In the fall of 1991, an unusual song found its way onto the radio. It was called “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” and was performed by a Houston hip-hop trio called Geto Boys. A slow, mournful plaint, “Mind” relied on long, harmonically complex guitar samples—a departure from the short horn bursts and rapid drums then dominating hip-hop. If the song had an antecedent, it was the blues, not music you might have heard in a disco. Geto Boys—Scarface, Bushwick Bill, and Willie D—had deep, unmistakably Southern voices, and their lyrics didn’t celebrate or protest anything. “Mind” is an unsettling song, its opening couplets freighted with anxiety: “At night I can’t sleep, I toss and turn. / Candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies being burned. / Four walls just staring at a nigger. / I’m paranoid, sleeping with my finger on the trigger.” For several months, “Mind” was on the radio all the time. Then Geto Boys—and Southern hip-hop—seemed to disappear. In the fourteen years since “Mind” was released, the band has showed up again on the Billboard pop charts only twice, most recently in 1996.
Now Houston hip-hop is back, enjoying a musical hegemony that happens only occasionally in pop. Not since Nirvana made Seattle the capital of grunge, in 1991, have a city, a sound, and a significant chart presence been so closely linked. One of the year’s biggest hip-hop songs, “Still Tippin’ ”—which was released on Swishahouse, an independent label, in 2003, and rereleased by Warner Bros. in January—introduced Americans to three influential Houston m.c.s: the needling, self-deprecating Mike Jones; the swaggering, bass-voiced giant Slim Thug; and the cheerfully louche white rapper Paul Wall. Wall’s major-label début record, “The Peoples Champ,” entered the charts at No. 1 in September, and Jones’s first major-label album, “Who Is Mike Jones?,” which was released in April, has gone platinum. Two other local m.c.s, Aztek and Short Dog, who are virtually unknown outside the city, have been signed by established industry figures—Jay-Z and Russell Simmons, respectively—and the Geto Boys’ new album, “The Foundation,” has been well received.
“Still Tippin’ ” is an elegant primer on Houston hip-hop. The music is unhurried and woozy, as if it had been left too long in the sun. A violin phrase wells up again and again, like a bubble in a blender, while the rappers hew to the sticky beat, drawling about cars, women, and diamond grills (the precious-metal molds inlaid with diamonds that rappers wear on their front teeth). The easy finesse of Houston’s m.c.s can make East Coast hip-hop sound stressed out, uptight, or just plain square. The Houston sound is, above all, slow, a perpetually decelerating music that is equally good at conveying menace, calm, and grief. (The sound was taken to a logical extreme in the early nineties, when a Houston native named DJ Screw found a way to play hip-hop records at nearly half speed, creating a genre that was eventually named after him—screw. Skillfully executed, screw music turns hip-hop and R. & B. back into blues and gospel.) The city’s heat seems to encourage both languor and soul-spilling; Houston m.c.s rap charmingly about their possessions but are comfortable singing about death, racist cops, and life in prison.
They are also an unusually collegial group; every m.c. and producer I met in Houston gave me phone numbers for other musicians. The intense and sometimes lethal professional rivalries that characterize the New York hip-hop scene seemed hardly to exist; in Houston, everyone is on everyone else’s record, and one rapper’s commercial success is invariably two or three others’ as well.
Almost every Houston rapper owes something—musical inspiration, performance opportunities, moral support—to Bun B, the hip-hop community’s thirty-two-year-old elder. For fourteen years, Bun B has performed and recorded as one half of the duo UGK (Underground Kingz). On October 18th, he released his first solo album, “Trill.” In seven days, it sold almost a hundred and twenty thousand copies, entering the Billboard charts at No. 6. “Trill” is a focussed and occasionally brilliant example of Houston rap, preoccupied with the status-enhancing possibilities of guns, cars, and women, but more convincing than the work of Bun’s juniors, mostly because of his forceful delivery. Bun has a steady tenor voice and carves his straightforward rhymes with precision. He stretches out the middle of the word “ain’t,” then bites the “t” off cleanly, as in: “Cause we doin’ it real big, in case you thinkin’ we ain’t.” His presentation is unfussy, direct, and loud.
As UGK, Bun and his partner, Pimp C, found an audience with “Pocket Full of Stones,” a vivid song about drug dealing that was featured on the soundtrack of the 1993 film “Menace II Society.” Six years later, UGK performed several tough-minded, pro-South verses on Jay-Z’s top-forty single “Big Pimpin’ ”—including Bun’s memorable admonishment “Go read a book, you illiterate son of a bitch, and step up yo’ vocab.” In 2002, after Pimp C was charged with a parole violation stemming from an aggravated-assault conviction and imprisoned, Bun B entered a period of intense productivity, contributing guest verses to dozens of tracks, by almost every major artist in hip-hop, and hosting numerous local mix tapes.
