"Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik" was a seminal album for Southern hip hop. During the early 1990s, the scene was largely discredited by the rest of the hip hop community as misogynistic and inferior to other scenes, particularly East Coast and West Coast hip hop. Those scenes dominated the hip hop market, and acts from other regional scenes were often produced by either East Coast or West Coast producers. The album offered an artistically credible alternative, both musically and lyrically, to those regional scenes and was produced by an Atlanta-based production team. Music journalist T. Hasan Johnson notes "Outkast's first submission to the music industry" as significant for how they "broke from the binary production options split by California and New York artists", viewing that their decision to boast their region and a native production team "signaled a break from the conventional split between East and West hip hop aesthetics and openly demonstrated that the South could produce street-certified, quality music." Nicole Hodges Persley cites its release as a critical moment in hip hop and writes that it "marked a break in bicoastal hip hop sound".