V. 2011. 1.
Photo by Marco Torres
Kirko Bangz has gone from YouTube to a major label record contract.
Photo by Marco Torres
Fat Tony, three-time winner of the Houston Press Best Underground Rapper award, tinges alt rap with Houstonisms. And Hennessy, apparently.
Related Content
More About
Kirko Bangz is sitting on a couch in an oversized house in North Houston that is filled with people watching him move.
He is flanked by two attractive females, each of them doing their best to gain his gaze. They caress his face and his chest and grasp his biceps. When he gets up to walk away, both paw at him. He turns and looks at them. They let go. Another woman, large-breasted and pouty-lipped, has entered his purview. And he is heading toward her now. The implication seems clear: He intends to win her also, even if only to ignore her later, too.
Bangz, né Kirk Randle, is a handsome kid — charming smile, strong jawline, a muscular physique that tonight is acquiescing to the restrictions of his V-neck sweater — so earning the attention of women has never been terribly difficult. But it's never been as easy as it is now.
Two years ago, Bangz was recording grainy videos of himself rapping and uploading them to YouTube. At the moment, he is receiving instruction from director Mr. Boomtown (worked with Lil Wayne, Ross, 50, more) as they record the official video for his second single, "Drank in My Cup," a saucy, sexy, catchy aggregate of mechanized thumps and machismo.
"Drank..." is the follow-up to last year's "What Yo' Name Iz," a robotized earworm single that first narrated Bangz's apparent hypersexualized existence (in it, the female protagonist lasted all of 0:25 before she found herself naked in his bathtub) and ushered him toward local stardom.
"What..." is an undeniably good, effective song. Among other things, it wiggled onto Billboard's Top Hip-Hop and R&B charts and secured a cosign from DJ Drama, one of the industry's current tastemakers. More importantly, though, it earned Bangz a major record deal (Warner), the first a rap artist from Houston has been awarded in six years. Still, "Drank...," produced by Sound M.O.B., the production team responsible for "What..." as well, is better in every aspect.
It is more precise, more engaging, more compelling and somehow even more visceral. (He makes it only 0:17 before revealing why your girlfriend would rather have sex with him than you.)
Collectively, it has already gained more than 2 million views on YouTube. It is currently being played on more than 50 radio stations across the country. And it even leapfrogged "What Yo' Name Iz" on its ascension up the same Billboard chart.
Kirko wanders fully away from the girls on the couch.
The camera fades to black. When it dissolves back into light, the large-breasted, pouty-lipped woman is halfway up a staircase, softly beckoning Bangz toward her with her delicate index finger. He approaches, grabs her hand.
Kirko Bangz is at the epicenter of a rap renaissance taking place in Houston.
But first, he's going to have sex.
V. 2005. 1.
For nearly three decades, Houston rap was invisible to anyone living north of Amarillo. There were flashpoints of success, moments where it seemed like its engaging, brilliant characters might receive their due, but they all came undone.
There was the time the Geto Boys, handcrafted by eventual regional kingpin J. Prince, released We Can't Be Stopped in 1991. It was certified platinum a year later and ultimately aged to become one of the most — if not the most — important albums in Southern rap history. But the threesome — an enigmatic genius named Scarface, a physical marvel and imposing natural disaster named Willie D and a breakdancing Jamaican dwarf named Bushwick Bill most famous for forcing his then-girlfriend to shoot him in the face — was always too macabre to become ubiquitous.
There was the time DJ Screw spent a decade creating/perfecting a whole new genre of music, Chopped and Screwed, the one that's still listed as the city's flagship style and default answer when pinning a label to Houston rap. It would eventually go on to infiltrate rap music entirely, even serving as the underpinnings of Houston's greatest rap boom later. However, Screw overdosed on a mixture of codeine, alcohol and marijuana in 2000, well before it was recognized as being transcendent.
There was the time South Park Mexican was going to be sovereign. With little more than a GED and an ungodly work ethic, he built a music presence that he leveraged into a distribution deal with Universal Records. It earned him a tidy $500,000 advance. He was king, pied piper to a seemingly endless number of disenfranchised youths. In the first verse of the first song on Never Change, his classic 2001 album, he bragged that he was writing "on this laptop in this jet, with the Universal Records president," sounding every bit like a savior. A few months later, he stood in a courtroom and listened as a judge sentenced him to 45 years in prison for molesting a nine-year-old girl.
In and out. In and overdosed. In and jailed.
Then a spark.
In the beginning of the aughts, a cornrowed, shiny-toothed 21-year-old braggart named Lil' Flip carried Houston's ostensibly limp body to the forefront. After he'd grown his reputation via a dedicated allegiance to Houston underground's rap business model (1. Make a lot of music; 2. Show up to everygoddamnthing), Flip brokered a deal with record company Columbia. In 2002, they released Undaground Legend, which featured the radiant, wonky single "The Way We Ball." The album went platinum. He followed that with U Gotta Feel Me in 2004. Two monster singles, "Game Over (Flip)" and "Sunshine," muscled the album into pop music omnipresence. It went double platinum.
