“Hip-hop, one of America's last bastions of regionalism, is threatening to exalt itself out of its local roots. Authenticity issues still insist the genre is tied to the street, but where a hip-hop province used to be as compressed as the South Bronx, it's now as sprawling as the Dirty South. Even during the dichotomy of the pre-*Chronic* days, when East almost never met West, entire coasts counted”
