Georgia
I’m grateful to have grown up in Atlanta. Georgia Tech’s radio station WREK introduced me to experimental music and punk at a time when there were no other resources to discover these things. Atlanta was extremely culturally rich in my youth. The punk scene was ferocious and even though the local hip hop scene hadn’t developed yet Atlanta was a certain stop once their fame took them out of NYC. I was fortunate to get to see the early legends of hip hop about as well as anyone outside of New York. The local underground music scene was phenomenal. Spacey reggae dub, noise bands, punk galore, jam bands- and then in more formal settings there were frequent opportunities to see concert musicians playing 20th C contemporary music - a good symphony orchestra and WREK and V-103 had the greatest radio hip hop DJ’s I think anywhere including NYC. They remixed everything live scratching and mixing on the air. The whole city listened in awe to V-103 on Friday nights. It was a great time to be in what was then always neck-in-neck with Detroit as the Murder Capital of the World.
Atlanta is different world today. It still has a lot going on but it’s a lot to put up with for what you get. It’s too spread apart and MARTA doesn’t alleviate the need to drive everywhere you go. Getting around is a bitch.
UGA/Athens is a great party college town. Naturally, we’ll cover the music history of Athens and I was lucky enough to experience some of it in its golden age.
Georgia definitely has an aristocratic antebellum residue but mostly you’ll find both poor whites and blacks neither of whom are nearly as scary as portrayed in the media and in fiction. Atlanta has some of the wealthiest black communities on planet earth. Race relations in Georgia are still strained but from my anecdotal experience better than most of America.