Houston was viable. Better, though, its rappers were ready.
A brash young group of cultural attachés — Mike Jones, Slim Thug, Paul Wall and Chamillionaire, all artists on the local label, SwishaHouse — had spent the years prior cultivating their own variation of Houston rap, trying to gain the attention of the rap world.
Photo by Marco Torres
Killa Kyleon was sent from central casting to play the role of Houston rap star.
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In 2005, the labels every rapper coveted came to Houston to find them.
"After I signed to Interscope," remembers Slim Thug, "they [record labels] started signing everybody."
Perhaps galvanized by Lil' Flip's success, Chamillionaire was the only local titan to land a feature on Undaground Legend and Will-Lean was the only Houstonian to be featured (on U Gotta Feel Me), they unleashed a firestorm of hits and megahits on the nation, shifting national rap's zeitgeist almost overnight.
• Mike Jones, a decent rapper but a preternaturally gifted businessman, released Who Is Mike Jones? ("Still Tippin'," "Back Then") in April of 2004. Two months later, he was celebrating its platinum rating.
• After Slim Thug had risen to king status in Houston's underground, he signed his deal. Superproducers The Neptunes (Jay-Z, Snoop, Kanye, etc.) put their hands on his debut album, Already Platinum ("3 Kings," "I Ain't Heard of That"). It was released that July, sold 130,000 copies its first week and ultimately moved more than half a million copies despite heavy bootlegging.
• In September, Paul Wall's The People's Champ ("Sittin' Sidewayz," "They Don't Know") sold 176,000 copies in its first week. The unconventional white rapper who first hustled his way into SwishaHouse's favor by handing out party flyers and putting up posters had his major label debut settle into the number one spot on Billboard's Top 200 chart. Platinum.
• Chamillionaire released his debut album, The Sound of Revenge, in November, then watched as it went platinum too, along the way earning a Grammy ("Ridin'" featuring Krayzie Bone; Best Rap Performance By a Duo or Group) and a thicket of other awards.
The universe had gone from 1992 to 2002 and seen only two Houston rappers produce platinum-selling records (Scarface's The Diary, 1994, and The Untouchable, 1997; Lil' Troy's Sittin' Fat Down South, 1999). There were three over the course of eight months in 2005.
Then the bottom fell out.
V. 2011. 2.
The difference between rapping prior to 2005 and rapping now is as different as the Internet then and now. Fundamentally, the idea is still the same (get information from one place to another), but the contexts are entirely dissimilar, which breeds a key singular difference between Houston's last rap surge and this potential new one:
"The Houston sound is more diverse," says UZOY, a talented young rapper with the gall to have a vagina instead of a penis. "I think everybody making music doesn't sound like they did before because it's not like before. I just make music that comes naturally to me. I appreciate the Houston culture. In the music I make, you won't hear it, though. I don't feel like since you're from somewhere you should like something. You should be who you are."
Incidentally, this is exactly the thinking that shapes a culture.
"When we first started advertising or shouting out, 'New Houston! New Houston!' people were upset about that," says Kane, a rapper/party promoter who's been an instrumental component in the development of the younger rap generation's burgeoning professional presence.
"What they didn't understand is that we weren't saying, 'Oh, New Houston,' like, we were wanting to change the city's identity. No. I love the city. The culture is the culture. It's gonna be that. 'New Houston' was a phrase meant to categorize the new artists in the city. It's irresponsible to ignore what they're doing. And you're starting to see those gaps bridged between a Kirko and a Slim or a Propain and a Bun. There are a lot of people doing a lot of things."
Houston's buzz, were you to measure it, is not furiously high outside the Beltway. Presumably, it is no better off than Cincinnati or Idaho or any other dot on the map that nobody who doesn't live there cares about. But right now, that's sort of the point.
"Most regional movements start off just about nonexistent to out-of-towners," explains Jayson Rodriguez, executive editor at XXL magazine. "[It stays that way] until the point it saturates its local market, then bursts onto the next city, then the following, etc., till it feels like it exploded overnight."
"Still Tippin'," the first single from Who Is Mike Jones?, is credited with having started the 2005 movement. And that's a fair enough assessment, because basically it did. But it was a hit in Houston well before then. SwishaHouse released it first in 2003.
National media wasn't talking about what Houston was doing in 2003 or 2004.
That's sort of the point, too.
V. 2005. 2.
The New York Times came. The New Yorker came. MTV came. BET came. XXL, The Source, USA Today, forward-thinking bloggers, people that liked soda, people that wore hats, people that didn't wear hats, everyone, more; they all came, came to see the golden(-grilled) geese that had finally figured out how to fully commercialize Houston rap en masse.
