His cell phone's ringing off the hook. He's got a small but growing real estate company. Later this summer, he's hoping to either get on the Anger Management Tour or to hit the road with Paul Wall and Mike Jones -- Houston's other hot rappers involved in the current major-label feeding frenzy. His grill sports plentiful platinum and what looks like the weekly output of an extremely fertile South African diamond mine. And when he rolls up to our interview -- in the parking lot of the Roxy on a wet and muggy Wednesday afternoon -- it's in a $450,000 deep purple Rolls-Royce Phantom with personalized plates.
There's only one small problem here: Slim's not driving the Phantom. His potna Chuck is. "The cops took my shit indefinitely," Slim says as he exits from the shotgun seat. "I ain't gonna be driving for a while."
His cell phone rings before we can get into the whys and wherefores. (Actually, we never get the chance, but he's been written up for numerous tickets over the past five years.) Slim excuses himself and picks it up as our photographer snaps shots of him lounging around in front of the Rolls. "Hey, foo', is 16 songs gonna be too long to add four more chopped and screwed versions?" he asks of whoever it is on the other end. "Is 16 songs gonna be too many to add four more? I don't know. I'll call you right back. I'm doing a photo shoot."
At first he seems a little tired of all the glitz, and he comes across as shyer than you'd expect. Here, in the shadows of the Galleria and Williams Tower, the 24-year-old rapper (born Stayve Peters) has come a long way from the grimy Northside haunts of his youth. He has described his childhood as a continual series of abrupt moves -- he has six older siblings -- and the criminal activity of his three hustling brothers often got the family evicted from their apartments. When he was 11, one of his brothers bought him a karaoke machine, and Slim told XXL magazine that he immediately freestyled 11 different raps over one OutKast beat. Still, he heeded the call of the streets for a time and dabbled in petty crime, the proceeds of which bought him the first of what would become many rides, a 1972 Cadillac El Dorado that earned him his enduring "Boss Hogg" nickname.
But he kept up the rap end too, and by the time he was 17 he'd captured the ear of Michael "5000" Watts, who was then just firing up what would become the Swisha House empire. At that time, Houston rap was all about DJ Screw and Lil' KeKe's "South Side," but Slim rapped about what was unique about the Northside. Braided hair, for example. That was the favored haircut from the Fifth Ward north -- down south it was all about fades.
After parting with Swisha House around the turn of the millennium, Slim cut a series of mixtapes -- his raps over pre-existing beats. Slim says mixtapes are not just good promotional tools, they're also about as good an education as a rapper can get. "It's great practice, for one. And second, they put your name in the streets. Mixtapes is so easy -- you can do that shit real quick and put it out the same week. But as far as, you know, a rap album, you gotta get it mixed and mastered and it's a lotta time gotta go into it. But a mixtape is so easy to do. It's the quickest way to put your name out there -- you steady drop mixtapes in the street and get that look around the city or however far the mixtape travels. It seems like it's the thing to do, instead of somebody seeing your poster and spending their hard-earned money and takin' a chance based on how a dude look, the mixtape is a sample of your voice and your music and what you can do."
Though proud of being from the Northside, Slim's always been about ending the strife that once threatened to tear black Houston into warring geographical factions. "That shit was crazy back in the day," he says. "Then me and ESG got together and made a record [2002's Boss Hogg Outlaws] talking about that stuff, and it seemed like after that it started calming down. They seen we weren't really on that trip so it got better."
