “crunk,” emerging in Memphis with Three 6 Mafia’s spooky, horrorcore version, which Lil John and the Eastside Boyz, Ying Yang Twins and others lightened up and drenched in Hpnotiq in 1997. Crunk inspired its genre cousin, “snap,” which was born in 2004, with songs like D4L’s “Laffy Taffy,” Soulja Boy’s “Crank That,” and Dem Franchize Boyz’s “I Think They Like Me.” Crunk and snap music's party vibes fizzled out by the end of the decade as trap took over, bringing us to today. (Each era overlaps with the next.) Yet snap, whose songs came with easy-to-follow dances, feels like a precursor to today's TikTok hits.

As Carmichael explains, snap pushed the boundaries of what hip-hop could be. "I think the snap era still doesn't get its just due because it was so kind of antithetical to a lot of what traditional East Coast lyrical rap stood for. It wasn't about who could spit the hardest bars…That's kind of that first early era of the South emerging in a way of challenging the dominance of East and West coasts, really, because it wasn't about trying to pay homage to them…it challenged what hip-hop could be."

He also notes that many of the successful snap artists came from the projects that were  torn down just years after the height of the genre, thus dispersing these concentrated zones of creativity.

“[Bankhead] doesn't get the credit it deserves as a cultural and economic driver of what was making Atlanta hot to the rest of the world at that time in the early- to mid-2000s. A lot of the snap music groups came straight out of the projects of Bankhead, like Bowen Homes," Carmichael explains.

"These Bankhead cats were pioneers, who in a lot of ways were working outside of the industry. But snap was so infectious and undeniable that it overtook the industry… That first wave of virality in hip-hop you got to attribute to snap music coming out of Atlanta. Soulja Boy is part of that legacy."

Before Soulja Boy got everyone and their grandma learning the dance to 2007's Hot 100 No. 1 hit "Crank That," OutKast and former Goodie Mob member CeeLo Green scored massive hits—"Hey Ya" in 2003 and "Crazy" in 2006—shaking up the pop landscape while putting Atlanta in the global spotlight. Both acts brought a new energy to hip-hop, one that was playful with ever-evolving sound and visual aesthetic, giving other Black artists permission to explore and share their multifaceted artistic identity.

"I think that Andre and CeeLo and a couple others, like [Goodie Mob's] Big Gipp, kind of set a tone in Atlanta of being really experimental and weird and artsy, and almost gender-bending, with Andre wearing the wigs and big pink furry pants and stuff like that. I think it set a tone that in Atlanta hip-hop you can be weird, be a rock star, play with gender stuff—like Young Thug does today," Veazy notes.

“The success of Dungeon Family acts showed for future generations we had nothing to prove to anybody else, to any other region, or any aesthetic style or sound; that we were our own planet, so to speak," Carmicheal adds. "ATLiens was OutKast's second album title, but really became a way to describe the generations that follow them. In a lot of ways, it felt otherworldly because I think, creatively, they felt free.”

And now, Atlanta is the center of hip-hop. And while OutKast and other Dungeon Family acts had intricate production, an ever-changing sound and aesthetic that was difficult to pin down and replicate, the programmed 808 drum and hi-hats synonymous with ATL trap are relatively straightforward to reproduce and integrate (a trap drum sample pack is just a download away!) into any style of track, from nursery rhymes to Taylor Swift singles. But Atlanta rap doesn't stop here.

"Trap is really the first era that has completely defined Atlanta and put a stamp on the Atlanta sound. And even that sound, sonically and content-wise, has continued to evolve. We definitely don't hear the same things In Lil Baby or Young Thug that we heard in T.I. 20 years ago, and that's all trap… That constant transformation is what in a lot of ways has enabled the city to hold on to that number one spot [in rap] for so long."

"Atlanta's [unofficial symbol] is the phoenix because it self-conflagrates, it resurrects itself from its own ashes... Atlanta is definitely a city that, all through the Civil Rights era, was able to use its own self-mythologizing as the Black Mecca identity as a way to shape and steel itself against some of the harsher realities of the city," he continues.

And for better or worse, the city has transformed. Ahead of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, city officials wanted to "clean things up" and tore down Techwood Homes, the nation's first public housing development, to build lower-density mixed-income townhomes in its place. The rest of the projects—which in the '90s housed a larger percentage of the city's residents than any other American city—were completely torn down by 2011. The displaced residents—including future rappers and producers—moved across the city and into the suburbs in search of affordable housing.

"Post-Olympics, there was a new commercialism in Atlanta music and it kind of broadened up to the whole country and became more relatable to everybody," Veazey explains. "In earlier Atlanta hip-hop, people are constantly mentioning neighborhoods and streets, and nowadays, you almost never hear that. But also, all those old neighborhoods are gentrified now. I color-coded [the ATL Rap Map] by genre and era, so you can kind of see the movement. The earlier genres are all coming out of the inner city, all the neighborhoods right around downtown and on the west side. And after the 2010s, a lot of rappers are coming from the suburbs."

"Whenever you start to demolish housing projects or do this kind of class transfer that happens with gentrification, major shifts within the culture are bound to occur," Carmichael adds. "You see a lot of areas and concentrated cultures and people get dispersed throughout the city. Unfortunately, a lot of these areas were economically depressed, and they never were able to see the economic fruits of a lot of the success that they bore. I'm not sure whose responsibility that is, or what role the city should have played in it, but for whatever reason, there was no value attributed to these communities, despite the talent and the money that originated from them.

So, they get demolished, and you have to wonder what happens culturally and sonically to a place that in some ways loses its character because of forced dispersal or erasure? Atlanta over the years has literally and figuratively erased Bankhead—the name was changed years ago; Bankhead Highway is now Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway."

The 74 acres that once housed Bowen Homes in Bankhead was supposed to be turned into a mixed-income neighborhood, but has sat vacant for almost 13 years. And while the shout outs to Bankhead and other, now-gentrifying neighborhoods are less present on raps, some successful rappers are investing in these areas. Killer Mike and T.I. bought the beloved Bankhead Seafood Restaurant in 2019, the year after it closed.

"Hip-hop, at its core, has always been not only about representing for your hood and city, but rapping to your hood and your city, the cats on your block; if you could speak to them, forget what anybody outside has to say," Carmichael points out.

"When you start to think about cadences and articulation, and how you had an era where Atlanta cats, and Southern cats in general, clearly wanted to be heard and understood by everybody. Then you come to an era where it was derided as mumble rap, but a lot of it cats speaking in their own dialect to their own communities. It's like, 'Hey, if my homeboy can understand me, who am I code switching for?'… We're no longer worried about trying to impress New York or translate our rhymes and our culture to other people. That intensely personal focus somehow ends up becoming universal, and is part of the charm and part of the reason why it's so infectious and why it has become so huge.