For decades, the East Coast's cultural hegemony, which delineates the rap South as inferior, has been upheld and largely uninterrogated, most quantifiably by the media. In the '90s and early 2000s, when the Source was held as the bible for all things hip-hop, only two Southern artists ever received the coveted 5 Mic rating — OutKast, for Aquemini, and Scarface, for The Fix. The magazine's 1998 list of the top 100 albums included only four Southern releases. A 2011 XXL special edition covering the 250 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs of the '90s included only 26 from the South. A 2012 Rolling Stone list of the 50 Greatest Rap Songs featured four (a 2017 update of the 100 Greatest Rap Songs only turned up 11 more); a 2017 Complex list of the 90 Best Rap Albums of the '90s managed 15; a 2019 XXL list of the 50 Best albums of the 2000s yielded 11; the results of a 2019 BBC poll of 108 critics about the 25 best rap songs turned up four. At some point, these things aren't just coincidence or a matter of some sort of objective measure about what is and isn't great or is and isn't important. It's bias and erasure begetting more bias and more erasure — not unlike what women in rap (and women in music as a whole) continue to face.