Talking to Low-G, we feel like we're talking to a wise old wizard. Though only 31, a hard-life will do that to you. It'll age your speak. To understand why he sounds beyond his years, you have to go back to when he was a twinkle in his father's eye, or more appropriately, when he was just a drop of his father's blood on his mother's clothing.
When Low-G's father was clinging to life after being shot during El Salvador's civil war, he did what he was trained to do... get to the river that separated his country and Honduras. His Honduran mother was washing clothes on the river dumbfounded by the pink showing up on the clothing she scrubbed, so she followed the red dye in the water. Upstream was a man bleeding to death, Low-G's father. When you're born of those circumstances you know life isn't going to necessarily deal you a full house.
Low-G arrived to the U.S. as an illegal alien in New York at nine-years old. He made his way to the Rio Grande Valley, then up to Houston. He couldn't speak English and would soon have to put together a Second Ward gang called GTC (Gangsta Type Criminals) to fight his own people, Mexican-American kids and Black kids who made fun of him and his fellow ESL students for not speaking English and wearing L.A. Gear tennis shoes versus Air Jordan kicks. It led to a life of serious gangbanging and eventually a murder charge he was acquitted of in 1995 at 16 years old.
The thing about Second Ward's Latino rappers is that they're no studio gangstas. They've truly lived the thug life and have lost friends to bullets and to jail time, as a result of shooting bullets. Not glorifying the life (we'll let hip-hop do that) but we can't help but think that maybe it took those kinds of nuts, and "I don't give a fuck" attitude to enter a genre of music that you know already wasn't going to have a warm welcoming.
Regardless, it's thanks to artists like Low-G and all those Second Ward cats that helped pave the way for the wealth of Latin rap we have available today in Texas.
Low-G is also special because he's one of the few artists that rap in Spanish in a way that resonates with the streets. If you're a fan of music, you might spit off a few rappers in Latin America or Mexico that do it, but it's different. Low-G is from the Houston streets and if you know anything about rap, where the messenger is from is just as important as the message.
