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Houston-area rapper MC Vanilla faced a difficult career choice in 1990. A scene veteran who impressed Chuck D after a strong performance, Vanilla found himself juggling two offers: a $30,000 contract with Def Jam which included studio time with Bomb Squad legend Hank Shocklee or a $1.5 million deal with SBK to become a crossover pop act. He went with the money and soon became trivialized punch line MC Vanilla Ice.

Journalist Roni Sarig's exhaustive history of Southern Hip Hop, Third Coast, overflows with these kinds of minute details that, when strung together, coalesce into a richer portrait of a scene and a culture. This is not just a who's who collection of publicist-penned superstar bios. The bulk of the book chronicles more meaningful acts: Chapters on Atlanta's OutKast and the Dungeon Family are especially deep, backed up by multiple interviews with key players. But Sarig also spends ample time sketching connections between music, urban history and geography, advancing his Southern campaign one city or region at a time. While not as detailed as Jeff Chang's analysis of bombed-out late-'70s Bronx culture in Can't Stop, Won't Stop, Sarig's forays into the dirty roots of Miami bass or the myriad connections between '70s soul and funk musicians and Hip Hop stars demonstrate that the roots of Southern rap run much deeper than syrup and snap music.

Sarig argues, convincingly, that rap originated in the South, a claim that will have New York purists ready to unleash an ass kicking with their shell-toe Adidas. But it's important to note that Sarig doesn't say Hip Hop originated in the South -- he agrees about the genre's Bronx birthplace. As he points out, the roots of African-American oral tradition originated with slaves in the South, who had to rely on verbal skills for both escapist entertainment and collective historical memory. And it's not hard to connect the dots between Southern soul music, reggae toasting and Hip Hop.

Some may argue that Sarig takes an unnecessarily long view, tracing a historical arc from pioneering black radio DJs in the '30s to today's rappers, and he occasionally gets caught up reciting the details of small-time stars in Hip Hop's early days. But it's his commitment to making revealing cultural connections, along with digging up telling stories about early pioneers, that makes Sarig's saga exhaustive without being exhausting.