It’s a Thursday night barbecue at the Dope House.
Oh, yes. Nestled in the backstreets of downtown Houston, (interestingly enough, just a stone’s throw away from the Municipal Courts-HPD downtown complex) is The House that Dope Built.
And there’s a party going on ย a modest, discreet one, if you will, but a party nonetheless.
Fajitas and tortillas are cooking up on the big-ass black grill on one side of the patio, and a group of people are shooting the breeze on the other. Who are they? The South Park Mexican will tell us. The rapper says the congregation is the Dope House Soldiers, a clan of aspiring artists (who are known only by number) ready to jump on the mike if the Mexican gives ’em a shot. Among others, there’s the luscious Latina redhead (No. 14) who bounces up and down in her red cutoff shirt and gray sweats whenever she busts a rhyme, and the tall, lanky brotha who just happens to have only one arm (No. 18).
They’re not the only ones here. There is the Mexican’s sister, Sylvia Lynn, his brother, Arthur Jr., and his father, Arthur Sr. And they all work beside the Mexican at the Dope House, which is a record label. Friends, family, co-workersย whoever.
Decked out in a black mesh Nike shirt, well-starched black jeans and black-and-white Air Jordans, the Mexican sits in a wood-paneled office, where his sister works. It’s quiet here: The lobby is getting painted, and everyone’s staying outside for fear they’ll get high off the fumes. Here the Mexican explains where he’s coming from, so to speak, as a gangsta rapper, a performer who will also be playing the Watcha Tour this weekend.
“I rap from the streets,” he says, grabbing his crotch in what is the first of many crotch-checks soon to come. “I don’t rap for kids that have good homes. I don’t rap for kids that have Jesus in their hearts. I don’t rap for none of those kids, because they already have it going on.”
True that, true that. His music, which can be described in some instances as Cypress-Hill-Goes-Gulf-Coast, isn’t necessarily for the “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” crowd. “I rap for all the crazy muthafuckas,” the Mexican says. “For all the muthafuckas that need help. For all the muthafuckas that are lost. I let them know that I’ve been lost and needed help just like them, and I put that in my lyrics.”
It’s obvious that those people are picking up on those vibes, or else kids all over the South wouldn’t be buying the Mexican’s “dope.” His third and most recent album, Power Moves: The Table, has sold more than 60,000 copies all over markets in the South, and his second album, 1998’s Hustle Town, is still selling at 70,000. The record is selling more because its first single, “Mary-Go Round,” his open letter to the demon weed, is beginning to get airplay at various radio stations. “That’s why everybody who follows me are the sickest, craziest, most ill people in this world,” he says. “People that love me are the fuckin’ scum of the earth, and that’s who I want to love me, ’cause that’s who I want to help and change. My fans are crazy about me, drop-dead loco. They know all my lyrics by heart. They love me and I love them. And they ain’t no less of a person than what I am. I’m just a crazy muthafucka that just decided to start rapping, you know.”
The Mexican (a.k.a. Carlos Coy) grew up in Houston. Correction: Carlos Coy grew up in South Park, which is, as everyone who lives there knows, a whole different movie than Houston. You can say that the Mexican’s musical career began when he was ten years old. When he was ready to go to the fourth grade, his mother moved him to Garden Villas Elementary. There, the Mexican took up the violin.
In the span of a year, amid all the other kids who had been playing for years and years, little Carlos perfected the violin to rank at first chair. Some teachers were on the skeptical tip. “A lot of teachers would tell my violin teacher that I was, you know, some kind of fake,” he says, “that I was lying, that I was taking private lessons.”
The Mexican moved on to middle school, then high school to further his violin playing. But it was in high school where the three G’s ย gangs, grudges and girls ย caught up with him. “I was 17 years old in the ninth grade before I decided to go ahead and leave school,” he says. “One more year in high school and I would’ve went to jail for fucking all those little young bitches, you know.”
He dropped out and, in 1986, survived the only way he knew how: by selling drugs. He was soon the only Hispanic in an all-black neighborhood to own a Cadillac. Needless to say, the street drug trade began to take its toll on the Mexican.
“[I was] tired of selling crack to your homeboy’s mom,” he grimly recalls. “[I was] tired of looking at dope fiends being pregnant, trying to buy dope. [I was] tired of seeing my homeboys getting shot and killed, set up for the murder, you know, getting jacked for their cocaine, getting jacked for their cars.”
With nowhere else to turn, he looked to the Lord for a sign. “So I fell on my knees and I prayed to God,” he remembers. “I said, ‘Jesus, I don’t wanna slang dope no more. I don’t wanna, you know, work for the fuckin’ white man for $6 an hour and get treated like a fuckin’ worthless wetback. I am a worthless wetback, I just don’t wanna be treated like one.’ I didn’t wanna work for no chump change, you know. I’ve always known that I had something great in my mind. I could’ve been the best fuckin’ supervisor at Kmart. I could’ve been the best manager at McDonald’s nationwide.”
When he finished praying, he got up, snatched the remote off the coffee table and pointed it at the TV. And there he saw it, three big letters: R-A-P. “And then some guy gets on and says, ‘That’s right. Call this number and give us your best rap, and you can be the next person to get signed on with a major label.’ It was an old commercial they had back in ’92.”
Being a novice rapper, the Mexican didn’t make the call. But the commercial did inspire him to look into that line of work. Somewhere around ’93 or ’94, the South Park Mexican was born. He began working on his skills and putting them down on tape. His daily routine would consist of packing a backpack full of black-and-white audio cassettes of his work, walking the South Park streets and selling his wares for $1.30 a pop. The Mexican just took the same work ethic he used for slanging dope and incorporated it into selling music, or as he called it, “planting the seeds.” He would sell tapes anywhere, anyplace. Instead of paying $500 for a booth at a car show, he would hang out in the men’s restroom and sell there.
To quote a classic line, he just didn’t give a fuck. In 1995 the Mexican, along with big brother Arthur, began Dope House Records. With the Mexican as the only artist in the company’s stable, the duo started work on his first album, Hillwood, named after the Mexican’s ole neighborhood grounds. Though that album sold 20,000 copies, it still wasn’t enough to let Dope House stomp with the big dawgs.
For the first two years, Dope House made meager business. When it was ready to drop the next record, Hustle Town, its first order was only 500 cassettes. But those copies sold out the first week, and the company delivered 2,000 more. And they sold out in a week. The demand for the South Park Mexican was slowly but surely building. The seeds were sprouting.
This past January, the Mexican, along with his family, transformed a downtown diaper warehouse into the Dope House. With 11 folks on the payroll, the Mexican shelled out for 14 cellular phones, four vans and three company cars (and a $74,000 limo, for special occasions). “Money ain’t shit,” he says. “Money can never make me happy. What really can make me happy is my family being happy, my friends being happy. And I can be riding around in a brand-new 600 V-12 Mercedes-Benz right now. But I choose not to have diamonds all over my body ’cause I don’t wanna look any better than anybody else ’cause I’m not any better than anybody else.”
At the moment, the Mexican is concentrating on two major Dope House projects. One of those is his fourth album, The 3rd Wish: To Rock the World, which he says will include everything from opera singers to rock and roll guitars to even “fucking radio shit.”
And for “them hoes who never wanted to play” his music, there’s The Purity Album, a compilation disc that will spotlight all of the Mexican’s labelmates (currently up to 11) on the Dope House roster, including Lo Kee, Rasheed, the Hillwood Hustlers and other artists. Both records will drop sometime this year.
Above all else, the Mexican’s top priority is keeping his label independent. (“You gotta have 30, 40 million if you wanna come to the table with me.”) If someone does throw down a respectable deal, he isn’t making any promises. The South Park Mexican is going to make loot any which way he can, all by his damn self, if he has to. He’s even planning to branch out into movies, looking to write and shoot something called Dope Sells Itself in upcoming months. “The radio can suck my dick,” he says. “Every major label in this world can suck my dick. I’m still gonna make my money, no matter what. Because all I do is cook up dope, and dope is always gonna sell itself.”
Just before he gets up and leaves the office to go outside and fix himself some fajitas, the Mexican adds this final note: “Underneath all this tough-guy stuff, you know,” he giggles, “I’m really a pretty nice guy.”
South Park Mexican performs with Fishbone, Molotov, Titan, Atomic Fireballs, Control Machete and others as part of Watcha Tour ’99, at the Woodlands Pavilion. Show starts at 4:30 p.m. Call (713)629-3700.
This article appears in Aug 5-11, 1999.