Atlanta anthem not music to all ears
By Jenny Jarvie
seattletimes.nwsource.com...cation=rss
ATLANTA When Dick Williams heard his city's new anthem, he was aghast. The 60-year-old local Fox television host, who sings for his local choir, could understand only one line: "Get 'em up, get 'em up, 'get em up, get 'em up, get 'em up, let's go. ... "
"Not," he said, "a good line for a city with a high crime rate."
Now that Atlanta is the first city in the United States to have an official hip-hop anthem, residents are agonizing over the meaning of the song.
Mayor Shirley Franklin commissioned Dallas Austin, a hip-hop producer based in Atlanta, to write the anthem as part of her Brand Atlanta campaign to attract tourists and businesses to the city.
Yet ever since "The ATL" an up-tempo hip-hop and R&B fusion song debuted in front of 70,000 football fans at an Atlanta Falcons game in October, Atlanta's residents have critiqued its rhythm, its melody and its lyrics.
One suburban reader of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution complained that the song told the world to "bring your boom-box and your bling-bling to Atlanta," and another said he could no longer identify with a city that had abandoned family values in favor of "gun-blazing, Ray Lewis-admiring thugs."
Austin declined to be interviewed.
Sarah Lattimer, a partner at LattimerMoffitt Communications, the company that conceived of the idea of an Atlanta anthem, said she was shocked by the critical interpretations of the song. " 'Get 'em up' is a club reference," she said. "In a dance club, people throw their hands in the air."
Lattimer said "The ATL" articulates the soul of Atlanta. She said she expects the song, performed by such contemporary R&B artists as Monica, Ciara, Jagged Edge, Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins of TLC, and Sammie, to enter the Billboard Top 40 and become part of the repertoire of Atlanta's high-school bands, symphony orchestra and nightclubs.
"The ATL" underlines the difficulty of defining Atlanta, the bustling, entrepreneurial capital of the New South. Although almost everyone here agrees the city has moved past "Gone With the Wind," tensions linger when it comes to shaping an identity that can unite urban and suburban, black and white, young and old.
Atlanta has a reputation as progressive, but there is still a divide between the predominantly black city and the predominantly white metropolitan region. According to the 2000 census, the city of Atlanta is 61 percent black; the wider metropolitan area is 29 percent black.
In the past decade, Atlanta's hip-hop scene has flourished, inviting comparisons with Detroit's Motown and Harlem jazz. OutKast, Usher, Ludacris and Jermaine Dupri are just some of the Atlanta artists notching platinum records and Grammy awards.
Still, many Atlanta residents are unaware that their city has become a hip-hop hub and that artists based in Atlanta Young Jeezy, Dem Franchise Boyz, Trina and D4L dominated last week's Billboard Rap Charts.
Earlier this year, a Georgia State University report estimated that the annual economic impact of Georgia's commercial music scene which is concentrated in Atlanta is close to $1 billion. But many Atlantans scoff at the notion that the commercial success of Atlanta's hip-hop industry could translate into a broader business plan for the city.
S. Craig Watson, associate professor of Radio, Television and Film at the University of Texas, Austin, and author of "Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement," said many Americans do not distinguish between commercial R&B hip-hop and hard-core gangster hip-hop: "Someone who doesn't know a lot about hip-hop just hears hip-hop and with that comes the stereotypes ... the idea of young urban black men who are dangerous."
By Jenny Jarvie
seattletimes.nwsource.com...cation=rss
ATLANTA When Dick Williams heard his city's new anthem, he was aghast. The 60-year-old local Fox television host, who sings for his local choir, could understand only one line: "Get 'em up, get 'em up, 'get em up, get 'em up, get 'em up, let's go. ... "
"Not," he said, "a good line for a city with a high crime rate."
Now that Atlanta is the first city in the United States to have an official hip-hop anthem, residents are agonizing over the meaning of the song.
Mayor Shirley Franklin commissioned Dallas Austin, a hip-hop producer based in Atlanta, to write the anthem as part of her Brand Atlanta campaign to attract tourists and businesses to the city.
Yet ever since "The ATL" an up-tempo hip-hop and R&B fusion song debuted in front of 70,000 football fans at an Atlanta Falcons game in October, Atlanta's residents have critiqued its rhythm, its melody and its lyrics.
One suburban reader of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution complained that the song told the world to "bring your boom-box and your bling-bling to Atlanta," and another said he could no longer identify with a city that had abandoned family values in favor of "gun-blazing, Ray Lewis-admiring thugs."
Austin declined to be interviewed.
Sarah Lattimer, a partner at LattimerMoffitt Communications, the company that conceived of the idea of an Atlanta anthem, said she was shocked by the critical interpretations of the song. " 'Get 'em up' is a club reference," she said. "In a dance club, people throw their hands in the air."
Lattimer said "The ATL" articulates the soul of Atlanta. She said she expects the song, performed by such contemporary R&B artists as Monica, Ciara, Jagged Edge, Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins of TLC, and Sammie, to enter the Billboard Top 40 and become part of the repertoire of Atlanta's high-school bands, symphony orchestra and nightclubs.
"The ATL" underlines the difficulty of defining Atlanta, the bustling, entrepreneurial capital of the New South. Although almost everyone here agrees the city has moved past "Gone With the Wind," tensions linger when it comes to shaping an identity that can unite urban and suburban, black and white, young and old.
Atlanta has a reputation as progressive, but there is still a divide between the predominantly black city and the predominantly white metropolitan region. According to the 2000 census, the city of Atlanta is 61 percent black; the wider metropolitan area is 29 percent black.
In the past decade, Atlanta's hip-hop scene has flourished, inviting comparisons with Detroit's Motown and Harlem jazz. OutKast, Usher, Ludacris and Jermaine Dupri are just some of the Atlanta artists notching platinum records and Grammy awards.
Still, many Atlanta residents are unaware that their city has become a hip-hop hub and that artists based in Atlanta Young Jeezy, Dem Franchise Boyz, Trina and D4L dominated last week's Billboard Rap Charts.
Earlier this year, a Georgia State University report estimated that the annual economic impact of Georgia's commercial music scene which is concentrated in Atlanta is close to $1 billion. But many Atlantans scoff at the notion that the commercial success of Atlanta's hip-hop industry could translate into a broader business plan for the city.
S. Craig Watson, associate professor of Radio, Television and Film at the University of Texas, Austin, and author of "Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement," said many Americans do not distinguish between commercial R&B hip-hop and hard-core gangster hip-hop: "Someone who doesn't know a lot about hip-hop just hears hip-hop and with that comes the stereotypes ... the idea of young urban black men who are dangerous."
