How the DMV and Virginia Beach made rap safe (and profitable!) for eccentrics
As it celebrates its 50th birthday, we are mapping hip-hop's story on a local level, with more than a dozen city-specific histories of the music and culture. Click here to see the entire list.
As early New York hip-hop hits like "The Message," Kurtis Blow's "Basketball" and Run-DMC's "King of Rock" started to make their way down I-95, hip-hop was already storming over Virginia Beach. A resort town seated at the northeastern-most edge of the Bible Belt, Virginia Beach was in many ways a fraught borderland, full of NAS Oceana lifers and Southerners born on the fringes of the Union, that couldn't have felt more different from the Big Apple. In the 1980s and '90s, its suburban community was growing increasingly (and reluctantly) diverse, as its rigid base identity to adapt to its
