I drove to the back of a brand-new apartment complex in East Nashville that shared real estate with a vegan bistro and a climbing gym. It's the sort of gentrifier's paradise that's become the subject of contempt in a southern town devoted to preserving its past. This side of Nashville is home to country music's counterculture, a reputation that's attracting out-of-towners who threaten to dilute the local charm.

__ _This article appeared in the November issue of VICE magazine ._ __

I was there to convince Yelawolf, whose new album, Trial by Fire, is due out this fall, to sit down for an interview. He's a skinny white rapper with an affinity for denim, wide-brimmed hats, and tattoos, one of which is inked across his hairline and reads slumerican, a word he coined as a way of trying to reclaim terms like "white trash." His management expressed that he didn't want to be associated with any "redneck rap" because Yelawolf, whose real name is Michael Wayne Atha, has been trying to distance himself from the fringe artists in the maligned country-rap genre.

Yelawolf is not a country rapper but instead a hip-hop artist who stands out in a crowded field by infusing his music with southern rock and stories about rural America. It's not for everyone—imagine Eminem with an Alabama drawl and a taste for nu metal and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and you'll have a pretty good idea of his sound. But in the years since his 2010 breakthrough mixtape, Trunk Muzik, he's avoided many of the criticisms typically made of white rappers and managed to woo both the media elite and hip-hop royalty alike, landing the cover of the Fader and getting signed to Eminem's Shady Records. He once told Hot 97's Ebro that country rap is "done poorly because there's not enough people on the country side that understand enough about hip-hop to do it right. There's not enough people on the hip-hop side that know enough about country to do it right."

But country and rap have more in common than most realize. After recording a collaboration with country artist Tim McGraw called "Over and Over," St. Louis rapper Nelly explained why the marriage could succeed: "Hip-hop and country... they come out of poverty-stricken communities, so putting those together, it's gonna work—it just has to be done right." That's the major problem: It's so rarely done right. Look no further than the half-song, half-viral joke "Accidental Racist," a Brad Paisley duet with LL Cool J, who raps a cringe-inducing verse about his willingness to forget the chains of slavery if white people can forgive him for liking gold chains. With examples like this in mind, people regularly write off hick-hop as a lowbrow gimmick that conflates two genres that shouldn't share studio time.

Yelawolf moved around a lot as a child, often spending time in the Nashville suburb of Antioch. He was born in 1979 in Gadsden, Alabama, a place that was once the center of commerce and manufacturing in the state, but by the 80s had been named one of the "seven worst cities to live in the United States" by a Rand McNally article. His mom became pregnant with him when she was 15. According to Yelawolf, she was a "rock star" (by which he meant that she drank like one). His upbringing inspired his brand, Slumerica. On "Whiskey in a Bottle," he raps, "Slumerican means: Slum American breed, gutter raised with worldwide dreams."

Hick-hop often uses glossy, digitized fiddles and steel pedals while trafficking in clichés about Chevy trucks and southern whiskey. Yelawolf, too, raps about Chevy trucks (on literally five iterations of a song called "Box Chevy") and booze (he loves Jack Daniels, which I experienced firsthand). But in his more ambitious songs, his lyrics spin southern gothic narratives with big hooks substantial enough to work as stand-alone country tracks. On "Bible Belt," a song off his first independent album, Creek Water, he raps about his home in the Deep South, describing a storm in the plains and the equally turbulent social climate: "Welcome to my land, my home: Bama / Where the clouds turn green / Where the Klan marches up and down the small streets / Where cops look for excitement / Where the oak trees split and burn from the blue lightning."

And even Yelawolf and his coterie haven't entirely escaped that scorn. One of the few publications less keen on Yelawolf's work in recent years was our own. In 2012, a VICE writer published an article suggesting that Yelawolf had used Illuminati mind control to convince hipsters that he was cool. It also made fun of his haircut, which, at the time, was a mullet Mohawk. When praise did finally arrive after his album Love Story, it came in the form of a backhanded compliment with a headline that read, "Yelawolf Has Returned from the Wilderness of Suck." I wasn't aware of any of this the night I showed up at his apartment.

Another white rapper named Struggle Jennings arrived shortly after I did, while his grandfather Waylon's music still played out of Yelawolf's speakers. Struggle had gained notoriety for rapping over unreleased Waylon Jennings masters, including a song called "Outlaw Shit" that features Yelawolf. To purists in the Country Establishment, repackaging Waylon's music in a rap song was blasphemy. Struggle thinks differently. According to him, he and his cohorts are carrying on in the tradition of the outlaw country movement that his grandfather, Waylon, joined in the 1970s. But where Waylon broke from the formulaic Nashville sound by stripping the orchestration out of his music and incorporating elements of rock (as well as unapologetically doing copious amounts of drugs), Struggle instead brings in hip-hop. Even if you believe that Struggle is simply piggybacking on his grandfather's legacy in Nashville, it's impossible to deny that he grew up on his music. He came of age in the 90s, and that means he was probably raised on hip-hop as well. So it's hard to imagine what else Struggle would have produced.

Yelawolf, however, had not forgotten.

***

Two days earlier, in an attempt to get to know the fringe world of country rap—the part Yelawolf's management had told me he was so eager to distance himself from—I visited the headquarters of Mikel Knight, the self-proclaimed "country-rap king." I was there to find out how Knight—a white country rapper who wears a Stetson and cowboy boots and hardly performs or releases music—had in four years developed a direct-sales business that he claims has sold 2 million of his albums in places like gas stations and Walmart parking lots.

The general manager of this operation, FAT Thomi, is a music-industry veteran who once ran hip-hop promotions for Arista Records. He explained what he believed to be Knight's appeal: "About seven years ago, I came to the realization that black rappers were going to be a thing of the past... I followed trends. And I watched more and more white rappers... I wanted somebody that was white 'cause it was unique, and it was still fresh and new to the industry." Although his forecast was flawed, FAT Thomi, who is black, stuck to his guns, and when he discovered Knight, he believed he had come across the artist he'd been searching for. "When I heard him and I heard his story, I believed it was the biggest thing in music 'cause he was putting the two biggest genres together yet to be put together."

Hick-hop reignites the long, enduring debate about the place for white people in hip-hop but adds a complicated twist. While Yelawolf, Struggle, and Bubba Mathis bring rural sensibilities to hip-hop, Mikel Knight removes the music from its bearings and fits it into a country mold, in effect making rap more palatable for a southern white audience. In FAT Thomi's words, "Mikel recognized the fact that maybe Billy from Sparta can't really relate to what Lil Wayne is saying. People identify with what they are comfortable with. So I think, yes, there's an element that says country people will accept someone in a cowboy hat and cowboy boots rapping before they would accept somebody with gold teeth and baseball caps." Knight found this out through his own research, telling me: "I would go to every country bar, and I would say, 'Hi, what's your format here?' And the DJ or manager would say, or the owner would say, 'Oh, it's a country bar,' and I'd say, 'Well, what about after 12?' And he goes, 'Oh, yeah, we play that rap crap.'"

Colt Ford couldn't be further from what we've come to expect from a contemporary rapper. He's a portly, white, self-described "redneck" from Athens, Georgia, with a horseshoe mustache and ruddy complexion who used to be a professional golfer.

Making music based on a marketing gimmick can yield mixed results. While Knight calls himself a pioneer who brought rap to country bars, some of the lyrics in his song sound better suited for a T-shirt you'd buy at a beachfront shop in Daytona. On "We Don't Give a Truck," he raps, "You ain't gotta like how I wear my pants / You ain't gotta like my rebel flag / You ain't gotta like my tat / But you can kiss my country ass."