A Southern hip hop album, "Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik" incorporates analog elements such as Southern-styled guitar licks, languid soul melodies, and mellow 1970s funk grooves. It also features digital hip hop production elements such as programmed snare beats, booty bass elements, including Roland TR-808 clave rhythms, and old school hip hop elements, including E-mu SP-1200-styled drums and turntable scratches. Music writers characterize the album's music and beats as "clanky" and "mechanical". Roni Sarig of "Rolling Stone" comments that the music shows "clear debts to East Coast bohos like the Native Tongues and a West Coast level of attention to live instruments and smooth, irresistible melodies". In Oliver Wang's "Classic Material", music writer Tony Green delineates the album's release "at the tail end of a second hip-hop 'golden age,' a two-year period (1993–94) that spawned Wu-Tang's "Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)", Snoop Dogg's "Doggystyle", De La Soul's "Buhloone Mindstate", Nas's "Illmatic", and A Tribe Called Quest's "Midnight Marauders"", and comments that "like many albums released during that period, "Southernplayalistic" alluded to its roots ... while clearing the way for a new direction that used the peach cobbler soul funk of the Organized Noize production crew as a starting point."