This may horrify you, but Southern culture has deeply influenced your life. The South gets my fun out of being backwards, but in a lot of ways y'all non-Southerners are always a step behind us. You see people in Brooklyn drinking out of mason jars, which we've been doing in the South for years, but you don't see many people in Chickamaga, Georgia, unicycling to their polyamorous juggling classes. Well, it is strange to be outside of the South and all the cool kids are suddenly dressing like your uncles. That's a very weird day. Started with trucker hats, which our people call them hats. The banjo country music blues rock and roll and the great American novel, all things that come from the South. He wanted to write the blues, he wanted to talk about rock and roll, talk about country music, talk about gospel music. All of that is created by Southerners, either in the South or in some cases, Southerners who've left the South and places like Chicago. If you want to talk about literature, the 20th century, the South was one of the two great fonts of American literature. They are being urban Jewish writers. Take away Southern writers and urban Jewish writers, and you don't have much American literature left in the 20th century. I know it's difficult to think of southerners as thought leaders for anything that doesn't involve monster trunks. Just look at literature. Tennessee ain't just a state. It's also the name of a guy who wrote some of America's greatest plays. Tennessee Williams, just by virtue of his name, is pretty explicitly Southern, right? Except for what he did in his works and everything about him wasn't stereotypically Southern. And if you don't fit the mold of what people envision a Southerner to be, it doesn't matter how openly Southern you are, you still like don't count to them for whatever reason. It wasn't easy for Southern rappers to overcome people's perceptions either. As Andre 3000 put it at the 1995 Source Awards. Outcast is now recognized as one of the greatest American rap groups of all time. I bet none of y'all were considering them exclusively Southern, where you were screaming, hey, y'all, at every wedding from 2004 until whenever uptown funk came out. Southerners made the T-shirt cannon and the Super Soaker. So if you need some normally not projectile objects shot out of a gun, we probably know a guy. Personally, I think T-shirt cannons are better for home defense than guns are because even if you miss the burglar, he's going to turn around and chase the free shirt. The South is crossed over to make huge cultural impacts both good and bad. Sorry about the big mouth-billy bash craze in the early 2000s. The point I'm trying to make is Southern culture gets otherwise as if it's another thing, but it's an integral part of the American story and culture. You have a choice. You can think of us as kind of hillbilly fools, you know, a little evidence or a redneck villain. When I say Southern culture is American culture, a better way to say it might be all Americans own Southern culture. The good, as I alluded to above, Outcast made rap better. The bad against all odds the North made the theme song for slavery. I'm talking about the song Dixie. Perhaps no song is more closely associated with the old South. Dixie became the unofficial national anthem of the Confederacy, but it was written for menstrual shows and is credited to a guy from Ohio who is living in New York. It's like finding out Billy Graham wrote straight out of Compton. In fact, menstrual shows where white actors performed terrible caricatures in Blackface were way more popular in the North and one of the biggest menstrual sea companies performed on Broadway for a decade. Fun fact, the most popular menstrual performer went by the stage named Jim Crow. So we might have come up with the awful policies of the Jim Crow era, but y'all nor the nurse helped with the branding. Proving once in for all that everything in America from our art to our cuisine to our systemic evils is a collaboration. America is a melting pot. And all I'm saying is that the South has contributed some of the good ingredients to that stew. And the nauseating stuff, it's geographically diverse too.