We can't remember where we read this recently, but it was a truism. It read something like, "Old music doesn't exist. There's music you've heard and there's music you haven't."
We wonder if the same applies with life. "Old stories don't exist. There are those you've read about and those you haven't."
Rocks Off has music and a story that you probably haven't heard or read about.
Recently, we returned to the Houston area after a three year stint in San Antonio and found a four-year-old article that's really the inspiration for this blog.
Before we left Houston in 2007, we got to know a Punjabi MC out of northwest Houston by the name of Deep Cold. We took to his unique style of music that involved blending bhangra and Southern hip-hop - mixing crunk beats, Indian flutes and thug life lyrics with the angelic pitches of Boliyan singer Kamla Punjabi.
It was assaulting on the musical senses, but in a good way. To some, the fusion might feel like an odd pairing, but nothing probably felt more right to Deep.
Deep is a product of growing up Indian in the Land of Screw. It was a bi-cultural line he walked. On one side there was his Indian culture, and the other was the influential Houston hip-hop culture that went beyond music. It impacted people's speak, dress and swag. It shaped Deep into what he is today.
Before we had the honor to help cover Houston's underground hip-hop scene for Rocks Off we were hoping to help Deep market himself in 2006. But a job in San Antonio took us away from Houston and from Deep. But before we left, he gave us the 41st issue of Fader magazine, which we found in a box at the end of 2010 and revisited recently.
In that issue is perhaps one of most important Houston hip-hop stories ever told to a national audience - if not for its cultural significance - and it was about Deep. The article, "New South," was written by Edwin "Stats" Houghton.
What that story delivered was what we as a writer were hell bent on showing when we first started writing for Rocks Off: That Houston's hip-hop culture has morphed ethnic culture.
We're not sure if a better story could be written on Deep unless, of course, he opens up about his brother's imprisonment for the murder of his parents in 2000 - which he has yet to do, for reasons that are beyond understandable. And him opening up is contingent on our ability to chronicle his story better than anyone, because it was pursuant to that tragedy, that Deep went neck-deep in rap.
