The city was hip-hop's ruling class.
The world listened, became infatuated with the slow-mo culture, loved it, championed it. And then, same as had happened in L.A. and Atlanta and St. Louis and so on, they stopped. Hard.
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.
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Paul Wall retained the most inertia initially. He released Get Money, Stay True in 2007 and it sold 92,000 in its first week; still impressive, and good enough for 8th on Billboard at the time, but not nearly as influential or significant in the pop culture canon. When Heart of a Champion, his fifth studio album and arguably his most dexterous to date, came in 2010, it lived undisturbed on shelves. It sold 7,600 copies in its first week, a 96 percent drop-off from his 2005 album.
Chamillionaire released Ultimate Victory to better-than-modest numbers in 2007, too (79,000 first week), but it somehow seemed paltry, shadowed alone by the surreal success of the single "Ridin'" (Grammy, MTV Video of the Year, cited by Rolling Stone as the third-best song of the year, more). Afterwards, he was the victim of a messy label dispute that prevented him from releasing any proper music.
Jones failed to release his self-hyped follow-up LP The American Dream as a full-length album. Instead, he offered it as a retread EP, supplemented with a movie of the same name that was almost unwatchable. When he did manage to release an album, The Voice (2009), it flopped. More than two years later, it has sold less than 65,000 copies. Jones disappeared from Houston, and is rumored to have moved to Atlanta. He has only recently begun popping up online again, filming awkward video interviews and tweeting about an upcoming mixtape appropriately titled Where Is Mike Jones?.
Slim Thug, who was unjustly criticized by Texas loyalists for having out-of-towners create the atmospherics for Already Platinum, didn't release another album until 2009. When he did, it was a moving, monstrous, menacing ode to the dynamism of Southern hip-hop, all swollen hooks and trunk destruction. It was the most honest, most open work of his life. It sold 32,000 copies in its first week.
Nearing 2010, only Bun B, consistent as the letter "E," and Trae, primed to be Houston's next breakout star, were making national headlines. But Bun B was a proven commodity, the legacy of UGK long secure. And Trae's name wasn't ringing out for his music, but rather a lack of it. He was banned by one of the largest radio corporations in America following a verbal altercation with a DJ and subsequent mixtape disses. He had moved back to the D-I-Y circuit, still attaining successes, but not those he was perhaps in line to receive.
V. 2011. 3.
"It's cool to be country, but not if you're from the country," explains rapper Killa Kyleon. "The shit backfired on us." Two minutes into the conversation and his mouth is already sprinting to keep up with his brain.
In a city full of outsized personalities, Kyleon, a hip-hop historian with an affinity for art and talking shit, is especially so.
He is elaborating on the notion that it's now unacceptable artistically for rappers from the South to mimic and/or regurgitate the Southern rap tropes that they created (grills, Syrup, Screwed music, etc), but it is okay — groundbreaking, even — for rappers from other parts of the country to do so.
Most famously, Drake, a Canadian who has shown a candid appreciation for Houston rap culture for the duration of his career (he even managed to record a "June 27th" homage that he called "November 18th"), did so.
And most recently (or egregiously), A$AP Rocky, a Harlemite with tenuous-at-best ties to Houston, has done so.
When Drake signed with Lil Wayne's Young Money label, he reportedly received a $2 million advance. When Rocky signed with Sony/RCA sector Polo Grounds Music, he reportedly secured a hefty $3 million advance.
"I honestly believe we're the trendiest city in rap," says Kyleon. "Shout-out, A$AP Rocky."
Growing up, Kyleon's mother was an employee of Harris County Probate Court, his father a laborer at a plumbing supply company.
During the school week, Mom raised young Killa, born Kyle Riley, in Trinity Gardens, an austere neighborhood on the north side of Houston. On the weekends, Dad raised him in an equally baleful section of concrete, the poetically named Dead End neighborhood in south Houston.
Kyleon was planted square in the center of Houston's North-South civil war during his youth, loyalties to both sides. He flourished in the ferocious, learning how to hustle, how to breathe with confidence, how to understand what people needed and wanted. He moved at warp speed. Rap came easy to him.
Underground legend K-Rino is heralded for having recorded all 17 of the tracks on his 2006 album Time Traveler in 21 days. Kyleon once recorded 23 songs in a single day.
"People say Houston fell off after '05," spurts Kyleon, always full speed. "It's been alive and well, way before and beyond 2005."
It doesn't feel immediately natural to classify Kyleon as a new artist. He was already part of the professional rap community during Houston's boom, watched the whole thing happen from the inside. He had even signed with Interscope alongside then group member Slim Thug. But he never officially released any music under Interscope because, as Kyleon explains it, "it was new to them, they didn't know what to do with the music or how to market it to the public." He spent a substantial part of his career waiting for his contract to expire in 2009.
